# Brattleboro Stories > And to this day, the events that followed all seem like a distant dream. But the dream was real and was to change our lives forever. I kept asking Clarence why our world seemed to be collapsing and everything seemed so shitty. And he'd say, “That's the way it goes, but don't forget, it goes the other way too”—Quentin Tarantino in *True Romance* ## Brattleboro, Vermont *That's the way life is. Usually, that's the way it goes, but every once in a while, it goes the other way too* Things had been going a certain way for me since I was born—I had a neglectful, abusive father and I massively did not fit in with the kids from my school. Then, around the tenth grade, things went worse—I had figured out how to survive the social experience of school, and how to thrive in terms of grades, but I hadn't figured out my own emotions..I broke down crying in computer class and when my teacher asked me why, I didn't know. *Because everything is so meaningless?* I sobbed. He told me I needed therapy. And around the time I was twenty-seven, things got worse still—I stayed awake for one week, terminally high on my own mind, programming, watching *The Truman Show* on repeat, undulled by massive amounts of potato vodka, until, sleepless, my mind crashed, I called a suicide hotline, and cops came to my house and handcuffed me and drove me in their police cruiser to the psychiatric ward of a hospital on the outskirts of LA. Doctors monitored me for a week, interviewed me for eight, ten hours, and finally told me they didn't think alcohol was the root of my problem. No. I had to stop drinking of course, but according to this panel of psychiatrists, the root of my problems was I had a major mental illness that reduces your lifespan by a full decade, that kills one in five people by suicide (that's *twenty times* the rate at which people kill themselves generally)..also, an illness that's *incurable*, and that this disease is why my entire adult life was *fucked* (my word) socially, financially, and at work. This disease, they told me, *doubles* my risk of dying early from "natural causes" (their words)—things like heart attacks and strokes and aneurysms and just about any other thing that can go wrong with your body *and kill you*—if you're bipolar all those things are twice as likely to happen to you. Not only this, but I'd have to take medicine the rest of my life to help manage this disorder. They let me out of the hospital. I still thought I got taken there because I drank too much—if I hadn't been drinking I wouldn't have called the suicide hotline. It didn't occur to me that other people I knew drank at the same level and it never caused *them* to feel suicidal. But I stopped drinking, took my pills, went back to work, and forgot about everything those doctors said. And forgetting that I had that illness, and running out of my mood stabilizer due to the insurance companies, my life sank. It sank *like the Titanic, baby!*—and for my sinking I had lots of guests and fancy tablecloths and cupcakes and candles and dancing and drinking and drugs, and it all sank way down to the bottom of the ocean. Almost everyone at my sinking party died. I tried to kill myself—literally tried to *take my own life*. I haven't worked a single day since that suicide attempt—I'm no longer a brilliant software developer, at least not practicing. I lost all but a couple of my friends. I destroyed relationships with just about everyone in my extended family. I haven't had a girlfriend in years, so I'm no longer a brilliant lover of women, either—at least not practicing. Everything normal and good and happy went away. And all that's left now are the relics that I'm putting in this book. - - - - But even though usually *that's the way it goes*, in 2011—as Tarantino had promised me when I watched *True Romance*—sometimes things go the other way, too. And in the kernel of my suicidal catastrophic *collapse* of a life, from the tiniest spark of myself that was left among the ashes, slowly, slowly, over a period of years, things started going the other way for me, too. I had never heard of Brattleboro, Vermont, until I was living with my mom in Buttfuck, Pennsylvania. It was ok at first, then we started getting in meaningless fights. I wrote three books at her house. I lost twenty pounds. I got over the stress of the latest in a decade-long series of jobs that to me were a cross between a monster truck race and every medieval torture device ever invented..rolled into one. The people working in these places may as well have been eating lysergic acid and watching Looney Tunes while they typed their computer programs. I was in LA; Ohio; New York; Tucson; Buttfuck, PA. Then, instead of moving for a job, I decided on a change of location to help cure my ills. In 2011, I move to Brattleboro, Vermont, population 11,765 (plus one). I live there a year. This is what happens. ### 2 The first thing I saw was a Craigslist ad for a house in Vermont. No, go back further. I did a search on "places that are good to live for writers" and *Burlington*, Vermont came up. Something about the isolation and horrible weather and gobs of coffeehouses were supposed to make Burlington one of the top 10 best places for writers to live in the US. But there was something before that. I saw a filibuster in 2010 of lone Bernie Sanders, standing in the halls of congress, talking, and he was one of the first politicians who made sense to me in my life. So I was predisposed to like Vermont, to think Vermont was filled with people who made enough sense politically to elect this nut job. Then I saw the list of best places for writers to live. Then I researched Vermont. Then I found Brattleboro. Even thought it only has eleven-thousand people in it, Brattleboro is the second-largest city in Vermont, after Burlington. The Wikipedia page said nudity was legal there until recently. The people were liberal. They had more bookstores per capita than any city in the country. There was a picture of a waterfall right in the middle of town. Craigslist revealed a listing that stood out for being the only one with pictures—and the pictures were just of a cracked and peeling porch—but I looked at that porch for hours and imagined myself sitting on it and getting a job in town and walking the less than a mile walk the ad promised in blistering cold into Brattleboro, working some meaningless job, going home, and loving every minute of it because I'd be in a place my family had zero access to me, where I could finally get some peace, where the harshness of the weather would keep random crime to a minimum. (If you've ever lived in a major city, you know the first nice day of spring always comes with a rash of homicides.) I wanted to be, like I imagined I was in Tucson, somewhere so out of the way that no one was likely to visit me—ever. That was my first introduction to the house on high street—the Craigslist ad, the photos of the porch. It was the porch that really sold it for me. Walking along the side of some state highway into town to work my job, waiting tables at some restaurant, and walking the two blocks back in blistering Vermont winter cold—that's the kind of thing that gets me excited, living somewhere that requires more fortitude than found in the average person, hence the average person would be less frequently encountered. I bookmarked the Craigslist ad with those pictures of the porch and looked at it five times a day, just feeling how right it felt, in my intuition, in my bones. It was right. I wrote the people in some Ft Collins, Colorado house I was considering and told them I'm was going with the house in Vermont. - - - - I guess I ought to tell you that I had lived with my mother for a couple of years after—I hate the word breakdown—but after having gotten to a point in Tucson where I couldn't take another step forward. I had stopped drinking and eventually got eleven months sober at my mom's house, but I couldn't find a job back in Tucson, the IRS was taking money out of my account, my job had put me on half pay because they lost their funding, and I couldn't pay the rent. The mail carrier had some problem delivering my mail to the mailbox in the lobby of my apartment—sometimes I let it get too full and instead of being persistent, the mail carrier stopped delivering mail to my box altogether, even when it was empty. It was my fault—I just don't think about things like checking mailboxes as a normal course of mind—and because of this I missed an unemployment application, which, if I had gotten it and filled it out, would have provided me enough money to pay my rent temporarily while I continued to look for a job in Tucson. But I never got that mail until months later. I was stuck: I couldn't go any further, I couldn't move another inch—I couldn't take care of myself. A mentally robust person, an adaptable person, would have bought some nice clothes and found a job as a waiter (as my mom suggested) but I had no experience with that and to me, to my mind, every idea was impossible. As I have done many times—as I have had to do because I am maladaptive—I gave up my home voluntarily and became someone else's guest..or, one time, I became homeless. I explained all this to Mom over the phone while I was in Tucson and she was in Pennsylvania and I mentioned the idea of me coming to live with her. "Well," she said, "that sounds like your only option." - - - - I drive to Mom's house, changing a flat tire in the desert. The boot was underneath all my stuff which was packed neatly in the trunk, so I had to unpack all my possessions on the side of an Arizona highway, get the boot, hunt around for a tire iron—I think that's the first time I ever changed a tire. It was Sunday so there was no place open to get new tires. I stayed in some 100-person town in a little hotel for one night, fantasizing about working at the grocery store and living in my car while I saved money to rent a room in one of the family houses there. But the next morning I bought four new tires and zipped through LA to empty my safe deposit box, which I had stopped paying for. I tried to sleep in the parking lot of a casino in Vegas but it was too bright and I felt too exposed. I drove all night into Utah and saw scenery that blew away even New Mexico. I got out of my car and read a plaque about settlers trying to live in this river valley and even they had found it too hard, so they moved on. I'll never forget the sign at the trailhead of that overlook in Utah with its text that clearly suggested one "STAY ON DESIGNATED PATH." A human being, one of the most intrepid explorers in the known catalogue of living creatures, standing before a valley of infinity beauty, with some hardly visible path cut into it, and a sign that suggests that when you walk, you walk in this *tiiiiiiny* little footpath cut into the vastness. I understand it from a conservationist point of view—and if that's how you're viewing this sign, I suggest you switch over to my analogy because it's a lot more fun. A human being..who *stays on the designated path*..is dead. Please look at that picture. If the absurdity is not clear to you, stop reading now. This book is not for you. I'm serious. Go watch *Chopped!* or HSN or something. On my way across the country, I sleep in the back seat of my car at rest stops and become quite comfortable with it. The first few nights I fear getting killed by assholes but several nights in I feel safe as a baby in her crib. My axles, which had been a problem since between San Diego and Los Angeles, are now so bad they're lurching me into the next lane as I drive outside of Cleveland. So far I haven't lurched into another *car*, but once the lurching is so severe that I can't control my vehicle I pull onto the shoulder and call a tow truck. A state trooper stops, uses the opportunity to run my plates, and, finding nothing, makes himself completely useless by small talking with me about where I'm going and where I'm coming from. I know, sitting between Bub on one side and Bob on the other side of the tow truck cab, that once I pay for the tow I won't have enough money to pay for whatever is wrong with my car. They tow me to a garage—a guy they say is the best in the city. I call my sister Joanne in New York and she wires me the money. I pick it up in a convenience store filled with liquor—I mean not just a little liquor..this store is like the Cadillac of liquor stores—but with four months sober I didn't drink, I used the money to fix my axles and drove the next day to Mom's house. - - - - The first two months I was at Mom's house I slept and watched cable. Mom said I was in bad shape. I was. I had so much anger built up at the last twelve years of my life, which I viewed as wasted time doing software for criminal corporations and getting nothing of substance in return, culminating in my last job, where I had the most freedom and did some of my most interesting work, but for a company that fell apart due to a friendly but fraudulent boss. My mom suggested I write a novel. I had written one seven years before but I took her suggestion and wrote a character that on the outside was an eleventh-grade girl with a highly stylized tongue and a hatred for her life and classmates, who on the inside was a thirty-one year old, bitter, suicidal, murderously hateful ex-computer programmer who had a lot to vent about how jaw-droppingly stupid had been the corporations he had worked for and the people they were made of. I had a lot of anger right at my fingertips and I funneled it into *Things Said in Dreams*. I wrote three books while I lived with Mom. After I wrote the second, a story about camp counselors *Camp Lake*, I didn't think I had any more books in me, so I moved to New York to be homeless. I packed a bag and abandoned my car in a Manhattan parking garage. My plan was to find a homeless shelter to live in while I found a job—within a year I would be programming computers again. That's not what happened. What happened is that within an hour of being in New York, I relapsed on 11 months clean (by drinking) then found myself doing subpar coke in Washington Square Park, then crying uncontrollably into a payphone to Joanne, who rescued me again, coming to the payphone where I was still bawling, yelling at people who passed by, just: broke down. Joanne let me sleep on her floor, took me for a nice picnic lunch in Central Park, and I drove back to Mom's house. Oh yeah Joanne had to give me money to get my car out of the parking garage because I spent it all on coke. Why did my mom allow me to attempt this? Let her son move to New York with the intention of being homeless? Does that sound like a safe and reasonable plan to you? Maybe when your flailing adult son is living with you, different kinds of plans start sounding reasonable. She took me back in. - - - - I applied to Cornell's architecture program because I liked the architect character in Chris Nolan's *Inception*. The ridiculous mismatch in my admissions essay and general thinking about architecture and what Cornell's typical student is and wants and what role Cornell plays in that was like the difference between an ant and an elephant. This is me in the architecture building, talking with one of their professors: "I think of architecture as *interface*, especially visible in a kitchen or a bathroom. The environment specifies buttons you can push, and those buttons change your reality. People are a species who *massively* change their environment. We don't live in forests anymore, even though our houses may be in forests. We are a species who looks around us, at sticks and snow and beetles and snakes and says: *I'd like to have a jacuzzi right there.*" This architecture professor sets his pen on the table. "Let me tell you something about the average Cornell architecture freshman. They just got out of high school. What they want to do is *build a skyscraper*—that is their goal in life. They want to design a skyscraper. For the eighteen-year-old mind who comes in here, that's what they're looking forward to. This is a five-year program. They spend five years in that wood shop downstairs building models. That's what the program is. And at the end of that five years..*maybe*..if they're lucky, they get an entry-level position at a New York firm. But I don't think you would be happy with an entry-level position at a New York architectural firm, no matter how prestigious." "I would never take such a position." "Right. I just think there's a quicker or a more direct route for you to take to get to where you want to go." The professor leans in. "And these kids—who want to build a skyscraper?—they're never going to." "No?" "No. Their whole lives will be spent in that New York architectural firm *wishing* they were the one building the skyscraper, but for almost all of them, it will never be the case. But it's important for them *to believe* that they will..or else they would never finish the program, they would never work in the company, etc." "So you take kids who want to build skyscrapers and allow them to labor under the lie that they're going to get to do that once they get this degree when actually that is nowhere near the truth." "Right." "I think this meeting is over." Lol. Fucking Cornell. That's almost the exact conversation I had with this guy and that's how the system works, kiddies, in a lot of professions. ### 3 I got some of my spirit back after my New York failure and my sobriety failure and my failure to find a program at Cornell where I could use my skill and intelligence to learn to do something useful. And eventually I set up my unemployment (which I could have had going for a long time if I had just done the paperwork) and I researched cities that would be good for writers. And I found Brattleboro. And I found those pictures of that porch on the house on High Street. I email the contact on Craigslist and someone rather amazing writes back, someone named Tooler. She was pretty concerned that I was on the same side or at least sympathetic to her side of the Israel-Palestine issue. I assured her I was, and we left other details by the wayside. I scheduled a trip to meet Tooler and her partner. From New York I take The Vermonter, which I'd always wanted to take because I mean it's "The Vermonter"—it's gotta have like the coolest train name ever. Just like QT in *Four Rooms*, "When you're drinking champagne, you say you're drinking champagne. When you're drinking Cristal, you say you're drinking fucking Cristal." Well when you're on a train, you can say you're riding a train, but when you're on The Vermonter, you say you're riding the fucking Vermonter. Anyone can take some commuter train to Jersey—only certain people ride The Vermonter. Here's what I see out the window: the trains and car lots of New York, houses, open fields, the tall white building with gold towers looking like something from another century, then increasingly snowy, half-land half-water fields, then it gets dark, and there is more and more darkness between smaller settlements. Most people get off the train, then I make my *Brattleboro.txt* journal entry—riding and writing on the Vermonter—Amtrak's train, as they say, "to Vermont and points north." Here's what I write: > **December 15, 2010, 4:52pm** > > I'm in a new place now, seeing land I've never seen. On the train to Brattleboro, Vermont. Reminded that the past is only stories we tell ourselves. Ready to embrace my life, ready to not be poor, ready for my books to sell. Ready to walk, live, meet, love, explore. Ready to let myself let go of the past, of what I might remember, of the stories I and we have told ourselves about family and country and company and success and failure and school and everything we've known. Ready to feel there is great time and space before me, to know that my life will be long, that I am young, and will be now for a while! That every time I thought, and think, that this has been the end, I have been wrong. Ready to forget the past and carry only a very small set of packages forward, just a few people, just a few abilities, just a few expectations—simple ones. To be itinerate, to fall in love, to fall in love with the people I meet and the work that I do. To allow myself to heal and move on, and most of the healing has already happened. To let myself grow healthy physically, to love company, to allow my beauty to be, to do what I want for my own sake. Learn one thing about life every day, not more, not less (usually). Trust, enjoy, simplicity. Stop trying to know the meaning behind, stop being afraid, stop worrying, stop holding back, stop trying to pretend something other than what is (when it comes to the truth). Forgive myself for everything that has come before, bless myself with oblivion..quiet, distance, presence, simplicity of now. I don't need to tell anyone anything I don't want..don't even have to tell myself anything I don't want, about the past especially. I am an adult, I am alive, I am ok. Bless myself, in this moment, on a stopped train in Massachusetts, with the freedom to live in the now, to forget about the past, to feel ok and present and to love myself and love the moment as if I were the lightest being in the world, new, owing nothing in the way of karma, owing nothing to anyone's ideas of me, including my own. I don't have to explain anything, I don't have to remember anything, I don't have to delve into anything, I don't have to return to anything. Change, oblivion, peace. And then I allow myself the ability to actually love. Change, oblivion, peace. And then I allow myself the ability to love. I am new, here now, nothing need have come before. And then the conductor is announcing Brattleboro as our next stop, and saying to please move to the *front of the car, people—front of the car*. I close my MacBook and put it in my bag. All I'm traveling with is a backpack. My hat, my gloves, my coat—all insufficient for the cold that sinks into me as I step off the train. - - - - I meet Tooler and Issa at the house on High Street. Tarps are everywhere, ladders. "Abby's still painting," Tooler says, pushing out her hand, which I shake. "This is Issa." Issa shakes my hand. Tooler puts her hands on her hips and looks around. "We don't really like the colors..do you?" I look at the living room, walk into the kitchen. "No," I say. "Is she colorblind?" Issa cracks up. "I mean these colors are like..almost..but not quite..right," I say. "Like that salmon color..if it was the deep orange color in the girl's bedroom in *American Beauty*..have you seen that movie?" "Yes but I don't remember that color..but I know what you mean. Issa and I were thinking of going into town and getting a beer, do you want to come with us?" "Yes," I nod. Yes. I've got a good feeling about these two right away. We sit at the only table in this bar in downtown Brattleboro. And we *drove*—even though it was only two blocks away—Tooler wasn't about to stay in that cold any longer than she had to. Her car was a Subaru station wagon, old as sin, fucking..cassette tapes everywhere..a giant hookah apparatus. "I only smoke shisha out of here so if the cops ever stop me there's no pot residue. Do you smoke shisha?" "I never have, but I'd love to try!" Issa squeals, "We have ourselves a shisha virgin!" "I just think," Tooler says, "driving..and smoking shisha at the same time..is—" "The height of luxury?" I say. And she says, "Basically, yes." So we're at this place called I think the City Cafe, at a table in the window and we all order different sandwiches and trade them around so everyone gets a taste. We talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict most of the meal and they seem satisfied that I am sufficiently informed on the subject. The girls drink beer. I drink pineapple juice—such a transparent sign of an alcoholic: I won't drink around you at first, because then you'll know I'm an alcoholic. But you can't hide it: the inability to drink one drink and stop is just as sure a sign. "So that's a nice haircut," Tooler says, of the strands of hair that are sticking out of this scarf/hat thing that I fashioned on the walk to the house. "It's more of a lack of a haircut," I say. "I haven't had a haircut in like..years?" Anyway, she reassures me she likes it. I start to loosen up. These are not people who are gonna judge me for looking like an animal who just stepped out of the motherfuckin' bush. "So is Zha your real name?" "It's my legal name. I changed it from Matthew Temple to Inhaesio Zha about ten years ago." "Cool. Tooler is also not my original name." "Nice, nice. Are you gonna tell me what your other name was?" "Maybe when—or if—we get to know each other better." But it was a *when*. It was already a when. I could tell they liked me and I knew I liked them. Everything from here on out was formality. We laughed. They each had a second beer. One day, months into the future, I saw Tooler's legal name on a piece of mail but I forgot it almost instantly—she was always Tooler to me. After dinner we stand awkwardly on the street saying our goodbyes and talking about the house, guardedly, because they haven't made their decision, but it looks good for me. They tell me they met with someone else but didn't like him—got a bad feeling. Then we all admit it's too cold to be standing here talking and we wave goodbye and Tooler and Issa go their way, back to paint the house, and I go mine, back to the Latchis Hotel. I see the bar below the hotel, see it crowded with women and men, and there's an empty seat at the end of the bar. A brown-haired female bartender even sees me standing in the cold and holds out a hand to the seat, inviting me in. But I smile and wave and walk the other way. I had been mostly sober for eighteen months and I didn't want to start drinking again so I waved and smiled at the bartender's invitation and walked away. I crossed over Main Street, down a hill, across the railroad tracks, and walked halfway across a bridge connecting Vermont to New Hampshire. My hiking mountain—one I had seen on the map and gotten excited about—this mountain was in New Hampshire, just across this bride. I stopped halfway across and put my hands in my pockets. Up there, it was the kind of cold that burns the skin. Fast wind across the path of the river, blowing right through me, through every article of clothing I was wearing. I'm standing on the bridge reflecting and a guy walks by. "Is there a bar up here, I think it's called the Red Room." "I have no idea," I say. "This is as far as I've been in that direction." It was like *Gatsby*, even though I couldn't give him directions, now "I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood." I was no longer the newest person in Brattleboro. The difference, of course, is that I had no idea where this bridge would take him. He continued on, already drunk, lit with spirits and the illusion of warmth they carried. I don't know how long he walked, but from what I learned once I moved to Brattleboro, it was a long walk that way before you got to anything at all, and what you got to was a GameStop and a Walmart—there was no bar up there. ### 4 The next day I tried to leave Brattleboro and go back to my mom's house. At the tiny Amtrak ticket counter I spoke with a stationmaster. "I'd like to buy a ticket to Stamford." "Do you have a reservation?" "What do you mean, a reservation?" "You need a reservation." "I never needed a reservation before. In New York when I buy a ticket I just buy the ticket and that's it. No reservation." "Well that's New York. This is Brattleboro, Vermont." I smile. "What do I need to do to get a reservation." He sets this old-style phone on the sill between us." "You can call 'em. But you ain't gonna get a reservation." "Well, should I call them, then, or not?" "I mean, you can *try*. You might get one." "Do you have the phone number?" He hands me a card with the number on it. No luck. I call them, but I can't get a reservation. See, in New York, this train might have 10 cars on it..plenty of seats for everyone. But by the time the train gets to Vermont and *points north*, it has two cars..not enough seats for everyone. So you need a reservation and a ticket. I put up with some stereotypical northeast gruffness from the telephone operator and made a reservation for the next day. My ticket was still good. And now I'm stuck another day in Brattleboro. With limited cash. A hotel that made me leave a hundred dollar deposit because I wasn't paying with a credit card. I only brought so much cash with me so I did some quick figuring in my head and figured out that I'd be ok. I could make it to tomorrow morning..and then I'd have the hundred dollar deposit so I'd have, as my sister says, "a little walking around money." "So when did this whole reservation thing get started?" I ask the stationmaster as he's shitting his chihuahua in the Amtrak parking lot. "You used to be able to just buy a ticket and get on a train." "If you want to know what it really is," this guy told me, "it's some post-9/11 bullshit, Department of Homeland Security, you know, terrorists on trains..it's just a bunch of bullshit. Know that no-fly list?" "Yeah." "They got a no-train list, too, it's just so low key it doesn't make the news. That reservation..that's just a chance for the Secret Service to check up on your social media accounts and make sure you ain't havin' no rooftop parties with Mohammad Al Jazoo, you know what I'm saying?" He's laughing. "What's your dog's name?" "Oh this is Empress—'cause she my little empress." I pet his dog and walk off. I guess I'm naive, but I didn't think Amtrak and the *Secret Service* were checking my social media accounts when I made a reservation to ride a train. I went with the theory that this was a small town with a small train and it filled up quickly because there was high demand for the seats. Amtrak's reservation system had nothing to do with 9/11 or The Patriot Act. It was just, you know, supply and demand. But I'm probably wrong. I rented my room for a second night at the Latchis hotel. I got a haircut—one of the best haircuts of my life. This woman at a ten-dollar Genericuts made me look like a skater from Orange County—everything but the tan. I looked way cooler than I actually am. Feeling good, go back to my room and use my MacBook and the hotel's internet to work at getting an online job. I'm in chatrooms and some collaborative programming environment showing off my stuff but the former/marginally famous CEO (of a domain name you would have heard of) turns out to be fraudulent..just like the last remote supposed superstar CEO I worked for at Mom's house. I get hooked up with this guy who talks the talk and makes it sound like we're going to take over the universe together as father and son. Then I look at the code. It's *unworkably* messy—worse than even what I'd seen at Mead Research. I had to test an audio signal coming out of a speaker at his house in Nevada, while I was in Pennsylvania unable to hear what I was testing. I finally quit, he never paid me..just another in a long string of CEOs and businesses that were not exactly above board, but not quite criminal enough to get noticed by the law. No one cares about billing fraud or payroll fraud or not paying employees anyway..they're just part of business. Anyway this interview for a purportedly sweet software job with this millionaire boss over chatrooms in my hotel room went as usual with these sorts of things. The guy wants me to do the work for free..saying he'll have a bunch of guys do it, submit their work, and he'll pay whoever does the best job. No thank you. He probably never pays anyone. - - - - I figured doing programming work for free was more expensive, net-net, than drinking my ass off, so I went downstairs to the bar next to the Latchis. I sit on a stool at the bar. (Let's just cut forward about four hours.) There's a guy named Will sitting next to me. We're talking about smoking crack. Will is saying things like, "You *have* to smoke crack every once in a while." And I say, "But then stop." And Will and I would look at each other and laugh and point at each other. *You can't smoke crack all the time.* (Then you're a crackhead.) *But you have to smoke crack from time to time.* This was the essence of our conversation. The bartender was looking at us and shaking his head. "You want a cigarette?" "Yeah." So me and my new friend Will, the artist's assistant, go outside in sub-arctic freezing fucking cold temperatures. He assembles rollies in fingerless gloves, sharing with me while we each catalogue all the drugs we've done and how much each one fucked up our lives, with a special emphasis of respect for this last aspect. Some hot girls bum rollies from Will. They're like fifteen. We keep them at a distance. We talk to them, but we keep our little space separate from their little space. Contrary to the shit guys talk, every thirteen-to-fifteen girl is not out on the town scouring the sidewalks for old men to fuck. But contrary to *that*, you do have your fifteens who wanna get fucked and they don't care if you're thirty-three or thirty-*eight*. Will and I stayed away from those girls. But we looked and we talked shit, and they talked it right back, about going up to my hotel room and could we get them some alcohol and they were all dressed for Florida—fishnets and short-sleeved shirts and Will and I were like these girls must be from out of town. But that's not it—girls dress like that in any weather just to get your attention. It's a life-threatening occupation. I tell Will about this jackmonkey who was refusing to hire me earlier because I didn't know Ruby and I was like: *Did you read my résumé?* It doesn't say Ruby anywhere on there. "The guy's like: It doesn't make much sense for you to lead our Ruby team if you've never done Ruby before. And I'm like: Read my fucking résumé. I'm not a Ruby programmer. I'm not about to *become* a Ruby programmer. And the guy's like well you're the most experienced developer in my résumé pile so I want you to lead this Ruby team. And I'm like: *Read my lips. No new taxes.* I'm not learning Ruby for you. Fuck Ruby. There's too many programming languages now anyway." "Ready for a drink?" "Yeah." And that was pretty much our night. Drinks. Crack. Cigarettes. Dope-looking fifteen year olds in miniskirts hanging by the door to a bar they can't get inside. Will had a certain night he stopped in Brattleboro on the way home, so for a while I'd always meet him for drinks on that night. "So where are you girls from?" "We're just passing through." "Anyway tell me about the bear." "Right," Will says, flicking this sparking rollie cigarette butt across the street. "That's why I have the gun. My wife and I drove here from fuckin' California, man. Now our house is—up that mountain—" Will is panting telling me the story. The air is so cold it's hard to breathe. "So we're at the end of a very end of a..very very end of a street..it's not even a street..it's just a dirt road..it's not even really a road..and one night I come out on the porch to smoke and there's this bear on the porch." "Black or brown." "Black. There's no brown bears around here." "So wha'd you do?" "After I shit myself?" "Did you have your gun?" "No I hadn't *bought* the gun yet. I bought it after this incident. So I look at this bear..and he looks at me..and we're both like: this could be a situation here. The screen door was still open. I backed the fuck up as slowly as humanly fuckingly possible and I pulled the screen door. Then I pushed the wood door. And I locked that fucking shit and went back to bed!" "Have you seen him again?" "No, I bought that stupid gun and that is the first and last time I have seen a bear in Vermont." "He prob'ly knows you bought the gun." Will laughed. "One more drink?" "Sure," I say. He's the one that's gotta drive. I had read somewhere that David Mamet lives in Vermont, I assume when he's not in California, and I remember this stately picture of him sitting in an old house, at a wooden table, smoking tobacco from a pipe. I imagined that David Mamet and Will were neighbors, and that Will's bear showed up on Mamet's porch from time to time. We drink, Will leaves, and I'm sitting at the bar pulling out a crumpled piece of paper from my pocket and flattening it. It says: > (vt trip) > > $500 > > 11:33 am > > 51 new york >> brattleboro > > 88 latchis hotel >> (802) 254-6300 wed > > + 100 deposit > > $40 dinner > > $60 brattleboro >> stamford 12:31 >> 5:28 > > $700 > > Ross .. apartment > > Bobby .. xx > > 2:00 > > he's the guy I have the application for > > Will > > *[email redacted]* The next morning I got sushi as a special meal—talking with the server about dance since my sister's a dancer..she knows the exact train I'm catching and the exact time it comes without me ever saying a word..she can just see it on me. "The 12:31?" (Smile.) "Yeah. Don't worry, your order'll be ready on time." She laughs. I do the same thing. "I mean you gotta have train food. And the craft cart—it's a joke, right?" "No," she says, "I do the same as you, get a box of spicy salmon or maybe a rainbow roll and I sit by the window—do you sit by the window?" "Always. Planes too." "Good, or else we we gonna have to stop this conversation." "Yeah, you just sit there and watch Vermont go by and eat your sushi and then before you know it, you're in a different world." "You like New York?" she says. "Love it." "Me too." "You gotta have both, don't you?" "I mean for a full person—which I can tell you are—you gotta have the city..but you gotta have the mountains too." I smiled, and I nodded (the genuine kind) and I thought, I could marry this girl. I mean how high of a bar are you gonna set for yourself? Someone who's pretty and can carry on a conversation with a stranger, someone who sits by the window and loves the skyscrapers of Manhattan as well as she loves the mountains of Vermont?—That's good enough for me. I could be happy with that. And for the few minutes we shared before I left her for the Amtrak station, I was. ### 5 I went back to Bowmanstown, where I'd been living with my mom. We drove to Philadelphia and met up with my sister Joanne. On the drive to Philly, Mom thought she saw a UFO in 4m sky. It looked like a star to me but we later found out it was Saturn, or some planet, that had come close to the Earth that weekend. The three of us flew to New Orleans, where we met with my little sister Leona, and I got to see her holding her baby, my nephew Daniel (I'm an uncle!!) for the first time. That's a beautiful sight, friends, seeing your baby sister holding her baby boy. It kind of gives you an idea of one of the things that's going on down here on this planet. Then we went through a grueling process of Leona lecturing the car rental company on having the wrong kind of car set—she had called ahead and requested a safer model of car seat for her baby. I can't argue with that. But it did involve hours us of sitting in the car rental parking lot having occasional conversations with employees who basically told us it wasn't going to happen. My littlest sister Leona got mad at them for not doing their jobs (and you don't want Leona to to get mad at you—she was diagnosed bipolar because when she took prescribed antidepressants she went ballistic (she went manic) and going manic when you take antidepressants is an automatic diagnosis of bipolar disorder, because people who don't have bipolar disorder don't get high or manic off SSRIs, they just get less depressed). Anyway you don't want Leona to get mad at you because she will tell you off in a very cruel and creative style only shared by my mother. And by me. Also, that night, we did this thing that is sort of a family tradition, which is to get caught up in some intellectual or logistical problem and forget to eat, thus lowering all of our blood sugars and making us all less able to solve the problem we are working on—in this case, locating a safer car seat for Daniel. I think ultimately Leona just sat in the back seat and held Daniel rather than use the inferior car seat. Totally less safe than using even the sucky car seat, but none of us questioned her. It's her kid, she's the mother, and, yes, she gets to set the rules. We drove for at least forty-five minutes trying to find an acceptable restaurant. Mom was driving. Joanne in the front passenger seat, me and Leona and Daniel in the back. I was just looking at this child, this infant, and he was so beautiful—I was easily caught up in the miracle of this new life who was related to me and would someday talk to me..it's just overwhelming. When we did find a restaurant that fit all current diets (gluten free, meat only, omnivorous, and others), the restaurant was a disaster. The waitress spilled a whole pitcher of water on our table. Daniel was thrashing around and knocked over my pasta (which I had added extra chicken and other extra ingredients to). As the waitress was cleaning that up, she kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and we felt bad for her and said, "It's ok, don't worry about it," and then she left and like an hour passed and they never brought me another dinner. I finally asked and the waitress said she thought when we were saying, "It's ok," that we meant *Don't bother making another one.* I went without dinner and they gave us a coupon for a free entree for the our next visit—by that time the kitchen was closed. I took the coupon for a free entree from a restaurant that I knew we would never be coming back to and I was like: *This is going to be a hell of a family get together.* We stood in the parking lot for half an hour while Leona tried to get Daniel to stop crying before we got into the car. Mom wanted to get to Baton Rouge as soon as possible so that everyone could get to sleep, and she said she didn't mind us being in the car with Daniel crying. Joanne agreed. I agreed. But Leona insisted on getting him quiet before we got into the car. Leona, I love you, but you should be aware that you are a very bossy person, not really a team player, more of a drill sergeant. But hey, I respect what a mother wants to do with her child. It doesn't have to make sense to me, you are the expert on how you're going to treat your child. And Leona, like us all, now, years later, as you approach thirty, you're cooling off. We drove to Baton Rouge, said hi and goodnight to my aunt Susan, and all went to our respective rooms. - - - - For days I sat around my grandmother's house, occasionally visiting with my grandmother, aunt Susan, uncle Bob, my immediate family, and a lot of the time I sat on the back porch looking up through the lattice at the sky. Even though it was bone cold in Brattleboro, it was warm in Baton Rouge. We didn't do much. Watched movies, ate out, and everyone sat around and marveled at the baby Daniel!! We each held him. A week later Joanne, Mom, and I were back in Bowmanstown. Leona and Daniel were back in Portland. And my grandmother, aunt, and uncle were left with their quiet house once again. When I was sitting on that back porch in Baton Rouge, one of my favorite places at my grandmother's house, I thought about my creative life and what I wanted to do. And, as is typical of me, I wrote down my thoughts. > Things I want to do in my life. > > (Make worlds, yes; we've settled on that general paradigm) > > I want to make a book that's so sick in the way that it draws you in, in the way it affects you. Probably I will have to do this several times, to satisfy myself that it's done. So at each point, make the most diabolic one I can, the most beautiful one, the strangest one, the most horrible one. > > I want to make a game that people give up their lives to play. A game that's so intoxicating, that creates such bliss in the players, that they spend their whole lives playing, and have made a good trade. > > + Maybe start with a diabolical RPG > > + Then make ^% > > That's what I want..ridiculous is an adjective I use sometimes, but right now the appropriate word I think is "sick". I want to make stuff that when you read it, when you play it, when you go into it, it's—and not in a moral way, not in a values-oriented way, but in the sense of its construction, I want to make stuff that is very far down [up/along] the scale of "what the fuck"..stuff that is sick. That was me in BR, spinning out sick, ridiculous fantasies about my future, writing it all down for you to decipher decades later. - - - - And this was me in BR, escaping the family, needing a minute of my own, borrowing a vehicle and driving to the closest bar to the house. There's a bar right there, a two-minute drive from where my grandmother lives. I go into the darkness, buy a pack of cigarettes, and drink gin and tonics until my alibi of finding some taco dinner won't hold up. I try to drive back to the house and find it's much more difficult than driving to the bar. I drive forever in both directions on the main street, turn around, repeat, and I finally find it, the side street that leads to my grandmother's house..and the street is right next to the bar I was drinking in, Ms. G's. I mean right there. I didn't have to go anywhere. This is a good illustration of family dysfunction, trivial though it is. Everyone in my family thinks that bar is called Mr G's, even though they've lived three blocks from it for fifty years and it has a huge sign over the door that says Ms. G's. My aunt Susan and I have even drank there together, walked under the sign that says Ms. G's to go into the bar and walked under it again to go out. And yet, if I refer to that bar in conversation, and I call it Ms. G's, someone in my family will correct me. "You mean *Mr.* G's?" I used to correct them and say, "Please, look, the next you drive past that shopping center, and see what the sign above the door says." But no one feels the need to do that. They stand their ground, remind me that they've been living here for fifty years and assure me that as long as they've been here, that bar has been called Mr G's. I told you it was trivial—but I think it's a good example in the way people's thinking is essentially flawed. Sometimes when we feel completely certain, certain enough to correct someone who suggests an alternative, we are actually wrong—and we have absolutely no idea. - - - - Back in Bowmanstown, my stuff had been packed for weeks, from before we went to Baton Rouge..everything I owned in a couple of Rubbermaid tubs and a few cardboard boxes. Mom says that when Joanne and her and I got home from the Philadelphia airport late at night, I was like, "I want to just drive right now, all the way, through the night!"—my Mom's point being that my life is filled with plans like this, surprises, feelings, and wild executions. Instead, Joanne and I chilled at the house for a few days and watched TV. I showed Joanne some movies she hadn't seen that I thought were must-sees, notably *The Edge*, which David Mamet describes as his script about "two guys and a bear." Joanne had read this article in Vanity Fair about the making of the movie and I realized, when she was summarizing the article for me, that she was talking about *The Edge*, which everyone, including Mamet, seems to regard as a colossal failure. And while I understand that it's not a masterpiece of a film, it has a pretty good survivalist story and I knew that Joanne would benefit from watching that story, as I had—her uniqueness, like mine, automatically casts *living in the world* as a story about survival of the individual, of the individual's mind and what it contains. We watched it and she said, "Thank you for showing me that." I knew she needed to see it. And I'm always up to see it again. We showed our mother *Blade Runner*, which she didn't get. She said she could see why others considered that a great movie but it wasn't for her. We also watched *Dark City*, one both Joanne and I like. In general, we lazed around the house, ate food, watched movies, watched *Ancient Aliens* on TV (which sent my mom into a miniature fit every time they suggested that archaeological finds might put a new spin on the history found in the Bible). Mom is a minister, and pretty cool theologically (so cool that if I said *how* cool, she'd probably get in trouble with some of her churches) but she does not like anything having to do with UFOs, aliens, and especially not the idea that what we call deities might be the same thing as what we call aliens. She tolerated us watching it while she typed her sermon in the next room, but after a while we switched to Bear Grylls—we didn't want to frustrate her, especially in her own house, our own mother—but she finds Bear Grylls ridiculous too. I mean, who wouldn't—the guy is like, "This is one of the most venomous snakes in the world," then he picks it up and eats it. - - - - We waited a couple days and then I drove Joanne to New York (Harlem). I dropped her off at her apartment and picked up some old drawings of mine. I made trips around the block in the snow while pedestrians cussed at me for not moving quickly enough. "Honky motherfucker, can't you see this is a sidewalk?!" Stuff like that. One example is probably sufficient. Joanne ran up and down to and from her fifth-story apartment to bring down framed drawings and a see-through green tube which held many more drawings I had done with graphite sticks. There was nowhere to park. A homeless man shoveled out a spot so I didn't have to keep making the block. Joanne and I hugged goodbye and I told the homeless man I didn't have any money but I gave him the sandwich I had planned on eating on my way to Vermont. He looked happy, and I was happy too—the last few times I tried to give homeless people food when they asked for money, they declined, fucking up my innocent view of homeless people actually being hungry instead of just wanting money for drugs. When I was homeless the only food I wouldn't eat was food that had a sermon attached to it. Like: sit here and listen to our pastor preach while you eat this meal. Or: sit at this table in the park and eat while we try to stuff Christianity down your throat. No thanks—I'd rather starve. Being an atheist is not why I'm homeless, asshole. And if you think "following Jesus" is why you have that eight-thousand-square-foot house in the suburbs, the swimming pool, the Mexican maid, the power job, and the seven-figure income, then you are mistaken—Jesus is not your god, but rather Anthony Robbins. I wave goodbye to Joanne on the streets of Harlem, fumble my way back to the highway, and head north. This is me driving to Vermont, to live—this will only happen one time in my life, my first drive to Brattleboro in my busted-out Toyota Corolla. I mean even with the new tires and the new axles (which were two years old at this time) that car had radiator problems and problems I can't even describe except in the company of a mechanic but it's mine and it's been with me since Los Angeles and it's wonderful. Beautiful, beautiful, the freedom of driving alone. Up through the small states. Night falls. And eventually I get there: Brattleboro. It only has two exits, it's that small, and I didn't know which one to get off on so I took the first and winded through basically the only road and soon I was in downtown, excited beyond excitement to park my car in the municipal garage and think: *I am in Brattleboro. I made it.* I was so excited. I thought of how wonderful my life would be here. Standing in the parking lot, I called Tooler. "I'm here, I'm downtown, I can't believe it, Tooler. So, look, is there sometime tonight that would be best for me to meet you at the house?" "Well I'm still at work, but Issa's home. She can let you in and I get off at seven so I'll see you in a little bit!" "Alright!" "Welcome to Vermont!" Tooler says. When I ring the bell Issa is out beside me and with a few words, in the dark, we're moving my things inside with military efficiency. Issa was no dainty girl—a real worker. We unloaded that car in less than five minutes. Of course, the cold and the dark was a factor—we didn't want to be hanging around outside that time of night. Once Then Issa disappeared into her room. I looked around my room. No curtains. Spare wood planks with nails sticking out of them strewn on the floor, and my six boxes of stuff, including an inflatable mattress my mom bought as a present for me and had delivered to the house on High Street. My mom has taken care of me so much. I looked at my hand weights. I was gonna do it in this room, work on my body, write my books, be independent, be healthy; I was going to make my life work here. - - - - I'm starting you out slow, but some of you might be mad about this book, especially if you're in it. You might not think I represented you fairly. You might think I'm wrong. You might be mad. You might be mad about my Tweets, my speech, my language, my dialogue. Because in this book when somebody gets fucked, we're gonna say *somebody got fucked*. And especially in dialogue, look, you're saying it, I'm just writing it down. So you might want to put this down if you're squeamish. But you know what, I spend so much energy adjusting myself to you all, and it's wearing me out. So from now on I'll be doing less adjusting to you and you'll be doing more adjusting to me, if you want to interact with me at all. ### 6 Tooler got off work. She came directly to the kitchen and was uncorking a bottle of wine with her scarf still on. She leans across my door. "We doin' this?" Tooler and I sat in the kitchen and split a bottle of red. Issa was not in the mood or too tired or scared or whatever. But Tooler and I had a grand old time. The fridge was full of whites. The counter was flush with reds. "Where did all this come from?" "My dad owns a bar," Tooler said. "Drink anything here. It's all community property. You do drink, don't you?" "Yeah I drink." Tooler gives me a look. "Yes, Tooler, I love to drink, I just didn't want to look like a lush when we first met because I really wanted this place." "Oh I know. I can read you like a drink menu. I could probably guess what you drink just by talking to you." "Ok. Guess." "We have to talk more first." "You're gonna be sorry you offered me all these bottles to drink." "Why, are you gonna drink 'em all?" "The red ones, yes!" Drinking with Will had opened me back up to the good life of drinking with strangers in bars and making friends that way. I had some wine with my sisters at the Christmas trip to my grandmother's in Louisiana, and of course I made my secret trip to Ms. G's, getting completely fucked and meeting a couple who tried to convince me not to move to Vermont, but to stay in Louisiana because they were under the impression that the friendliest people in the world were in the south, especially Baton Rouge, and that no northern state, even venerable Vermont, could possibly compete in friendliness. I didn't have the heart to deflate their infectious local pride (which Baton Rouge has in spades) by telling them that I'd been all over this country and, even though everyone has a different style, the whole country is filled with friendly, loving people. Even New York City, which gets the worst rap about rude and unfriendly people, is filled to the brim with totally friendly, totally conversational people. I have to admit that *I* am a part of the equation here. I can find friendly people in a graveyard, buried in their tombs. Everyone is friendly person who I decide to be a friendly person—who I decide to be friendly *to*. And I'm friendly to everyone who a) I don't know yet, b) respects me, and c) isn't trying to hurt me or work against me. I can count on one hand the people I'm not friendly to: my uncle Perish, my tenth grade math teacher, Joshua French, the so-called Chief Software Architect from Optimistic Solutions, and..I think that's it. You've got to be a serious dedicated full-time professional antagonistic fuck-up to get on my bad side. Even my dad, who has hurt me with his neglect and abuse and total absence from my life, I don't put on this list. He's doing his best. His best just sucks. But he's not *going out of his way* to hurt me—that's the kind of person I can't be friends with. I think that's rational. I'm telling Tooler about the night at Ms. G's. "So I get a call from my sister Leona and leave the bar, and once I find my way *home*, I then then totally irresponsibly drive my pregnant sister and my cousin—" "That's totally irresponsible." "—I know!—and my other sister to Walmart." "Did you tell them you were drunk?" "No! I hid that shit. I was like focusing twelve-thousand percent of my energy on driving within the lines and not inciting any police encounters, because these days, you're not worried about a DUI." "No." "You're worried about getting your head blown off." "Even if you're white." "*Even if you're white.* These motherfuckers these days..it's like they're *trained* to kill as many people as possible on each call. They used to have quotas for parking tickets. Now they have quotas for skulls!" "Want more wine?" "Mmm hmm." And Tooler and I worked our way through a bottle of wine and broke any housemate ice there might have been but there wasn't because Tooler was cool as shit and she didn't seem to mind me too much either. "I gotta take a piss." "You want to split another bottle." Standing, I smile at Tooler. "Another time, housie, this has been great though." "Alright. I'm gonna check on Issa." Tooler went to the master bedroom and closed the two of them in. I went inside the bathroom, which (as with all Vermont houses) was off off the kitchen. They keep all the pipes together to help prevent freezing. About the first half of the time I spent living with Tooler and Issa, I peed sitting down because I was mortified that one of them would find my pee drips and decide they didn't want to live with me. This is was ridiculous. Tooler was a total dudebro. Back home she had a man cave. Still, there was the box of maxi pads somebody had left out on the counter, a reminder that there were vaginas nearby, though probably not vaginas that wanted anything to do with me. I wanted to fuck Tooler. She described herself as genderqueer which is kind of like someone asking you what kind of vehicle you drive and you saying you drive a truck—it could mean practically anything. I didn't know if she was straight, lesbian, bi. I imagined scenarios where we were in the bathroom at the same time, one of us come in to get the Swiffer WetJet and we end up with her on the counter with her legs spread and my hands between them, kissing her pale neck and her grabbing my cock. I didn't think these things in a *predatory* way, but I did think them. Tooler's an electric human being—how could I not be turned on? - - - - That night I went to the coffeehouse (this was before we had internet at the house) and I Tweeted about a cute girl I saw, wishing I could meet her, or someone, anyone. I sat there, lonely, surrounded by lonely people, all on their laptops, and somewhere in all the tragedy and chaos of my twenties I had lost my playfulness, my innocence, my fearlessness who can say hi to a girl and not be so delicate that I fear the consequences. The next morning, fresh snow blocked in the cars—that would be Tooler's Subaru and the upstairs neighbor's car. I came out of my room to see, in the background, landlord Abby and upstairs neighbor shoveling snow so our neighbor could get to work and, in the foreground, Tooler and Issa slunk down below the window line so that no one would know that they were there. My housemates were in their early twenties. I was in my early thirties. I laughed and they giggled and I put my boots on and went outside to help shovel. I introduced myself. Our neighbor's name was Maggie. We shook hands with our gloves on. Abby handed me a shovel. "You shouldn't be out here. Isn't your car parked downtown?" "Yeah." "Are Tooler and Issa in there?" "Yeah, there in there." "Well I don't want *you* to have to do this work?" "It's ok. It'll help me wake up," I said, and I slammed a shovel into some enormous pile of snow. That day, Tooler bought us a couch and the three of us moved it into the house through the new snow. I spent the evening sitting cross-legged on the wood floors helping Tooler and Issa make posters for their Palestine protest in Amherst the next day. In the beginning it was fun and games between us all, sitting in the living room coloring in posters for the right side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, drinking, telling stories of our youth—which was kind of funny 'cause the two of them had a lot more stories to tell than I did, I think because at 23, all your wild stories are fun and wild, and by 33, you've had a lot more time for a lot more life to happen to you, and your stories are still wild—in fact they're even wilder—but they're not all fun. ### 7 It just massively snows the next day and undoes all our work shoveling the driveway. I start to see Tooler and Issa's point. As Issa hysterically laughs: "It just keeps coming!" And she's right. I've been in Vermont two days and I can see that. Maggie wants us all out there as a shoveling crew each morning shoveling the snow that is just going to fall again the next day? Forget that. Also, this isn't just snow. I thought I had seen winters in Pennsylvania, Ohio—these are on a different scale. There's a huge block of ice that fell right outside the front door—I'm talking two feet long on each side, solid, clear ice. Thankfully no one was there when it fell. Six-foot-long icicles hanging from the windows and the roof. The front steps were completely covered with six feet of snow. To leave the house I had to put cardboard down over the snow to go *over* the front steps to the sidewalk. I mean that block of ice—if it had hit you when it fell—it would have killed you instantly. - - - - And I guess I'll tell you this, not because it's lewd, not because it's lascivious, but because it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. That second day in Brattleboro, late afternoon, I was lying in bed not sleeping, just resting, and I hear the distinct sounds of a woman's pre-orgasm grunting and cooing and abortive moans. And I quickly realize that what I'm hearing is Tooler get off in the next room, with Issa, in their bedroom. They have forgotten that they took on a roommate and that he might be home, and they've left their bedroom door open. Tooler's cumming sounds excite my brain. I'm wondering how they could have possibly forgotten I'm in the apartment with them—my door is open, my light is on. There's no way for me to leave without embarrassing them and so I do the best I can think of—pretend to be asleep. I'm lying in my inflatable bed hearing Issa make Tooler cum, and hearing Tooler cum from Issa fingering or licking her or whatever she was doing made my dick hard but I didn't masturbate right away. I might have that night—I don't remember if I did. But if I did it wasn't to any image of the girls—it was to Tooler's sound, the sound she made when she came. I repeated it over and over in my head so I would never forget, and I never have—it was like a bird cooing in heaven—withholding, building, releasing—that most excellent exhale. I wish I could feel the pleasure she felt, as a girl, the very *female* shape of it. But I was privileged to hear her cum—the sounds were so quiet and simple and true. Sometimes I wonder if Tooler knew I was home. I fantasized about having sex with Tooler, trying in vain to figure out by myself what queer or genderqueer meant in her case, and if it meant she liked dick, too..and I knew at her age she wouldn't have fucked that many people and I hoped it would have been *soooo* long since she had fucked a man. - - - - I came to Vermont to hike. That's part of why I picked Brattleboro to live in, because right across the river in New Hampshire there's a little mountain called Mt. Wantastiquet, and beyond Mt. Wantastiquet is a tiny body of water called Indian Pond, and ever since I saw that on Google Maps, I thought: I could live there. Live in the city, yes, but have my retreat to the woods. I love to hike, it calms me. Soon after I arrived in Brattleboro I attempted to climb Mt. Wantastiquet. I wanted to cross it, see Indian Pond, come back—that was going to be my regular hike. But my first few times going over there I couldn't even find the trailhead! Eventually it turned out I was staring right at it but these weren't trails like in Ohio, with a nice big sign telling you where to go. There was a path there, but you had to find it yourself, and with snow covering everything there was no way for a newcomer to know what to do. I managed to have an all day hike anyway, across the side of the mountain, creeping through the woods one step at a time, without snowshoes, looking out for bears, eating my snack intended for Indian pond, drinking water and reflecting. I climbed down the side of an icy portion of a lower mountain when I knew it was a very dangerous decision, but I didn't have money for equipment or a friend to hike with—I've done solo camping in mountains, woods, desert, urban areas, many times for the same reason: I don't have anyone to camp with. I had friends when I was younger—a few times I had a real crew—but now we're scattered to the wind. We used to talk on Facebook, but I deleted my Facebook to avoid the drama, so now we just don't talk. Maybe in text or a call, twice a year, with at most two of my old friends. Now I don't have any close friends, so I hike in areas with bears, poisonous snakes, and worse. I've climbed to the top of Arizona mountains and slept there alone, looking down on the fighter jets cutting through the sky. Solo camping in Arizona is limited to one day due to the water you have to carry. I am sweaty, bruised, cut, and euphorically high by the time I get home from my first day hiking in Vermont. Tooler sees me as soon as I come in the door. "Where have you been all day?" "Climbing the mountain. Well, I couldn't get to the main mountain, so I climbed a side path. Still, some interesting formations. It's not too bad if you stick to a path where someone else with snowshoes has been before you." "You don't have snowshoes?" "Nah, but I got these." I tap my boots together. A pair of Skechers sold at the mall, one-inch tread, zipper insoles. Made strictly for fashion but the best pair of boots I ever owned. Still own them. Still hike in them. "Where I want to get is Indian Pond. It's over Mt. Wantastiquet. You should come with me sometime." Tooler shakes her head and slowly backs away. Issa comes in the room. "Hiking?" Tooler says. "Yeah," I exhale. My cheeks are still red. Issa says, "Tooler doesn't hike." "No?" "Well, it's not about hiking. Neither of us like nature. We're more city people, you know?" I say, "Is this true?" Tooler smiles, shrugs, and Issa breaks out laughing. "So you like to hike?" Issa asks. "Yeah. That's why I moved here. So I could have a place I could hike to from my apartment door. Nature makes me..well it calms me down about fifteen minutes into being in the woods. I used to hike and camp all the time in Ohio. One time my friend Shringara and I, we went on a Shamanic journey—that's what we called it anyway—and I guess it *was*, you know, I thought less of it at the time than I do now, but we fasted for a week, we didn't camp in a campsite, we went way up into the woods near Athens, Ohio far away from any paths or roads. We didn't see anyone the whole week we were there. And we fasted." "For the whole week?" "Yeah. Five days. Well, we had a box of raisins." "You lived for a whole week on a box of raisins!" "Yeah! And we drank tea every day. We got into a routine: sleep, wake up, go to the lake, get water for tea, bathe in the lake, bring the water back up to our campsite, make a fire, make tea, and then we'd sit and talk all day. It was amazing—of course we missed our friends—but it was amazing to be away from *the expectations of others*, even others we loved. There's an oppression, created by all the mundane and unseen expectations of every person around you, and sometimes you have to get away from your mom or your dad or your lover to feel what's really *you*, apart from them, you know?" "Sounds deep." "Hah. I guess it was. We learned a lot of lessons. Then we did mushrooms on the last day!" "I bet that was intense after not eating for a week. It was. It was the first time I ever did mushrooms." "Was it scary in the woods?" "We weren't scared, no. It wasn't the *safest* thing to do, but no, we weren't scared—we felt connected to everything." On our first night together in the house, when we split that bottle of wine, Tooler and I talked of so much cooking we would do (to impress each other, naturally) but Issa finally came into the kitchen and smirked. With one hand she covered her mouth so we couldn't see her laughing and with the other hand she pointed at Tooler and through her laugh said, "Tooler doesn't cook!" Then Issa doubled over, laughing, out of control. It was true, for all our first-night wine-drunk cooking intentions, neither Tooler or I were any good in the kitchen. Issa made up for both of our good intentions with a handful of meals throughout the year that the three of us had together. We always smoked shisha and drank and had a good time when we did this, we just rarely did it. Tooler says, "Do you ever drink beer?" "Not really. But I used to sit at this awesome hamburger place in Tucson—Lindy's—and they'd lock the doors so it'd just be me and the two waitresses and the cook and we'd watch *Superbad* and eat hamburgers, chili tots, and I'd drink PBR." "Ewww!..PBR?" "What's wrong with PBR?" "It's nasty. Why did you drink it?" "Because it was the cheapest beer they sold." "Come on, I can tell just by looking at your hat that you have more style than that. Matthew Temple..buying something because *it was the cheapest* option available. Bullshit." "What? It was on tap, and it seemed like a local-type beer, like what the locals drink?" Tooler shakes her head at me. "You don't think it's a beer of the people?" "I think it *was* a beer of the people..that's been co-opted *by hipsters* who want to be part of the local scene, and by doing this, they've made it no longer a local beer." I exhale. I wish I wasn't being politically analyzed by my housemate right now. "Are you calling me a hipster?" Issa laughs. "You?" Issa says. "No, you're not exactly a hipster." "But somehow I co-opted this beer..maybe I just like the taste of PBR or the logo or something? Is everything a class struggle or can I just be someone who drinks Corona and PBR because they're light and they're the only beers I can stand." Tooler comes close to me. "I'm sorry, did I hurt your feelings?" she asks. "No," I say, but it's a lie. I go to my room and sit down on the inflatable bed. I start to cry. Tooler is at the door. "Oh no!" she says. "Matthew, I'm sorry. I'm just explaining my theory on why white culture takes over a local spot or a local drink and then suddenly more tequila is being sold in the US than in Mexico." "I know," I say, wiping my tears. "I'm just very sensitive. I'm used to being criticized and you're right, it is co-opting for me to drink a beer just because I perceive it to be the local beer. But when do I cease to be a tourist and *becom*e a local? I'll never be Latino but I've lived in Tucson three times, Lindy's is like a *home* to me, I mean I've dated both their waitresses, been over to their house— "They're *housemates*?" "No, they're sisters." "You fucked a pair of sisters???!!" "Well, I liked them both." Issa is standing next to Tooler now, laughing. "Did you like one of the sisters better than the other, in bed?" She cracks up. She's clutching Tooler's shoulder to keep from falling over. "I bet you liked the younger one because her hoo-ha was tighter!" Tooler pushes Issa off her and Issa falls on the floor, hysterical, pointing a finger at me and covering her mouth with the other. Tooler says, "Matthew, I'm sorry—" "No, you don't have to be, I'm overreacting. I'm just very sensitive today." Silence. Then Issa says: "Let's go down to Whit's, and we'll all drink PBR, and we'll all be happy again!" "I'm not drinking PBR," I say. And Tooler says, "I'm not drinking PBR, either." "We'll all have whatever we want, and everyone will be happy, happy family, then we come back here and smoke shisha!" I can't help but laugh. Tooler grabs my hand and pulls me up from the bed. "I'm drinking gin," I inform her. "Which I'm pretty sure is from Europe so I'm going to be co-opting someone." I look at her to see if I hit her too hard. "Oh it's ok. I like a man with a little bite. I'm going to be co-opting the Walsh myself." "And we'll all be like family," Issa says. And we were. For a while, we were. We cared for each other like brothers and sisters, except that the sisters were lovers. And slowly they learned that too much wine was no good for me, and that I cry at the oddest remark, and that it had nothing to do with them, and they learned pretty much everything about my mental state, which was even then best described as fragile. - - - - Issa cooked this, Issa cooked that, Egyptian specialties mostly, always amazing flavor. I was shy about eating with them the first night we had family dinner—I made dumb excuses like I didn't want to disturb their dinner together, but they were so friendly and nice to me..more friendly and nice than I can be when I'm in my worst mental states..they came to my room and told me I had to eat with them. It was just the generosity I needed to have shown to me, to remind me, after many terrible years, how to do it myself. After two bottles of wine between the three of us, they ask: "What did you and your friend..Shringara?..learn in the woods?" "Shringara, yes. It means love and laughter and sometimes I just call her Hasya which is the laughter part because that's a part of her we like to say I know better than anyone else. That I *know* that she *is* laughter. But what did we learn? Well, we learned the story of the fire." "What's the story of the fire?" Tooler says, pouring herself and I more wine. "In the woods," I say, "every day, we did two things. We went to the lake to get water and we made a fire so we could boil the water and make tea. And then we sat there all day and talked. And like I said before we came to many realizations about our friends and expectation and how sometimes if you want to change you have to leave your home town. A prophet is never recognized in his home town—have you ever heard that?" "No." "Well that's kind of a common saying. A prophet is never recognized in his or her own town. But the real realization we had was about our fire. So we spend all day building this fire so it can heat us in the dark and boil our tea and all this time we're thinking *we need our fire*. That camping trip would have sucked without a fire—any camping trip would. But then, after a while of looking at this thing that wad the center of our whole world, we realized that yes in one sense our fire is serving us—heat, light, safe water—but that in another sense *we are serving our fire*. Look at us: all day we roam around the woods gathering sticks and feeding them to the fire. It is an entity, that because of what *it gives* us, has convinced us to *give it* all it needs. We feed our fire and our fire and our fire feeds us. We need our fire and our fire needs us. Without us, there would be no fire. And without the fire, after a while, there would be no us! So you see it's not so simple as you needing me and me not needing you in return. We feed each other so we can feed each other. That's a different kind of connectivity than either of us was thinking about before." I take a drink of my wine. We all share a moment because these beautiful people appreciate my story and I appreciate their listening, and taking me in even though I'm a guy, and feeding me food I've never eaten before. Issa says, "I'm having a cigarette." "I'll go with you," I say. "You will??!! Tooler *hates* cigarettes." Issa and I go outside and smoke in bitch-insane Vermont cold. We're both shaking but I feel at home. With my free hand I pretend I'm smoking and when I exhale the steam from my lungs comes out looking almost exactly like cigarette smoking. I do this regally. Issa cracks up. "Vermont smoking," I say. She laughs. "These motherfuckers don't even have to buy cigarettes." I Vermont-smoke once again. Issa follows suit, acting silly with me and then she's going in. "Can I have another one?" She gives me one and I smoke a second, alone, thinking, ruminating, letting it all echo around inside me as deeply as possible, as I am wont to do. - - - - One time the two women came home with a large package, obviously meat of some sort. "Guess what this is!" "You'll never guess." "He'll never guess." "Just tell him what it is." "Well it's what we're having for dinner tonight so I hope you like it." Tooler laughs. I stand from my laptop, which is at my "desk" on the floor. "I'm interested, Tooler—you've got me interested." "Yeah I know I've got you interested." She gives me a definite look. "But back to the subject at hand!" I say. Issa opens the brown paper wrapper, then a clear plastic bag. She reaches inside and pulls out something red and beefy and places it on top of the brown wrapping paper. "I still don't know what that is." "It's—ready—one, two, three—cow heart!!" Issa cracks herself up laughing. "We wanted to know something about you, Matthew." "Yeah," Issa says, "we wanted to know something about you." "What." "HAVE YOU EVER HAD COW HEART BEFORE??!!" I laugh sardonically. "No! Where did you buy that?" "The grocery store. Welcome to Vermont, man. They just sell this shit in the meat section. You wouldn't believe what else they had." "Please don't tell me." "So are you up for it?" I look skeptically from Issa to Tooler. "Can we open a bottle of wine to go with this?" "Oh yes. Issa will take care of the..heart..and you and I will drink wine. Is this arrangement *ok* with everyone?" (It was.) Tooler and I got tipsy and chatted up the motherfucking stars—we were great talkers. That night I ate cow heart with Tooler and Issa. It's quite wonderful—just a tough beefy flavor with the added joy of knowing you're eating an animals's heart. After cow hearts T+I got out the hookah and we smoked shisha. I had never done this before, but it was pleasant. They had a method of chilling the hookah water with ice cubes so the smoke you get is cold..divine. Tooler holds up her glass of white, I hold up my glass of red, and Issa holds up her water. "A night of firsts," Tooler says. A night of firsts. ### 8 Issa escaped Gaza through a tunnel to Egypt..or something like that. It was this claustrophobic, hours-long climb and crawl through a tunnel in the Earth. She had to pay to go through, and that was a lot of money..but along the way, inside the tunnel, there were children with Uzis asking for more money..and she had to give them more money if she didn't want to die in the tunnel at the hands of an 11 year old. Luckily she did have some more money on her and she was able to pay her way all the way to Egypt, which is where she met Tooler, an American on a study pass. From Egypt, Issa escaped to the United States with a fake passport, which she showed me proudly. I hugged her—'cause hey—she was lucky to be alive. Tooler went through a year of work taking Issa to meet with New York lawyers and getting her classified for political asylum. At their request, I wrote a letter of recommendation for Issa to be used in court. Tooler got Issa asylum, and as soon as she did, Issa broke up with Tooler and moved to New York City—Queens—met other Egyptians who owned blocks and blocks of property and shops and because she was Egyptian, she got a sweet job at a restaurant/coffeehouse the first day she went there. They even gave her a sweet apartment of her own that was only one block away from her job and told her not to worry about the rent—she could pay that later. See? It is possible to live in New York, to find affordable housing—you just have to know people. ### 9 Brattleboro has less than twelve thousand people. The town is circled by a long road which goes up into the mountains and down again back to the river, intersects a bridge that crosses into New Hampshire. The whole of those thirteen thousand people live within that circular road, that you can ride your bike around in less than an hour. There are various neighborhoods: there's the area with the hospital at the south end of town, then the shopping center with the Dollar Saver—when I first get to Brattleboro, the first full day I'm there, I went shopping at the Dollar Saver and thought: I could get a job here, it'll be perfect. Then there's the prestigious High Street, where Tooler and Issa and I lived. Then Elliot Street. If High Street was quiet, Elliot Street was loud. If High Street was calm, Elliot Street was wild. If High Street was legal, Elliot Street was illegal. Even though they were just a block apart, rents were cheaper on Elliot, it had most of the bars in town, most of the drugs and drug dealers and homeless people using restaurant bathrooms. In the summer, Elliot Street had all the high school kids and junior high kids hanging out bumming cigarettes from adults (like me) and dressing as provocatively as the law allowed. When day drinkers came outside of their bars for a drink, underage girls who couldn't drink would bum cigarettes from men twice their age—more than twice—and they didn't take them for free. They flirted and stood way too close and rubbed themselves on you and didn't even care—I would have given them a cigarette for free but if some sixteen year old wants to step into my personal space (and do a special move where she steps to me and her breasts touch while she looks like she's kissing me but really she bites the burning cigarette *out of my mouth*, our lips touching, while she stabilizes herself by grabbing onto my arms) just to get a cigarette into her mouth, not minding if her fucking half-visible butt cheeks rubbed against my cock..well..so be it. She wasn't psychologically hurting me and I wasn't psychologically hurting her. But Brattleboro, other than having an overflow of hot teenagers who mostly disappear to other states by the time they're twenty, has has three grocery stores, one Burger King, one sushi restaurant, one Thai restaurant, one burger cart, one yoga studio, one massage and acupuncture center, one pizza place. When Joanne came to visit, she said it looked like a movie set: like those fake streets they have at Universal Studios that get used over and over in movie after movie, but everything dressed up and shot at a different angle so the same set looks like a hundred different cities. I guess the one thing Brattleboro has more than one of is book stores—when I moved there, the word on the street was that Brattleboro had more bookstores per capita than anywhere else in the US, including every college town in existence. And that might have been true. There were five or six within the very center of Brattleboro, each one with its own character and specialty. It may be true that Brattleboro had more bookstores per capita than anywhere else in the country—but if it was true when I moved there, within a few months it was longer true, because the fire came, and burned out large parts of downtown, including three of the bookstores, so I'm sure that pushed us down on the list of per capita bookstores. - - - - I called my sister Joanne walking down High Street just after moving to Brattleboro and just after a phone conversation with Dad that just devastated me in his lack of care or belief in or understanding of me. "I've been so hurt by him for so many years and I've given, now that I count back, five years telling him that I want a relationship with him, and him just dropping the line. He never calls me, I always initiate, his email communications (as you know) are never about feelings or people, they're always about his job and where he's moving to take a new job and how the job is going and what he's doing for his job. You remember that time he picked up the phone and didn't even recognize Leona's voice and when he did figure out it was her, he didn't have time to talk to her because he was busy with work stuff? He was expecting *another* Leona—not his daughter, but a *work* Leona." "Yeah, I know," Joanne says. And I said to Joanne, "I always trick myself or blame myself into thinking that *I'm* cutting off contact with *him*—when the reality is that he cut off communication with *me* a long time ago. And I say I'm thinking of stopping reading his emails because they always make me feel bad about myself and there was that therapist, when I was living with Rishi, who said I had some very complex ways of determining whether I should be around such-and-such a person, and my therapist suggested this metric instead: look at *how the person makes you feel*. How do you feel when you're around Rishi? Around Dad?" "Well that answers it right there," Joanne says. And I say, "It does, doesn't it." We talked for a long time more as I slowly walked down the steep hill of High Street, leaning against concrete walls, taking a few steps, trying to keep warm as we examined our childhood, the idyllic period with Mom when it was just the three of us and we took weekly trips to the library, everyone treated each other well, and that was a heaven of upbringing until about the third or fourth grade when we realized *almost no one* else lived that way—the world was full of not only large-scale war, but that on a small scale, everyone was sick and lying and cheating and didn't even experience *joy* within themselves. Our lives had been joy and bliss from the moment we were born. And, as such, we were perfectly ill-prepared to live in this world. And we are both at odds with it to this day. We also saw that we had the perfect upbringing for artists: one parent (Dad) who, no matter what we did, would always disapprove or ignore us. And one parent (Mom) who, no matter what we did, would approve and pay attention to us. It's the perfect family system for producing artists: as a kid, we internalized Dad's hate and disapproval, which was perfect for enduring long periods of mass disapproval from people about your art—our dad had inadvertently given us an innate immunity to hate and criticism. We could survive our whole lives never getting published, hired, awarded, galleried, approved, paid, or in any way loved for our art and we had the stoicism to continue doing our art with absolutely no encouragement until the day we died. Equally important, we had internalized Mom's unfailing, sometimes baseless, love for anything we did. So right next to Dad's disapproval, inside of each of us, was Mom's voice telling us she loved us *no matter what*. It created a personality that at least Joanne and I share that truly doesn't give a shit if you try to break us down with negativity, and which has an unending, internal source of self-love and approval for whatever we do. Way more than most people, Joanne and I a) truly don't modify our action based on hate and b) are happy with ourselves and what we make, innately, based on a trust of our own internal barometers. No one can tell an artist what to do—the expression of a highly-developed point of view is maybe the most central feature of what makes an artist, an artist. I felt better after my conversation with Joanne. I had cried a lot. But I felt lighter with a commitment to a new position with respect to Dad. Joanne said, "Did I ever tell you something?" "What was it?" "I was maybe two. No, I had to be older than that. But it was in the Dallas house. You know that game where a little kid counts to a hundred..and the adult keeps track for them because it's too much for the kid to remember?" "Yeah." "Well I played that game with Dad." I hear Joanne crying now, my little sister somewhere in New York City, telling me this story, crying. "I remember I had already said 17 but I asked him anyway and *he said I hadn't said it*. So I said 17 and then asked him if I had said 17 and he said that I had not said the number 17." "He was fucking with you." A sniffle on her end. "He was fucking *with a little kid*. What kind of mentality?" "I don't know, Joanne—he's a sick person." Sniffle. "Yeah." I say, "Joanne?" "Yes?" "Do you remember the end-hall closet?" "What closet was that?" "Smell of leather, shoe-polishing cabinet with brushes and varnishes and maybe some kind of box in the back, beyond the coats, with something unknown in it, something we couldn't know at that age even if we looked at it—" "Matt." "Yeah." "I remember it." "Yeah?" "I just don't want to talk about it." ### 10 I walked to Abby's office and met her for the first time formally. She worked as an accountant. I went to sign the lease. We shook hands without gloves. "Nice wall colors," I said. "Do you like the ones at the house?" "Oh yeah, they're great," I lied. But the statement about her office wall colors was not a lie. She told me she had picked those, too, and my mind twisted at the fact that she had chosen such deep jewel-tone greens and grays for her office and such cheesy carnival-circus colors for the house we were renting from her. I sign the lease. "Do you want any references?" "No." "Do you want a deposit? I brought cash." "Just pay Tooler, she already took care of it." "Do you want to know anything about me? My work situation? Anything?" "No," Abby said. In LA you could never get an apartment like that. In the frontier lands, places like Vermont and Arizona, there's still more freedom, computers and records don't control every interaction, and basically a smile and a handshake will do ya. But after what Abby put up with from me, I'm sure she does background checks now, application fees, proofs of employment, all that. Because eventually in this story will come a time when I'm unable to pay the rent, and it will kill Abby's finances for a short time. She'll need to pay for oil for the house so everyone living there doesn't freeze to death, while she and her daughter live in a hut, basically, that doesn't even have running water. Yup, people like me—people with mental illness—we mess up all the normal people's lives, who are just trying to work and make money. And what's wrong with that? If Abby could somehow extract the two thousand dollars I owe her, out of my body somehow, she'd want to, and I'd let her! But, I mean, without unemployment benefits, without a job, without disability, where does this mystical quantity called money come from? Work, obviously. But when you've got a disorder—a misshaping of your brain—that makes you try to kill yourself, work is not an option. You can't work while you're in a mental hospital, and if you tell anyone you're suicidal, or swallow a bottle of pills, that's where you'll be. And whether it's legal or not, after you get out of the mental hospital, if you tell your potential employer in a job interview that you spent time in a mental hospital..most of those motherfuckers aren't going to hire you. Of course you know this so you make up lies for the gaps in your employment history: your dad was sick and you had to take care of him, you were writing a book..or you just flub the dates of your surrounding jobs and make that gap disappear. If you're mentally ill and you have no family or friends generous enough to just *pick up the tab* of your life, you will be homeless. Some people get disability. As of now, five years after the events of this book, I have been trying to get disability, in the various states I've been living in (depending on which family members could stand to endure the infinite difficulties of having me around). I'm moving again soon, because I live with my Mom and she's moving, and I go where she goes. So I have to transfer my disability application to a new state, and hope that someday I am approved. And let's be clear: that money will not be enough for me to live on. I'll still be a dependent of my mom for the rest of my life, I guess, unless I go live in a tent in the desert. But I can't take care of myself. I shake, due to psychiatric meds I've been prescribed. I clench. I can't cook safely—I can barely screw the cap for the laundry detergent back on. So if I "get disability," it's not like I'll be buying Lamborghinis or a house or even renting an apartment. That'll just be money so that I can pay for my own medical expenses—instead of Mom having to. When you live in a society that had use for you for most of your life, from the time you were born until you were maybe thirty, and all of that time you were genetically predisposed to having a major mental illness, and around the time you were twenty-three a catastrophic life stressor (according to current bipolar theory) kindled the disease within your head, and in addition to being smart and weird and fun and an infinitely employable programmer, you become really weird and an alcoholic and you quit jobs for no reason that anyone else can understand, you do a lot of things that no one else can understand, like mail your entire spice rack to a New York art dealer along with tons of original artwork—no note—just *fuck it* I'm having fun I'm sending art to an art dealer hahaha! Then your life becomes a series of "flying leaps" as my mom calls them. Moving to a new city with no money. Quitting my hedge fund job to living in a tent in my friend's back yard in Arizona. Getting back into the work world for a few years, then getting out. Getting fired for the first time—before that I had always quit. Becoming homeless—which if you're romanticizing it, don't—it's almost completely a dead end in this country if your bank account goes to zero. I mean that's the basic game. Everyone does it. Almost everyone talks about the glamour associated with your bank account being at the high end. Hardly anyone talks about what happens when you are not just living paycheck to paycheck, but when you actually have zero dollars and zero cents. Everyone dumps you. You get evicted (the first time is the most exciting). You come home one day and the locks are changed and there's yellow caution tape all over your door and a neatly typed and printed notice that says the property has been repossessed, then it lists your name and the amount of money you owe the apartment complex so that all your neighbors can judge you for not being a movie star or a famous director yet. Then that's it. You live in your car until your car gets towed because you can't pay the parking pass, or you move into a crack motel—a weekly rate motel with bed bugs, roaches, giant cracks in the wall, a prison-quality cage that encloses the manager, who you pay in cash, for the right to feel like a degenerate for living in a motel where ninety-eight percent of the occupants literally are smoking crack with their disability check, which somehow they were able to get—while you are quickly understanding the end of the bank account game that nobody talks about. When you actually stop drinking because the thought of being homeless is harder than facing your emotions without alcohol. And eventually comes the day—the zero dollars and zero cents day—when your mind is clear as a glass bell about the entire spectrum, now, of the bank account game. You've made one-hundred k as a software consultant for Mead Research—you had that experience, you know what it's about. Now you are walking down a desert sidewalk looking for a homeless shelter (see my other memoir) and you know what it's like at the bottom of the game. The homeless shelter won't take you. You're sleeping in parking lots. It becomes clear (as the glass bell, previously mentioned) that *if you have no money* and *you're not working to make money for someone else, someone who does have money* that society wants you dead. That sounds extreme, but it's the absolute truth. Many these days say that the US isn't a society at all—it is solely an economy. They are right. Those are the people that when I was twenty-four working at a hedge fund toting my copy of *Atlas Shrugged*, I thought were crazy. I thought their liberalism had corrupted their rationality but once you've played both ends of the bank account game you realize *those motherfuckers were right*. We are not a society. We don't have room for everyone. The French overestimated us when they put Emma Lazarus' poem on the Status of Liberty. We are not a society, we are merely an economy, and if you, for whatever reasons, are not working to make the rich richer, this economy *wants you dead*. Yes. You read me right. The US is not a society of human animals, it is an economy controlled by superhuman, nonhuman entities—at the very least our corporations—and when you cease to serve those richer than you, the economy prefers that you quietly die. And I have huddled freezing in the middle of Tucson nights, thinking that if I can never be reconnected with the economy, that it was rational for me to kill myself. And I have reveled, in my own idiotic drunkenness, by sleeping in the most urban areas of Los Angeles *even when I had an apartment*, *even when I had a job*, because I had reached the saturation point of my disillusionment with all the jobs I'd worked for and bosses I'd made rich, and no one's opinion of me was worth a grain of sand. *I* would be the one lying under ferns in Hollywood as sexy date couples passed me and looked at me, drunk, in ratty clothes..and *I* would be the one laughing at *them*. - - - - I liked to dress as casual as possible and scandalize upscale bars like The Hungry Cat by making their door girl with her little black dress look me up and down and tell me with her hardened LA eyes that *you've gotta dress up to come here* and she would open the door for me and I'd inform her I'd be sitting at the bar and I wouldn't just *sit* at the bar, I'd *hold court*. I'd make friends with every bartender, every server, every patron—even the door girl was smiling and laughing and stopping by every time she passed the bar to make sure I had everything I needed. Fucking right I had everything I needed. I'd spend five times what anyone else in the place was spending, buy two-hundred dollar bottles of wine, drink one glass, and give the bottle to my server to take home and enjoy with his girlfriend. I don't think I'd call that *having fun*—I think I'd call that *disgust*. Disgust with the fact that one year I could be homeless and one year I could sit at a bar and collect phone numbers on napkins, meet a girl on Christmas Eve and wake up with her in bed, both of us making stupid jokes about being each other's Christmas present while my cock slowly fucked her on the morning of the twenty-fifth and while her cunt hugged me so warm and tight like only a girl can do. Walking into The Hungry Cat in sandals and capris which all my super-straight friends were not shy in telling me they thought they made me look gay..that was disgust. Sometimes when I went in there I had spent the night outside, in a secret place between the Cinerama Dome and the ArcLight Cinemas. I'm sure I looked horrible, by Hollywood standards. The door girl would never date me, for example—I would need to drive a car costing at least seventy-five thousand dollars and wear suits when I went out to drink. Bitches like that don't move to Hollywood to become movie stars—they move there because the men have money. They want to live in a house with a pool—and their high-school sweetheart from Oklahoma is never gonna be able to provide that. But if she has a decent body, then that's what she provides. And arm candy is worth a lot of money in LA. But to me it was just a childish game where I *forced* The Hungry Cat to let me sit at their bar because I spent a lot of money and I was making the point (to who?) that as long as I raised the amount of money high enough, they would let me do whatever I wanted in The Hungry Cat. Two years earlier I had been homeless—zero dollars and zero cents homeless—and now, because I walked into an office certain days of the week and listened to a foolish, hurting man (my boss) display his ego, daily, with as much spectacle as Cirque du Soleil (but with none of the beauty)..because of this odd sort of counseling function I performed for our self-proclaimed Chief Software Architect..and because I did some programming that was as easy for me as wiping my nose..I had enough money not to be homeless, and to obliterate my delicate bubble of higher consciousness with a constant stream of alcohol and other drugs. Anyway I signed that lease in Abby's accounting office in some tiny town in Vermont and was glad I was through with all that LA bullshit. ### 11 This is how the first few months went, taken from some forgotten blog. > **March 20, 2011, 1:33am** > > I need a plan, > > a general template for what I'm doing now, with fixed parts and variable parts. I'm living in Brattleboro, I'm not moving from here until I'm rich from books. I'll find a grocery store job, exercise, get low-income assistance for health care if possible, and I'll slowly write books and submit books and live and stand self-respectingly while I let my authorship develop. And I will commit to being able to write, whether I "publish" or not, and I'll joy in writing, at the rate and in the ways that I joy. > > **March 1, 2011, 6:32pm** > > Trying my hand in a combination of computation and psychology, in person, at the Spirit MeetUp in Brattleboro, Vermont. Setting up the room now, making posters and diagrams, meeting Mike, Michelle, and Cat, and generally trying something new! If you're in Vermont stop by, starting around this Friday, and for a small price you'll get something that functions like a tarot reading, but that under the hood, is all computers and math. *[This job never worked out, by the way. If I told you exactly why I'd probably get killed. Let's just say my bosses behaved erratically due to consumption of exotic substances. Fuck it. They were meth freaks.]* > > **February 19, 2011, 4:42pm** > Hiked Indian Pond > Six hours overall. Had a little conversation with god, and god with me, atop Wantastiquet. Wind blowing, me screaming at the wind, that sort of thing. We made demands of each other: each told each other what we need. I need reminding, because I forget. I need money enough to travel whenever I want, pay my debts, have a house, have tools for doing what I want to do, and money to pay people to help me with my projects. God needs me to do the work: hike, go to NA meetings, eat right..whatever it is that I know will move me, I need to not be complacent about those things at all: I need to do them. > > Some thoughts from today: No one is with me. No one is on the same journey as me. I'm the only person who hiked Indian Pond today. No one came with me. No one else from Brattleboro hiked that today, or I would have seen them on the trail. I sat by that lake alone, I walked there alone, I came back alone. But more than just literally: there is no one on my path with me, there is no one writing the books I'm writing or living the thought life I'm living. There is, hence, no one qualified to give me advice on how I walk my path, because there is no one else who can or will walk it. So don't take advice from people who don't know about me, and don't sway onto someone else's path for their benefit. I have my own path, my own way, and I am on that path and in that way for unique reasons and due to unique hungers. We can occasionally keep each other company, for a moment, but I am separate, I am by definition the only me, the only one on this path, and it is sensible for me to cultivate and maintain and fully inhabit my own, as no one else can. The scope of a day is the appropriate scope in which to think, as a human. I learned this profoundly a few months into recovery in Tucson, then somewhere I forgot. You can plan a day. You can live a day. You can not-drink for a day. That's all you can do, pretty much. So live within the scope of the day. In a day, live that day, plan that day, schedule that day, and get that day like you like that day. Then stop. And when you have the chance, do the next day that comes. Anything outside of that is inappropriate, and crazy-making. Don't plan five months from now, and decide that I'm going to be rich, or decide that I'm going to be homeless. Plan today, the time that I am awake, and live that, do that, and don't do a thing else. This is a recipe for sanity. Whatever is your church, spend time there. Wherever it is that you worship, spend time there. If that's in front of a keyboard programming, then be in front of the keyboard, programming. Spend your time worshipping. Whatever is worship to you, spend your time in the corresponding church. For some that may be a stock exchange. For some it may be a church. For me, today, I am reminded, it is outside. It is in nature. That is my church. That is why I came to Vermont. Spend time in the place that gives you cause to worship. That's a recipe for seeking your spiritual self. And also: maybe a little RPG thinking would help me. Like, today I earned the "Hiked Indian Pond" badge. My character did. By doing something. No one else earned that badge today. No one who doesn't hike Indian Pond ever earns that badge. Those badges, whether I think of them that way, whether I post them on "Minutiae" or not, are real. Maybe thinking of them that way a little more would help me to quantify and understand what I am doing, to put a finger on the work I do that goes into the changes I want to see. > I'm incredibly thankful for this day. That mountain is beautiful. From a certain point, walking, I was talking aloud, thanking god for allowing me to live today, for giving me the chance to do so, and I get some credit for living it the way I did =) > > **February 9, 2011, 1:35am** > > It's 10°F > > Cold walk from the house to downtown Brattleboro. I bundled up. The new wool coat did well, but in this cold my arms were getting chilly by the time I got to the church. Been sitting at the homeless shelter about every other evening. Today I'm doing the 1am-7am shift. I'll reward myself with breakfast from the deli in the morning, english muffins with sausage, egg, and cheese. And for whatever reason, my computer is working with the church's internet tonight, so I'm posting from there. > > Selfishly, this is a great job for a writer, at least it was while the internet wasn't working. There's nothing to do—or very little, usually—and you have to sit here for six hours. That's *ass in chair* right there. Most nights I've come here I've written. I probably will tonight, after this post. I took the last day or two off from writing, from doing anything productive, and just relaxed. I needed to give myself a break. Feedback I got about my last volunteering made me realize I was being too hard on myself. I'm volunteering at a fucking homeless shelter: you can't do that wrong. So what if it isn't a holistic solution; I'm not Superman, I'm not even the director of this shelter, I'm just one hand making one cup of coffee at a time. I don't have to feel bad about that. In fact, it's inappropriate for me to, for my sake. I need to beat myself up less; not at all if I can swing it. > > I'm going to work the days I signed up for in February, then re-assess. I need to get a job, myself, sometime in the next..I don't know..while. I've got to take care of myself, so I don't end up in here. Have been putting out feelers, submitted a résumé last week to a fairly local tech business. We'll see. > > I was on Twitter there too much for a while. I drank some, after not-drinking for a while—and when I drink I drink too much. I was feeling beholden to my family, like I owe certain people a return email or a proactive birthday wish at a faster rate than they give to me. It was wearing me out, so I stopped. I don't owe my parents a check-in. They're doing fine, in their lives, and I'm doing fine in mine. It's uncertain how tomorrow will unfold, and that uncertainty was getting me down more than it needs to, in light of that other quality of tomorrow: that it's not promised. Imagine how my dead friends would encourage me: do you think they'd think it was wise for me to use a single one of the days I am given—days more than they were given—to worry, to feel sorry for myself (or angry with myself?) because I don't have a paying job and am not fully actualized as an artist, as a scientist, as a thinker? I don't think they would think that was a good idea, or the most grateful way to approach today—a day I've been given, a precious thing. > > So I'm giving myself a break. Not drinking—it's better for me this way. Not beating myself up for not having satisfied societal demands on my own servitude to capitalism. I mean: anyone who's paying attention knows that our world is *fucked up* at the moment. Ten years ago I could make middle-class money doing software consulting in the US. Now..not so much. I feel in my own mind that the projects I've done recently are significantly more valuable, they better use my gifts, etc. than projects I did in my early twenties. That I've made less and less money along that same string of time is, I don't think, entirely dependent on me. I don't want to be 100% nihilistic in every moment of every day, but I think a touch of nihilism is needed, to be *realistic*, in this day and age. It may be the case that things I do make me enough money to someday be able to get out of debt, buy a house, feel secure enough to decide I am capable of responsibly having children, etc. etc. I hope that's true. I'm open to that; I think I'm ready for my life to go better. Or it may be that in six months, I'm sleeping on the floor in this church, because I never found a job. But you know what: I'm going to give myself a break. I'm a person, a valuable life, I happen to be wildly creative and industrious in a few different ways, and whether I deserve to (or just get to) self-actualize as a fuller expression of a human being, or whether I don't, I deserve not to hate myself in the process. > > **December 27, 2010, 7:29pm** > > Moving on > > Going to Louisiana tomorrow with my mom, both my sisters, and my nephew Daniel. I'm looking forward to meeting him in person for the first time..so far our relationship has been over Skype. > > When we get back from Louisiana I'm moving to Vermont. > > In Louisiana it will be my grandmother, my aunt and her husband, and maybe their son. We will eat crawfish if they haven't been damaged too much by BP. I hope they're ok to eat as that's a family tradition. I'm looking forward to seeing my grandmother, and everyone. It's a treat that so many of us will be together. > > I miss my dad. He's out of the picture. He's still alive, but he just does other things now. That's hard for me; really, at 32, that's the hardest relationship for me to ponder. I love my dad, I know he loves me. Our love, somehow, at this time in our lives, doesn't translate into civil contact. He is estranged from his ex-wife and 2/3 of his kids. Dad: you're a mystery to me, a painful one. I am sending you love and wishes and, yes, shaking my head a little. If I had kids I wouldn't treat them like you do. I respect you and wish you the best. And I miss you. > > In Vermont I'm renting a room with masters degree students/political people. They seem cool. We have a house close to town in Brattleboro. > > I'm looking forward to Vermont. I'm going to write at first, then find a job, probably, and settle in. Work has been dicey for the last year—I haven't had any. Lol. Jobless recovery. Well, I don't need anyone's permission to be productive, and I always am. Going to work at finishing my NaNoWriMo novel, and continue looking for a literary agent. I can write, and you should do what you can do, so I'm doing that. > > The thought of a week with extended family stresses me. Of course everything will be fine, and we'll all enjoy each other's company, but it's always stressful too. I don't have as much anxiety about it as I would have had 5 or 10 years ago, though, so that's a blessing of age. I think I know now that connections between people are limited, so more and more I can accept their limited—and wonderful—but limited—and wonderful—nature. We're not here for all that long anyway so you just forget about perfection and enjoy the communion that exists. > > I think 2011 is going to be a great year for me—2010 has been. I want to write, meditate, meet new people, and hike. And eat. I walked through the grocery store in B-Boro and the beef and cheese selection looks amazing. Here's to a year much like this one—creative, connected, and happy—with these mods: thinner, published, and richer. I waste so much money in restaurants. If I'm not careful—or even if I am, I might end up homeless in Vermont. And even knowing that, I took myself out for a nice dinner and drinks before I came here to volunteer. What the fuck? If I volunteer here when I have money, if I ever do someday, I'm still going to eat out..I'm not saying that I don't deserve to eat in restaurants just because these people are coming to us at this desk asking for weak sandwiches. But maybe I should give myself a better chance..not spend so much, spend slower, spend smarter, while I am poor, living off unemployment. A handful of times since I came here, I've blown too much money on a meal or bar excursion. Being here is so depressing, it makes me want to drink when I leave. It really does. And I might do that. My hope is basically to solve my own money problems by making more money. But I could be more frugal, in this time, could live simpler and cheaper, for sure. I do that kind of spending to address some hunger within me, that I don't know how to quell. If I came here to volunteer a lot, this might be excellent writing time. It might be. I could write my book here, which I had considered before ever seeing what the actual volunteer experience was like..but it's true, being here and seeing it, that I could write my book here, in the night. I look at my own life and I see (for example) a laptop that I have no means to replace if something goes wrong. To me that seems like lack, like tenuousity, like scarcity. Because I would like MacBook Pros to be disposable, so that I never have to worry about losing mine, or something going wrong. But the fact is I have a working MacBook Pro..tonight. So I should use it tonight. And I am. But that's the thing. We are doing something useful for these people, even though it's not permanent, it's not at the root. But still: one night of not freezing to death is worth something. It is. As is, in my life, one day of writing. One day to live: what a privilege! Can I see it that way, see it that way every day? I think I mostly do, but I could see it that way more. I don't have to work out tomorrow today. But I can do what is possible today. I mess up there, a lot. I worry about tomorrow, today, and I don't do what is possible, today. I could do better, there: don't take on tomorrow. Take on today. I could leave tomorrow alone more, and address today better. My spending and drinking are symptoms of this, are wrapped up in how I do this: I could manage my time and my energy and my expenditures, today, much better..and part of that is leaving tomorrow alone, today, and doing today better than I would have otherwise. I'm afraid to do that, sometimes. And it messes me up. Because really I'm making tomorrow much harder by not living today in the better ways that I know how. I have a bank account here. I don't need to fuck that up. I have the lack of stress and recent history of not-drinking that I need in order to quite easily not-drink to any degree that I want. My life isn't really tragic right now. It's not perfect, it's not even stable, it's maybe even tenuous. But it's not tragic, and it's not in immediate crisis. It's maybe one step away from crisis, from devastating financial ruin, but it's not there right now. And I don't have to help it get there. It might go there anyway, or it might not. But I don't have to help it, today, to get there faster. I definitely don't want to fuck up my bank account. I don't want to be drunk all the time. I don't drink responsibly, I don't. Sometimes I can do it to a fun level, but sometimes I go too far. And I hate myself for it later. I don't have to do that to myself. It's actually a choice. I can totally choose never to do that, never to feel that way. And it's that Gene logic *[this girl from Tucson](#)*: Why am I feeling this? Because I want to. Because I want to feel this way. Because there's some part of me that lacks that experience, and wants it, misses it, requires it. I think I'm ready to require something else. To receive something else. I think I'm not needing to explore anymore the need for self-hatred or self-loathing due to terrible acts. I did need that, I did want that, I did require that. But maybe I require something else now. Maybe I'm ready to receive something else now. I hope so, I think so, but it's hard to let go of your self, but you need to, to make room for the new self to come into. And I think just like with other people, you have to make room first, then into the empty space, only once it's empty, can new things come. - - - - With the drinking thing, one of my main things is I just need to further develop my other activities..so that I tend to think of other things to do. I've made some progress along these lines with some hiking..but like today..I just went for a drive, for no reason, around B-boro and outlying areas. It was great. Sometimes I just need to do something like that..just take a walk for no reason or just call someone, or drive. > make room first, then into empty space, once it's empty, may new things come ### 12 Vermont equals snow. The streets and sidewalks are taken care of for you, but you've got to shovel your own driveway—as discussed. We continue our pattern of Maggie angrily shoveling the snow all by herself or sometimes with my help while my housemates who actually have a car in the driveway hide inside slumped down on the couch so Maggie wouldn't see them and they didn't have to shovel the snow. Maggie would even bang on our door and no one would answer it. We'd just leave her there in her own fury about no one helping her shovel. Even I got tired of Maggie's insistence because she had such an angry work-ethic attitude that frankly it reminded me of my dad. Most of the time I hid in the first-floor apartment with T+I and we let Maggie work out her demons with a pair of shovels and a driveway of waist-high Vermont snow. Oh that's a funny thing about Vermonters that if I don't mention here I'll forget to mention at all. You know how they Eskimos have like a thousand words for snow? Well, Vermonters have at least thirty. After it snows, locals stand around in front of their houses talking about the snow..like..its characteristics, it's deviations from the predictions, and the estimated time to get back to normal. This is not a short conversation. I'm talking, like, two grown people having a half-hour conversation about the snow. Where was I? Oh. Yes. Maggie getting mad because we never helped her even though she was shoveling like every day. I shoveled with her like seventy-five percent of the time, basically because I wanted to fuck her (let's not start lying to each other at this point—we have a long way to go). Anyway you know, I imagined scenarios where I shoveled out her car and she offered me a cup of tea before she went to work and we fucked. Basic, simple stuff like that. Maggie had that kind of purity that someone like me wants to *corrupt*. I mean I want to make the bitch *blush* when we fuck. But part of it was I am a genuinely empathetic person and I can't stand to be around people who are doing work when I'm not, so my instinct to help had me going out there picking up a shovel and helping that girl get to work even though I knew Maggie and I were never going to fuck. Still I am a very sexual person and I can sense things about people's sexuality (and other aspects about them—it's not just a sexual thing). Maggie was no virgin, but she looked like she'd never had an orgasm with someone else, and I wanted to be the first to give her one. I really can tell a lot about a person sexually just by spending a few seconds around them—even perfect strangers. Maggie was definitely the repressed type, but just through cultural training, not abuse—she was a girl that if you said the right things to her in the right order and did the right things to her in the right order, she'd hatch from her downy chick shell and grow into a full-fledged freak in a matter of about six minutes—My fantasies about Maggie were always in her apartment: stepping inside the door, kissing her, and putting a hand up her shirt and a hand down her panties. But I'm a simple type, too. Just collaboratively shoveling Maggie out of the garage and waving at her as she headed down High Street to go to work..that level of satisfaction is enough for me. You know? The idea that we're not all individuals but really an interconnected web, one giant organism—I believe all that. - - - - Setting up a bank account was difficult. I needed to get money orders to send to Wells Fargo so I could open a bank account (I owed money to my California bank, had overdrawn it with fees for lots of money) so I was in ChexSystems and I told the woman who was acting as the representative for the Brattleboro Savings & Loan that I was trying to turn things around, be right with all the appropriate systems, and she said she could see I was sincere..as if what she thought of me mattered. It was like this exchange of approval where the bank gets to give me the nod that they recognize I'm trying to live within the system, and they make a value judgement on me that that is good, in a good and bad sort of way. I am trying to get out of ChexSystems: I am now a good person. I was in ChexSystems: all that time I was a bad person. So I had to get money orders to mail to my bank in California before I could set up an account in Brattleboro. I drive to the Walmart right across the bridge to New Hampshire in terrible raining ice to get my cashed unemployment check turned into money orders. "I've had a hard time of things. I'm trying to turn it around. I'll mail those money orders as soon as I can get them. I really want to have an account here." "Well, we should get a notice from ChexSystems in thirty to sixty days, so keep checking back and we'll see if we can open that account." It's funny how when banks and other companies need money from *you*, they need it right away, but when they owe *you* money, it's going to take them thirty to sixty days. Somehow their computers run at different speeds depending on which direction the money is flowing. - - - - Standing in the post office filling out my unemployment claims with lies about jobs I'd applied for. At first I gave the truth about where I'd applied, but after a few times, I'd applied for all the places to work within walking/driving distance of my house, everywhere in Brattleboro that would possibly hire me. You have to put down three jobs a week that you applied for—there are only about thirty businesses in Brattleboro. And almost all the stores there are mom and pop stores or one-owner stores and they can't afford to hire anyone. I had assumed Walmart would be my surefire place of employ and I applied there the second or third day I was in town. But, as Walmart does, they abandoned that location and moved farther down the road..away from Brattleboro..and there was no longer a Walmart just across the bridge into New Hampshire where Brattleboro people could walk. It was only a matter of months before my car was undriveable. The Walmart was a real blow to my survival. The critical item that I could only buy at Walmart were the prepaid phone cards that worked with my particular piece of shit phone. I never drove to the new Walmart in my own car—I think I was just afraid to drive that far into New Hampshire, that far away from what I knew. A normal person would have just driven up there and got a job, but to me it was a cataclysmic event that the Walmart moved. It scared me. I felt like my world had fallen apart a significant amount. I didn't have appropriate tags on my car (and hadn't for years) so I didn't like to drive places that were far from home. Getting Vermont tags was on my list of things to do but I was scared to do that, too. I was scared they would deny me the tags or that transferring the title or insurance or whatever would cost me more than I had and they would confiscate my car at the DMV and I'd lose my car earlier than expected. So I just let my tags stay, and stay, and stay, and the likelihood of me getting to my DMV todo list item got smaller and smaller. I think it's inertia. Anyway it affects me real bad sometimes and I just have to stop walking—like I literally stop walking in the middle of the sidewalk and I can't proceed. Does anybody out there understand? Anyone? Before the Walmart moved, I went there and bought a writing desk for thirty dollars, a folding chair, a lamp, some candles that were on clearance, toilet paper, and refills for the Swiffer that Tooler had gotten for the house. The weather on the way back was the worst weather I've ever driven in. I rolled down my window so I could scrape the ice that was accumulating while I was driving. It was sick. - - - - I hiked around the base of Mt. Wantastiquet but I still couldn't find the entrance to the trail that went to the top of the mountain—even though later I realized it was staring me in the face. So I hiked along a trail that cross-country skiers used—flat and along the base of the mountain, gentle ups and downs, half-frozen waterfalls six feet high flowing down the side of textured rock faces. Evergreens. Moss growing in near-freezing water. Half an hour on that path was enough to clear even my mind of every single one of its worries. ### 13 Tooler was a student. Tooler had friends from school. Tooler invited about 20 of her friends over one night while I was—as usual—in bed early. They were drunk and tried very graciously to invite me to their living room party by banging on my door and asking if I was awake. I was listening to the Wagogo soothing song on my laptop, but even that wasn't enough to get me to sleep with this party going on right outside my door. And—tell me this—why do drunk people talk louder than normal? All I had was the universe of their voices, and you could tell there were some cute girls out there. I debated going out there, jumping into it, drinking with them, flirting, talking loudly, but I don't know I was 33 and I didn't want to party with a bunch of 23 year olds. I just wanted the Wagogo soothing song to put me to sleep so I could get up early and hike. This is how their party went: "Let's say when you get your line busted you have to take a hit of shisha. An extra-large hit. Do you have any alcohol in the house? *Real* alcohol?" "We have wine," Tooler says, nonplussed. Actually, no, blissfully. She's like perfect two-beers drunk. "I want shots," says the cute-sounding girl. "I'll walk you to the store and we'll get you shots," Tooler says. "I don't want to walk in that fucking weather. How about every time you get your line busted you have to lick.." "Whoah!" "..no hold on! Hold on! I'm not finished yet." "Ok, what do you have to lick?" "The unspecified body part of the person who busted up your line." "Why don't we just play the game with regular rules." "No, bitch, I wanna get *laid*." "You're welcome to have a threesome with Issa and I." I can imagine Tooler raising her beer along with this invitation. "No offense, Tooler, but I want *dick*." Remarks like this make we want to leave my room. But in the end, I don't care if whoever that is out there wants dick or shots or what she wants. I'm a curmudgeon. I'm a decade older than her. I want to sleep. I want to hike. I've had tons of pussy and I hope I have tons more, but it's really not the motivating factor in my life right now. I thread in and out of sleep, always waking to the party in the living room, which consists of drinking more beer and adding bizarre sexual rules to some board game that I don't think I've ever played. The next day Tooler says, "I hope we didn't keep you up with your party." She's watching me get on my hiking gear. "Oh, no, I went to bed early, I said." "Have you ever played this game ZibbleDeeZurk?" she asks. I say no. "You should play it with us some time." "That sounds like fun." "Yeah?" "Yeah." Tooler looks me in the eyes. I look her right back. Whatever. I'm sure Tooler knew I was lying—she was just polite enough not to press me on it. - - - - When I left the house, I went to church, just because I thought that would be a way to meet people—even though I'm an atheist who hates church with all his heart and soul. I was also scoping out the church that houses the homeless shelter that I would soon be volunteering at. I don't really hate church with all my heart and soul—I've just been so many times that it's become pointless to go any more. This church had about six people in worship. I felt bad for them. They gave their pastor a special gift—an envelope—and I was like: I don't even think this bitch is getting *paid*. I was kind of lost with the hymnals so I just looked around the sanctuary during the songs. There was stained glass everywhere except at the top of the wall that faced the street, where there was a huge round area covered with plywood. I figured they were doing some sort of construction. The youth choir sang and I couldn't take my eyes off this one young teenager who was singing. She sang louder than the other three kids like she felt the need to carry that whole motherfuckin' choir even though they were only singing to six people—she just had that kind of energy I'm wired to pay attention to, and to reach out to. At the fellowship time afterward we ate nasty sugared cookies and drank sour coffee. I sat at a table by myself and this young teenager from the choir sat down across from me and was flirting with me hard core and some of the adults tried to rescue me (or her, I'm not sure) by sitting next to us and trying to draw her fire (yeah, like in Star Wars, motherfucker) but I mean this little Lola was all over me, asking personal questions like why this was my first time at their church and where did I live and when was the last time I kissed a girl. Not *do you have a girlfriend?* but *When was the last time you kissed a girl?* Then she accidentally kicked me under the table and even though on a desert island I would have behaved differently, in real life, I excused myself. She asked if she would see me next week and I started to think maybe this wasn't flirting but the best new member outreach team in the history of the church. I told her I'd see her next week but I never saw her again. - - - - I go up the street to a restaurant that serves breakfast. Check out their menu outside. Go in and unwrap myself from my scarves and hats and neck warmers and set my hand weights on the floor next to a bar stool. I sit down. This big guy, big belly, tall, gray beard, looks down at me with this smirk like he knows I'm new to Vermont if I need all that gear to go outside and go to a restaurant for breakfast. But he doesn't say anything about that. He says, "You want a drink?" "Sure, how about a glass of wine." "You wanna see a list?" "Nah, just something red." He brings me a glass of wine and the breakfast menu. "Your Philly omelette looks good." "Out of Philly steak." "Ok, how about any other kind of omelette." "Out of eggs." "You're fucking shitting me." "No. Wild series of events. I can tell you all about it if you want." And some woman in the corner, walled off with a toddler playing, says, "Don't tell him about it." "That's my wife," this guy says. "I figured that out," I say. "How about just the best thing you can make with whatever you've got back there." "I can make a burger." "I can eat a burger." "You want blue cheese on it?" "Oh, I have walked into the right place *today*," I say, knocking on the bar. "How do you want that cooked?" "As rare as you'll make it." "We'll make it as rare as you'll eat it." "Good, 'cause some restaurants have you know like limits and they won't make ground beef rare." "This is Vermont, son, you can have your burger any way you want it." "Ok, extra rare?" "Extra rare it is." The guy goes back to his computer and types it in. "You don't seem like a bartender." "I'm not. I'm a restaurant owner. And I'm thinking of getting out of that." "You don't seem like a restaurant owner, either." "Well I used to be a psychiatrist." "That's more like it." I sip my wine. "How can you tell?" "Just the way you talk." "Well I gave up that shit!" The woman in the corner says, "Calm, Butchy. He's a customer." "Well he doesn't *seem* like a customer," Butchy says, peering at me. "Why did you get out of psychiatristing?" "I got out. Because I was tired of hearing people's stories." "Now you're a bartender. Same thing." "Ah! Ah! See!" he says to his wife. "This motherfucker walks in here and *you are the only person to get—he is the only person to get*—my *wife* doesn't even get that. We're selling the bar, baby. That. Is. It. After this guy eats his hamburger we're selling the bar. What's your name?" I reach out to shake. "Matthew." "Butch." "Is that your real name?" "Who are you, a real-deal mindreader?" He tells me his real name but at this point I've forgotten what it was. "So why do they call you Butch?" He puts one elbow on the bar. "You're not gonna believe this, but when I was a kid I was a bully. I used to beat up kids and they called me Butch. Then even my mom started calling me Butch." "A bully. Who became a psychiatrist. Who became a restaurant owner." "Former." "Hey!" says the wife. "Almost former," Butch whispers to me. "You want another glass of wine?" "Yeah." "So what about you, you always drink wine with breakfast?" "No, but I'm looking to start." "What's your story?" "Ahh..computer programmer trying to be a writer." "You've come to the right place. This is a good place for writers." "How'd you find Brattleboro?" "I Googled *good cities for writers to live in*." "No shit." "Yeah, Google's got your number." "Are you afraid a million other writers will do the same search and come here and flood the market?" "I think the weather will deter most people of any profession from coming here." Butch nods. "That's part of why I like it," I say. "Not a lot of riffraff." "Oh we have riffraff. But I know what you mean. And you're right. It takes a certain..fortitude..to live up here. It's almost too rough for me." "How so?" "My ankle! Slipped on this fuckin' ice!" "Butchy!" "What? He don't care. He's not a customer. He's a cool guy. Shut up. We're talking, me and Matthew. This guy is a computer programmer—he ain't no idiot. He knows how to put together all the ones and zeros to make your iPad work so give this guy some respect, ok? And all I said was I slipped on that fuckin' ice!! For what it did to me I wish there was something worse I could say about it. Anyway." "What happened?" "What happened?? I told you what happened! I slipped on the ice coming out of our house now I got pins here, here, here. It's still bruised! And I slipped *two* winters ago. What kind of shoes you got?" I was about to tell him but fortunately a guy came out with my food. "See that blue cheese? This is Chad. This is Matthew. Chad I can trust with anything in the restaurant and he's an *excellent* cook so I can guarantee you're gonna like that burger." "Thank you, Chad." Chad nods and leaves. "You want another glass of wine? After that one?" "Sure." "I'll go ahead and pour it. New glass, new glass." "No, no, bring the bottle, I'll finish this one. I don't want to waste a glass." "Listen, Matthew, this is my restaurant and if I want to bring you a new glass, that my business. Am I right?" "Yeah. But we're friends now, and I'm asking you, please, to use the same glass. If you use a new glass it makes me feel like you're keeping me at a distance." Butch looks at me sideways and nods. He brings the bottle over, pours me a glass of red, and sets the bottle by my plate. "The rest of that is on me because you, young man, have made my morning." His wife yells from the corner, in a heavy east coast accent: "Now let him eat, you've been talking his ear off since the kid walked in." I eat. I drink. We talk some more. I see that he's still wearing a brace on his ankle and walks unevenly due to his slip on the ice. Butch talks about how sidewalk ice is one of the principal dangers of living in Brattleboro and I later learn this is true. He asks me about my weights and I tell him I carry them while I'm hiking to build my arms. More drunk than I'd intended to be when I started my hike, I reluctantly left Butch and his wife and their baby and their cook and I went back to Wantastiquet. But I still couldn't find the trailhead to go up the mountain, so I walked the trail that followed the river, used my hand weights, alternately walked and ran, and by the time I was done I had that cardiac high that I always associate with the hour after soccer practice as a kid. - - - - The next day, determined to hike Wantastiquet, trunching over the bridge in deep deep snow hardly walkable because my car insurance and registration had expired. They were expired before but I no longer wanted to risk it. On this insane walk across the bridge in snow simply too deep to walk in without snowshoes, me thinking I'm doing ok but actually this being a mentally ill, financially poor person going through extraordinary measures just to spend some time in nature—I couldn't legally drive to the base of the mountain, I had to walk there from town. One out of a thousand people would have taken four steps across that bridge and turned around. I'm not trying to impress you by saying this. It wasn't bravery, or skill, or composition or talent that made me keep going. It was a resounding "FUCK IT" that ran through my brain, that didn't care if it took an hour to get to the base of the mountain—I had nothing else to do. Also, I've believed since I was young that I deserved to suffer, and because of that, I am able to endure avalanches of pain that would make most people simply pass out and die. So I made it across that bridge. My feet and my legs from the knee down were soaked in freezing water. I kept hiking. I hadn't even made it to the base of the mountain. Part of the reason I moved here was to hike Mt. Wantastiquet and I was going to hike Mt. Wantastiquet. And on this, something like my fifth attempt, I found the trailhead. It was right next to where I had been hiking all along, just impossible to see because the entire trail was covered in snow!! But I found some snowshoe tracks and used them as my guide, and in a matter of hours I was on top of that mountain. Now, maybe mountains do nothing for you. And I'll admit, the ocean, the desert, these are more powerful geographies for me. But even if you're not a mountain person, you've got to feel the glory of standing atop even the smallest of mountain/hills. This one gave beautiful views looking south, west, and north along Vermont's mountain scape. I stood on some rocks at the top and believed, for the first, time, that I was really in Vermont. I was exploring like I planned. I was doing it. I took a picture of myself in a warm hat, happy, happy as I'd been in ages. To see the look on my face, in this one picture, is a gift to me every time I look at it. To see me happy, hiking, smiling. I look content, I look at home, I look..right. When I look at that picture the feelings come back to me and I think *what a gift..what a gift* to have felt that way for a few seconds or a minute. Thank you so much (whoever, whatever) for this gift of life. At the top, I was peaceful, alone—I finally felt like I had got some quiet—something my mind desperately needs. I see a bird—a hawk maybe. I call out and it swoops down to check me out. I think, at the top of that mountain, after my hike, after my brain has had an hour or two to clear itself of noise. Later, when I hiked Wantastiquet, I didn't always hike the trails. You learn when you go to Vermont that snowy places have a fifth season: they don't just have winter, spring, summer, fall—they have a season that comes between winter and spring, and that season is called *mud*. Everything melts and all that snow is no longer snow, it's water and dirt and mud. So I hiked in the snow. I hiked in the streams, walking atop the rocks. Those were the best trails because the real trails were all *mud*. I sprinted down the mountain through the forest off the beaten path, saw people below me on the trails, stopped, hid from them, went again, stalked the other hikers, controlled my breath, waited, ran, hands moving with the trees and feet befriending the ice—and at that point I was no longer human, but a creature of the mountain. - - - - Maybe it was a bad omen that it happened—maybe it was way more than a bad omen—but a huge fire broke out in the center of Brattleboro in a building that was apartments on top and about half the walk-in businesses in town on ground level. Everyone came out to watch. People lost their homes. A firetruck soaked the entire building from the top and let the water flow down though the apartments and shops—water damage ended up costing more than the fire. You couldn't walk downtown—Main Street was closed off. The while town stood there while half of Brattleboro burned. A guy I would meet later, a drinker who lost his apartment in the fire, fell down some stairs after a night of heavy drinking that followed his apartment being destroyed. He suffered head damage—his thinking was affected, he was in the hospital. The husband and wife owner of the bar where he had been drinking did everything they possibly could for him so he wouldn't sue them for letting him drink too much, and because they cared, limiting him after that to two beers a day. It was a mess. A third of the town's apartment dwellers displaced..bookstores, restaurants (including Butch's)..all destroyed. And you know what the cause of the fire was? Someone in one of the apartments was putting up decorative lights—a string of lights like for Christmas—and they used a staple to attach the lights to the wall. ### 14 Tooler and Issa went to California for the weekend. I went out drinking. Some guy behind me shouts: "Because it's your birthday!" I turn around. There's like five guys. I say: "Tequila shots on me." "Seriously?" "Seriously. Is it seriously your birthday? Then I'm seriously buying tequila shots for you and your friends." "You wanna see my ID? It really is my birthday." I'm tapping on the bar. "I don't want to see your ID. What if you show it to me and it's not your birthday? Then we won't get to do tequila shots. I have absolutely no interest in this not being your birthday." This guy puts his arm around me and yells: "THIS IS MY NEW BEST FRIEND!!" He sits on the stool next to me. "Your logic seems to be fucked up on the surface but when you follow it to the root it makes perfect sense. In other words, a paradox. I'm Aaron. I'm a quantum physicist." I shake his hand. "A quantum physicist. What does that entail?" "I could explain it to you, but you wouldn't understand," Aaron says. I take five minutes to explain the work I've done to him and his friends are going crazy waiting for us so we can all do Aaron's birthday shots together but by the time I'm done explaining the outline of what I know about the world, Aaron is clinking his shot glass with mine and saying: "I *knew* this guy would understand!" We all do our shots. "Now let's *go*," his friends are saying. "We can't go *now*." "Why not?" "Because. It's not every day you meet a computer scientist who understands the fundamentals of quantum physical interaction. You guys, this guy *has invented* quantum systems that demonstrate the emergent properties I try to explain to you *every day* but here finally someone comes along who actually knows what the fuck I'm talking about." "I thought you wanted to meet that girl..Darling Nikki?" "Darling Nikki can wait," Aaron says. "Unless you want to come with us to Inferno." "Why not," I say. I slap a card on the bar and soon we're trunching up Elliot Street in the *goddamn freezing cold* and I meet Darling Nikki and Darling Nikki is nice in a weird angular but very sexual way. Every look from her oozes sex and she calculatedly doles these out to me, Aaron, the bartender, everyone in the goddamn motherfucking place. We get smashed, everyone buying shots for everyone and it's as if I knew these people for years. "I want to smoke," Darling Nikki says. At that, the hive of gentlemen following her organize to construct or locate a place for Darling Nikki to smoke pot, because if Darling Nikki gets to smoke pot, then whoever made that happen might get laid by Darling Nikki. That's just the way it works. Well, that's the way the hive of guys perceives it works. Aaron has weed but no pipe. Someone has rolling papers but they're at his house in another town. The convenience store is closed. No one even has a place we can go to smoke. "We could go to my house," I say, remembering Tooler and Issa are in California. "Yes. *Yes*," Aaron says, grabbing my arm. "Do you have a beer can, a straw, a hot glue gun, and a washer like from a bicycle?" "I don't know about the glue gun but I can hook you up." "Yes!" Aaron shouts—a crazy motherfucker even crazier than me—I know it's a bad idea already. Aaron talks the three blocks up High Street and we are all *freezing* our asses off—this is a painful journey even with the promise to smoke weed and a one-sixth chance at boning Darling Nikki's angular little pussy. He talks about quantum physics (which he knows nothing about, by the way). Everything he says is generalities, stuff you'd pick up from a 3rd grader's introductory pamphlet on quantum physics. I hate myself for inviting these people to my house and the Vermont/arctic temperatures are sobering me up faster than a DUI. We get to the house. Everyone but me Aaron and Darling Nikki splits instantly because the house isn't well apportioned enough. "You only have one couch?" "Pull up that bed from my room," I say. "There's plenty of room." But they make up excuses for why they suddenly have to go and they must have really wanted to go bad because that meant walking back down those three blocks of High Street in mean-ass temperatures. One of Aaron's friend's actually says, "I don't believe you only have one couch." I look at the guy as though I'm holding a gun to his head. "Just sit on the floor if you're so disappointed." The guy is über offended. "Nobody else offered their place to come and smoke," I say. "Yes," he says. "Thank you. But I do have to work tomorrow." "Alright, well, nice meeting you," I say, mentally cataloguing him for execution at the next possible interval. - - - - So those guys leave. It’s just me Aaron Darling Nikki. Aaron tells me he knows a tech place up the road who's hiring. He'll get me their info. It's a done deal. He never sends me the info. It's all just talk to get down Darling Nikki's pants. He wants to come across as the guy with connections, the guy with the upper hand—*he's* getting *me* a job. I wouldn't even be able to live without Aaron the quantum physicist holding my leash. Then he attempts to construct a bong from an empty beer bottle, a straw, and Elmer's glue. It goes horribly. Darling Nikki and I start making eyes at each other. Then Aaron gets his bong going and the bong may have been weak but his pot was not. It was what my friend Tatiara might have called the *bomb-funky hallucinogenic weed*. Weed that'll knock you off your *ass*. I mean you'll be trippin' off one hit of this shit and then you realize you've had like 15 hits. Aaron Darling Nikki and I stood in front of this poster of Tooler's for like an hour. It was in the kitchen and I can testify that that shit was trippy when you were stone cold sober. But tripping, especially on this weed, you had a tendency to convince yourself that this poster was *meant to be looked at* on this particular strain of weed. There was all kind of body positioning between me Aaron and Darling Nikki which I let Aaron win. As I said before I was 33 and I truly didn't give a shit if Darling Nikki spread her angular legs and let her cunt be fucked by some crook-dick wannabe quantum philosopher or whatever the fuck this tooth-chipped asshole was pretending to be. I wished I had never bought that birthday shot because I just wanted to be in bed, sleep off the tequila and Wicked Witch weed and do something simple tomorrow, like hike Indian pond. The three of us stood there looking at Tooler's picture, torrentially stoned. Darling Nikki leaned into me. "Is this this interesting when you're not high?" "Yes, sometimes I can't even leave the kitchen because I'm tracking down all the subtle references built into its intricacies." Darling Nikki gave me a special look and I thought she wanted to fuck me and in retrospect probably the only reason we didn't fuck during my year in B-boro was that I was psycho. We all started to sober up so we drank Tooler's white wine. I got so drunk off so many different things I had to duck into my bedroom closet and throw up in my boots. I found myself lying on the wood floor of my closet unable to move. I heard the sounds of Darling Nikki leaving and Aaron futilely trying to keep her there and me knowing that he was an amateur because anyone could tell that she was leaving that house *no matter what*. Their conversation and Darling Nikki leaving and the satisfaction that Aaron didn't get to fuck her are the last thoughts I had that night. - - - - I woke up the next day under the most unfortunate of circumstances. Aside from the fact that I was face down in a pool of my own vomit in my Skechers. No. The circumstance I refer to is that when I left my bedroom, Aaron was still there, sleeping on the couch. I wanted this motherfucker out. Last night was a mistake. Aaron was the lynchpin of that mistake. I showered, hoping the motherfucker would hear me and get the idea. When I came out of the shower Aaron was sitting straight up on the couch trying to smoke some more of that crazy weed out of what I now saw was a soda can. Poor Tooler. Not only was her white wine wasted on me and a bunch of Brattleboro degenerates, but we used an entire can of her girlfriend's Coke to make a bong. "You want a hit?" "No." "You have anything else to drink?" We drank Tooler's last bottle of white wine. Totally useless: I wasn't going to get a buzz of a half bottle of wine and I don't even drink white. This fucker just wanted to get a buzz before he left. Yeah, how horrible it would be if he had to walk home sober. If you were careful it might kill you. I kept waiting for him to leave but this braindead asshole just kept talking and talking and I just waited and waited and said nothing and tried to be as boring and as least interactive as I could be so he would just *leave!*..which that asshole finally fucking did. When Tooler and Issa got back from San Francisco they told me, excitedly, that they had smoked some pot. I told them that, symmetrically, I had had some people over while they were gone and we had smoked pot too! We all decided that Maggie probably couldn't smell it so it was probably ok that I had smoked in the house. I was flush with anger at myself that I might have endangered our living situation. I apologized to these fine women, my friends and housemates, and they both comforted me and said don't worry. But I don't think any of us were really into pot—I only remember one time, later, when they were smoking pot and I was freaking out (naturally) because I was brainwashed by AA to think that if I inhaled some second-hand pot smoke I would have to re-instate my sobriety date. AA tickles my OCD. It's not good. - - - - Walking to my shift at the homeless shelter in the middle of the night. There being ice and snow and no one being out and it being very quiet. Me appreciating the features of my Woolrich jacket, which was already one of my favorite possessions I had ever owned. I volunteered at the homeless shelter at that church I went to that one time with the flirtatious new member outreach committee. I learned that that plywood-covered opening at the top of their sanctuary's front wall was what used to contain a Tiffany's stained-glass window that the church sold to keep its doors open to offer service to the community..hosting AA meetings, renting space to Brattleboro Pastoral Counseling, and mostly, running this homeless shelter. Oh yeah: running the homeless shelter meant sitting at this desk in the room where all the homeless people slept on the floor, refilling snack foods, making coffee, and that's about it. Officially. But once you're there a while you learn the people, and you learn that there's more food in the kitchen than your trainer told you about, and then maybe your job involves heating up some leftovers for somebody who gets hungry at three o'clock in the morning. The men sleep downstairs. The women sleep upstairs. Them's the rules. But you tell me what you would do when after lights out a wife from upstairs comes downstairs to cuddle with her husband on a cold floor for most of the hours of the night. They're not having sex—they're both fully clothed! They're not even kissing. They're just some 40-year-old mentally ill homeless people harmlessly spooning because in this marriage, there is no marriage bed. Well I had a position on that and my supervisor disagreed. She said, "You're not suited to work there because you care too much about the clients." (Instead of holding them at a distance like the others who worked there did, calling them "they."—"They're usually pretty good."—"They usually keep to themselves.") In my fantastic mind, volunteering at the homeless shelter would be a perfect job for me. But it's a terrible mismatch because I am too sensitive for it and I am unsatisfied with the level of care we were providing. I wanted to solve the problem..when the purpose of the shelter, I learned, was just making sure people didn't freeze to death *tonight*. That mission did not paint a picture of the world that I was happy with, even if it painted a picture of the world that was true. I broke the cardinal rule: I made friends with the clients. I can't help it—I make friends with everyone. I started going there drunk, going outside to smoke with the patrons. And yes, I let that married couple sleep together even though it was against the rules. I knew, every night I volunteered at the homeless shelter, that if Dagny Taggart lived in Brattleboro she would be among them. If she lived in the real world outside of *Atlas Shrugged*, here in Brattleboro where there are no corporations to rise to the top of, where almost every business is owned by a married couple and they have one employee..she would see that this is a very hard town to even get a job in—and no one would have a need for someone with Dagny Taggart's skills. Dagny sometimes walked me to the shelter, down High Street, snow swirling in the streetlight. I used to say that I didn't have a girlfriend, my girlfriend would be Emily Brontë, and mostly that's still true. But while I lived in Brattleboro, if I had had a girlfriend, my girlfriend would have been Dagny Taggart, and she would have frozen to death if me and the church who sold their Tiffany's window weren't watching over her. See, Dagny Taggart would have no power if she lived in Brattleboro in 2011. All her upstart-ness and get-up-and-go would have been worthless and she would be freezing her bones off in the cold, smoking rollies with fingerless gloves, shuffling inside the church and coming up to my desk, embarrassed to be homeless and hating herself for having to ask my help to get a cup of coffee. I write a blog post about what a shitty person I am for not single-handedly saving all the homeless people in Brattleboro, about the futility and short-sightedness of what we're doing at the shelter. My friend Eglentyne pointed out: (in my words) how self-disparaging I am, I even give myself a hard time for volunteering at a homeless shelter. She said there's basically no wrong way to do that. But even helping the homeless, for me, is an opportunity to beat myself up. That's messed up, man, and totally unnecessary. I don't need to give myself such a hard time. I'm ok, I'm an ok person, I'm not horrible. Here's an excerpt of the post: > I think what bothers me about this is that we're not helping, we're not solving a problem at its root here.  We're doing exactly what that damn flyer said: we're just helping people not freeze to death tonight. I can't say I find that very satisfying, but I guess I'm not here for my own satisfaction, am I? And here's what my friend actually said in reply: > I wish I could say something to help with your sadness, Matthew. Living one more day, helping people survive one more day, that's not a trivial thing. We don't know what will happen on that next day, but being there to breathe, to have an opportunity or to make a choice is a good thing. You just being there, being you, that's a good thing too. ### 15 Whit's. Whitman's was a bar on Elliot street. There could be no Whit's without the Professor. The first time I went there I was looking for a place to drink by myself, where I wouldn't meet anyone or see anyone I know (which is straight-up impossible in a town this size). I went as far up Elliot Street as I could before the shops ended and it went dark (which was three blocks). The last bar on the street was a hippie bar and than turned me off infinitely. So I went back one bar. And that bar was Whit's. And that was fate. I went into Whitman's—a play on the owner's first name, Whit, and of course the poet Walt Whitman. And the bar had a literary theme: ancient books on high shelves and placed behind the bar where the would create atmosphere while being out of reach of drunk people who would likely destroy them. The full name of the bar was Whitman's. But I was telling you about the Professor. The first time I walked into Whit's, I case the long three-sided bar with booths around the outside of the building. A large handwritten sign over the register that says, "CASH ONLY." I sat at the farthest end of the bar, farthest from the door, in the very last seat, by a video poker machine that no one was playing. The only other person down there was an old man looked about 70 or 80 years old. A redhead bartender about 45 comes up to me and she's got this smile like a game show host. She's the only one working this rather large bar and she's like a sniper picking off unarmed muskrats—I mean, she owns the place. She literally owns the place but in terms of *control*, she *owns* this motherfucker—you can just tell, from the first time you meet her. "Whatcha havin' honey?" "I'd love a gin and tonic." "If you're drinking gin," the guy next to me says, "you might try one of these." "What is that?" "An anemic martini, but with vodka. Gin is such an American drink. Vodka is much more..international." "I'll have a gin and tonic." The bartender goes to make my drink and this relic next to me continues talking. "You know there was no vodka in America before the First World War. Or was the Revolutionary War? I can't remember. But gin is the quintessential American drink, while vodka is of course from Russia. Before the Civil War, Americans only *drank* gin. Only after, when the trade routes were modified, was vodka imported to this country. And now Americans mostly drink vodka—a Russian drink—and you have to look far and wide to find a gin drinker like yourself." "I wouldn't say you have to look far and wide." "Yes but would you not agree that vodka is more popular here? I mean, just look behind that bar. Sixteen flavors of vodka—only five or six gins. You're not having well gin, are you? Jill, hold that drink. We want to upgrade his gin to something real." "No," I say. "Well gin. Well gin. I'm drinking incognito tonight." "Well you're not doing a very good job of being incognito." "No?" "No. It's Brattleboro, Vermont, my son. You *can't* be incognito." He holds out his hand. "I'm—Well, it doesn't matter—" Jill is back with my drink. "We call him the Professor." I pay her in cash. "Nice to meet you, Professor. I'm Matthew." "But of course you are." And the Professor turns straight ahead in this seat and sips his martini. I drink and I hope that my conversation with the Professor is over. I just want to get drunk and be alone—I mean, honestly, is that too much to ask? I exist, and I am aware—hyper aware—and I would like to dull this hyper awareness for a few hours before I go to sleep. That is the sole content of my objective. But no. The Professor keeps talking. "I'm pretty sure it was the Civil War. Or Prohibition. Which is your country is pretty much the same thing." "Where are you from?" "Romania. Or Slovenia. I'm too drunk to remember." "How many of those have you had?" "Two or three." "He's had *six*," Jill says. "And if he bothers you, let me know." "Gin was a nigger drink, at first," the Professor continues. "As soon as vodka came in, only the higher classes drank vodka and the blacks drank the old American drink—your drink, gin—because it was considered *low class* one vodka came in. All the Americans—I mean the white Americans—switched from gin to vodka like rats swimming from a sinking ship to a seaworthy one." "It sounds like you're insulting my drink." "Not at all, Matthew. I am saying that gin is the original *American* drink." "Well you have a funny way of saying it." "Let me ask you something." I dread whatever this is going to be, but I say, "What." "I noticed you used the restroom earlier. Did you wash your hands?" I laugh. "Yes, I washed my hands." "Before and after?" "Just *after*." "You must wash before *and* after," this old man says. "The reasons are obvious. I surely don't have to go into them with someone of your intelligence." "You don't really know anything about my intelligence." "*Au contraire!* I know you're not the typical Brattleboro *trash* that walks in here." (He whispers "*trash.*") I'm starting to really wish I was sitting somewhere else. "What do you *do*, my young friend?" "I'm not really in that talkative a mood." "I've offended you. I'm sorry. I am a very offensive person, I know. I apologize. Drink your drink and I'll leave you alone." So we both sit there in silence and sip our drinks. The bar is full of couples mostly, mountain-looking people with hats and beards and newspapers and tattoos. It's like Tucson, where a beautiful woman will be with a rough-looking guy, not LA, where everybody has to be shaved and smooth and rich as simple precursors of love. "So what do you do?" the Professor asks. I laugh. I look at this guy. "I'm an out-of-work computer computer programmer, if you must know." "What type of computer programming?" "Genetic algorithms, AI stuff." "Oh so you really are smart." "No, I just had a lot of practice." "Bullshit. You aren't programming *genetic algorithms* if you don't have a good head on you." "Well, technically, you could teach a stupid person to program a genetic algorithm," I saw. "Yeah, technically. But we're not talking technically, we're talking *actually* about you. What do these genetic algorithms do?" I set down my drink. "Let's say you're on BestBuy\.com, and you click around looking at a few items. These algorithms—these systems—decide what to suggest to you over on the side of the screen. They figure out what you're likely to buy along with whatever you think you're looking for." "That's an interesting way to put that: whatever they *think* they're looking for." "Well, yeah, the most interesting search result, if you think about it, isn't what you know you're looking for, it's what you would love to find but never knew existed." "Mmm." "So these things are used in search engines and Nielsen ratings and shit like that." "'And shit like that.' Why do you do that? Make yourself sound stupid so you fit in? You're talking like a nigger now." "Hey!" "You don't like my use of the word? 'Nigger' was a perfectly acceptable word to describe what you call 'black people.' So was 'negro.' " "Well it's not acceptable now." "In some subcultures in inner city black neighborhoods it's acceptable between black people." "That's a long way from here." "There's nothing inherently racist about the word. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger." I hold my hand up. "Jill. What is up with this guy." She says: "Professor. You're driving away my new customer!" "Fine, I was just making one of the finer cultural points." "His thesis is that 'negro' is acceptable language in twenty-eleven." "Professor, you want to move over a seat? You want another drink?" "Yes, please. Same glass." "Same glass." "If you don't mind." "*I* don't mind," Jill says. The Professor says he'll have another as well. "You're cut off. I never should have served you that one." I'm thinking, as I drink my second G&T, that I'll leave after this one, but I don't even make it all the way through my second drink because the Professor, now with a seat between us, continues talking about the role of slaves in gin production and rare strains of viruses carried by the juniper berry and how when these strains of virus came in contact with human skin they created snail-like patterns in the backs of negroes that were considered a distinctive mark of beauty among American slaves. I leave my drink on the bar and walk out. I mean that guy made me so uncomfortable I almost never went back to Whit's, thinking I could avoid him. But suddenly every bar I walk into, the Professor is there. I close each door and walk out and find another bar but then he comes into *that one*. For me the Professor is like *Visa—he's everywhere you want to be*. Eventually I suck it up and do go back to Whit's because it's my favorite bar in town. I like Jill. I like the shape of it. I like the vibe. And I learn to take the Professor's constant admonitions to "wash your hands before and after" I go to the bathroom. The thing about the Professor is he plays a killer push/pull game. He says the most horrible things that you think *I can't be associated with this guy* but then he gets under your skin and you start to like him because he isn't standard Vermont mountain fare—he is actually a multi-educated former college professor and you can actually carry on a decent level of intellectual conversation with him (if he'll let you.) I hated the Professor the first time I met him. I kind of liked him the second time we talked. Then I hated him again. Then I saw that within each conversation with the Professor, I would go through periods of hating and loving the man—and that's how we all felt about him. - - - - Introducing Jill: this motherly figure—half-hot, half your mom—super friendly, just welcoming as hell, but she had this look, and when she gave you that look, it meant you had one toe over the line and you best back that toe up before Jill backed it up for you. Only twice did I see fights in Whit's, and I wish you could have seen Jill and Whit jump over the counter and *shut those motherfuckers down* in the span of seconds. You don't fuck around in Whit's. You just don't. Everyone knows it. They even have this strange rule: there are candles spaced evenly all around the bar. They're at the back, farthest from the customers, but they're still on the bar. And you don't notice this at first, but there's a sign on each candle that says *Don't touch the candles*. And if you touch the candles, and Jill sees you, you quickly learn that this isn't a just-for-fun rule, it's a hard-and-fast rule: *Don't. Touch. The. Candles.* What happens if you touch the candles? You don't want ti know—just *don't touch the candles*. "Jill, why can't we touch the candles?" I asked one day, when I had made friends with her and we were close enough that I could even ask the question. Jill stops pacing the bar. She looks straight at me. "It's because sometimes drunk people like to play with the wax and they knock the candles over and burn themselves and they could start a fire, etc." "Oh, I thought it was some mystical thing like if you touch the candles you drain the life energy out of them and that drains some of the life energy out of Whit's and then the bar wouldn't be as cool or something." Jill puts her hand on mine. "Matthew, I'm not sure what world you're coming from, but no, it's because if drunk people spill wax on themselves *through no fault of mine*, they *still might win a law suit* and then there would be no more Whit's for you to come drink your gin and tonics in." I smile. "Oh," I say. "I thought it might have something to do with an ancient spell cast by a black mage—" Jill cracks up. "Are you just fucking with me?" "Yes," I say. "Good. 'Cause if not we do have the Refuge right down the road I can send you there." "No, I'll stay here and drink." "Good." She touches my hand again. "We like you here." Jill and I talked about lots of things 'cause I like to talk and Jill had nothing better to do. I remember one time she was telling me why it was so empty that day. "No," she said. "Again, you're associating this with some cosmic phenomena. This isn't the weather. Are you listening? Let me tell you something. Today is the thirtieth. Are you following me?" "I might need another drink to keep up with such detail." "I'll get you your drink. Anyway. Today is the thirtieth. That means that all the people on checks" (disability, retirement, unemployment) "are out of money 'cause they drank it in here the first three weeks of the month and *tomorrow*..all these seats will be full again because everyone will have money again. Uncle Sam!" She makes my drink. As she sets it in front of me she says: "See, you've made your money." And I kept quiet about being on a check—the only reason I was drinking here was my unemployment check. I hadn't *made my money*. I couldn't even find a software job—I gave up on that back in Pennsylvania. I was just eking it out like everybody else—but don't tell Jill. She assumes *I made my money,* I'm set for life, just because I obviously don't work because I'm in here drinking seven days a week..but also because of my demeanor: I don't look like or act like I'm on a check. I'm gregarious. I'm proud. I own a MacBook. I make my money last all the way through to the end of the month. And, generally, I look like and act like I'm king of the fucking world, which as long as I'm in a good mood and have a hundred dollars in my pocket—I am. To Jill, I'm entirely different that those people she talks about being "on a check" even though that's exactly what I am. - - - - This is at Whitman's: A couple who looks like they just met for a drunk fuck; at a bar. That's what they *look like*. It's like they're doing all the flirting and tentative finger touching that works up to a first fuck, with shots and drinks to help them along. But the observer of this little play (of which I am only one) quickly finds out they're married, and this is what they do: come to Whit's and re-enact their first meeting. It's a whole thing. Playing Billie Holiday on the jukebox. They way she was sitting, the cigarettes she smoked; her old-ass blue panties and dress. On a napkin I write: > interesting idea: the rate at which compression, reduction, elimination, leads to clarity, concentration, benefit, value..versus the rate at which nothing can be contained in something less, at which reduction loses meaning..there must be some common factor there which reflects the optimal rate of a syntax, of a medium I raise my hand to Thomas. "Can I get you something?" "Yes," I say, struggling to get my ideas down. "Another napkin?" - - - - The first time I day drink at Whitman's. I'll never forget. I'm the only one there and Whit is tending bar. I drink six gin and tonics, one per hour, on the half hour, and Kip and I talk, I write poetry on my computer on Twitter, and everything is nice and orderly. I even say something to Whit about how I'm trying to manage my own drinking and he says it looks to him like I'm doing just fine and he doesn't have anything to say to me about it. After a while Jane is there, too, for part of it—my other day drinker, partner in crime. I met Jane the first time Tooler and Issa and I went out for drinks, at some underground bar that closed. I saw Jane working, cleaning behind the bar, then she and I were smoking in a stairwell, and we talked right away. She was beat up, deep wrinkles, missing teeth, but my kind of girl right away 'cause she could smile and she didn't mind talking to a stranger. Then I would see her around, at Whit's and other bars. She drank like me, like I always had in LA and in Tucson, moving from bar to bar throughout the day so no individual bartender would know how much I'd had to drink. Jane was my little Dagny Taggart—what DT would have become in Brattleboro—a model who everyone, when she's not listening, says was beautiful in her day, then a hooker, now an alcoholic on a check who sleeps in her car, paying for a permit in the six-level parking lot in downtown (smart, maybe that's what I should have done instead of renting a room in a house..maintain my car and live in it, pay a parking permit instead of rent). Yes, in secret, in my mind, Jane was Dagny Taggart—but not the fake one from the book—the real one, what Dagny Taggart's spirit would have become in real life. - - - - I was a newbie at Whitman's for a while. Flash forward to months later: Drunk off Scotch, carrying a snifter out of Whit's, drunk off *my ass*, launching the snifter over a three-story balcony drop so far I never even heard it crash. The next time I went in (which was the next morning one minute after they opened) Kip asking me: "Do you remember walking out with a snifter last night because I saw you?" And I almost said no but then it all slowly came back to me. Kip said, "Look around your apartment to see if you find it." And I said, "I'll look." But I just left an extra twenty on the bar to pay for it. And Whit never guilted me about it. I felt bad and didn't mean any disrespect (and I told him this) but he said, nah, forget about it, you paid for it. I wanted to punish myself with guilt and think about how Whit might have possibly interpreted my actions. Whit just wanted to even the books and move on with business, which, of course, was the business of drinking, cahooting, smoking, playing music on the jukebox, meeting people, hooking up, and drinking some more. ### 16 I kept working at the homeless shelter, drunk. I'd drink wine at my desk at home from 8pm until 11:45, when I had to leave to make my midnight shift. In the afternoon I wrote. I wasn't in any kind of productive book cycle, but one day before I started drinking (with drinking as my reward), I wrote the introduction to Penny's book and shared virtual cigarettes with her across the pond through email exchanges, coordinating our cigarette breaks while we both wrote. She's a poet I had admired for years, and a fledgling friend, and it was an honor to write her introduction. In it, I said things like: > Penny Goring is fearless. > > It was in PUSH BUTTON PUSH that I first noticed her lists. That whole piece is a list of call/response or prompt/response pairs. The prompts could be auto-generated blog prompts, or questions on an admitting test to a psych ward. To present such a thing is a bold move. We're always trying, in writing, to invent forms clever enough to elude our audience, such that the audience will, for example, receive the arc of a three-act play without our ever saying "Here begins Act III." We're trying to hide the form—we don't need to. A beginner learns the list. An amateur tries to distance herself from it. A master uses it unashamed. And I said things like this: > For some, Penny's language may be too frank, too sexual. If you're bothered by the idea that poetry might mention cocaine or tell you "How to get a tampon inside", as in Darklings, then you're probably still living in the 1800s, and Emily Dickinson will frighten you. I take for granted that contemporary poetry, as with contemporary anything, doesn't cater to those squeamish about reality—about the realities of contemporary times. So: if you need moral hand-holding, fuck off. > > Otherwise, turn the page and read some of the best poetry I know of. From the technical Thus Spake Nebuchadnezzar to the graceful, simple, loving House, Goring is real subjects and bright words. PUSH BUTTON PUSH is daring, and a personal favorite. Darklings deserves a whole introduction itself—and all the attention we can give it. Marc Nash calls it "astonishingly brilliant"; I echo that. To write these poems took a mind whose language I can begin to speak about and the experience of a life I couldn't claim to, but I feel certain that you will not find poetry this good, from another writer, for a long time. Yeah, I hyped that shit 'cause it deserved it. Then, with Penny's intro written, and with my bottle of wine just outside the frame, I'd video chat with my friend Ashley on Google video and help her and her friend write their haunted house screenplay. I had difficulties with this, I think because by that point my writing had become so much a part of me and had become such art for me that spending time writing a genre piece, even for my best friend, was no longer something I could feel good about doing. My involvement in the project fizzled. But look at me: writing an introduction to a poetry volume, helping my friend with a screenplay..I was like a productive human being or something. And around 11:45pm I'd walk through empty snowy High Street in my Woolrich jacket, always snowflakes visible in the street lamps. I'd do my 12am-8am shift at the homeless shelter. I was drunk during the first hours of my shift and all night I wrote the beginning of what I thought would be *HARD*, my next novel. I thought about levels of drama, levels of story. For instance, like a sitting at a desk (versus sitting on the floor) there is a level of art which is there, which is required, which functions, to make you forget about a whole level of questions..so that your consciousness takes on this other set of (desired) problems. Do you know what I mean? It's like, instead of thinking about your back, and your body, once you have a chair, your consciousness thinks about a whole other set of things..that is the purpose of a chair. And in art there are similar functionaries whose purpose is to elevate you so that you can safely, mindlessly, and comfortably consider a different set of problems. I thought about feedback I had gotten from literary agents on my previous books, specifically *Things Said in Dreams*. I tucked all these thoughts neatly away in a document titled *journal.txt*: > I think Gina Panitierre is wrong about TSID having an unsympathetic narrator. "I don't want to die today. I don't want to die," she says. There is a high degree of real victimization of her. She talks rough about it. But that insane world that GP thinks is too much..that is realistic, that is the normal, a quite real/real-world normal..this narrator is just the reaction to it. That warping, her warping, is normal given the circumstance. > > Plus, I don't think it would be right to tell a story about bystander evil without the main character being the bystander. Without that, how is there an issue to *present*, that can then be discussed? The evil has to happen in order for there to be a reaction. Otherwise, nothing happened. Right? > > The only other, or the primary other, option that comes to mind, is to have a story where the character encounters many small bystander evil situations, where others are the evil, and then she herself makes the right choice on a larger bystander issue..I think that's an acceptable route, in general, but I think of the two main options (my way in TSID, and this option described here), my way is stronger. I had my own cigarettes and went out to smoke with the clients and they spoke of a revolution that was coming because Americans (like them) had been pushed too far. They weren't about to organize the thing, but they seemed certain it was coming. Jane was with them, this fellow day drinker from Whit's and every other bar I went to, was homeless, I learned. After a few hours I sobered up and it was extremely difficult to stay awake. Most of the time I wrote through it. Several nights I asked my partner if I could leave early, if they could take the rest of the shift by their self. It wasn't long before I emailed the director of the program and told her I was very sorry but I was an alcoholic in the middle of a relapse and I couldn't work the homeless help desk anymore. It was weak to email her instead of calling but I didn't have enough self esteem to call her with that message. I couldn't think about homeless people anymore. I was excited to meet friends at Whit's, especially Justine. And I wasn't about to try to stop drinking. ### 17 Justine. I wanted to have her. I wanted to undress her. I wanted to push her down on my bed, her bed, any bed, anywhere, and smell her and bite her and rub my lips and my fingers and my cock over every inch of her body. Then I wanted to fuck her, cradle her head in my hands and overwhelm her small body with smells and tastes and touches until her eyes were looking up at me pleading me to make her cum. I wanted to hold her there and see and hear her at the height of her feeling, know my cock was inside her when her whole body felt..I don't know..let's just call it the enlightenment of the gutter. And I wanted to rub my cock inside her vagina until the rough walls and textures of this small-bodied young woman made me shake and shoot and grab her tight—her head against my shoulder—as I came inside her. That's what I wanted from Justine. That's all. - - - - I met her at Whit's. She was sitting with her boyfriend and she went out for a smoke and I *shamelessly, idiotically, forwardly, absurdly* just got up from my bar seat and followed that female human being outside and said: "You look like someone that I'd like to get to know." And she laughed and said: "Do you want a cigarette?" And I said: "Yes." And Justine blushed, and, blushed, and blushed, and I was glad she got the idea. I wanted to unzip her jeans and suck on her pussy right there. I was crazy about that girl. She was *so* feminine, *so* sexual to me, and I didn't really care who knew it, her, her boyfriend, anyone at Kips. Every time she went outside to smoke a cigarette I interrupted whatever conversation I was in and followed her. Sometimes we smoked her Parliaments, sometimes we smoked my Kamels. Justine would always ever only smoke a half a cigarette. She'd tuck the second half into the beams supporting the awning covering Whitman's door. I went from being a potentially creepy male who totally fucking insinuated myself into her situation, to being her smoking buddy. When she went outside, she'd stop at my seat and put her tiny hand on my shoulder and say, "You wanna smoke?" Then we went from being smoking buddies to being friends, and I met her boyfriend and we became friends, but if Justine needed more cigarettes she would leave her boyfriend at the bar and I would walk her across the street to the convenience store. We would both be be drunk—me and her and her boyfriend drank together, bought each other alternating rounds—but there was trust there enough that her boyfriend trusted me to leave the bar with his girl and she trusted me enough to make a cigarette run together. But Justine had a boyfriend. And they were tight. My only real chance was that Whit and Jill were swingers and Justine's boyfriend had a thing for Jill, so if he and Jill hooked up, that would give Justine a pass to go outside the relationship and I hoped if she did, it would be with me. But unlike some parasitic fuckers who make themselves a nuisance because unless they have actual sex with someone they don't even see the point of a relationship, I was happy to be friends with Justine and her boyfriend and special smoking friends with Justine. Spending a few minutes with her smoking in front of Whitman's was time spent in heaven for me, I admired Justine so much. - - - - Let's put my Justine obsession aside for a second, though, and paint a fuller picture of Whit's. The music. You had to play the right music at Whit's. Nina Simone's *Sinnerman* was played at least once a day in Whit's—it was the song of the bar. Then Billy Joel—because Thomas liked Billy Joel (especially *New York State of Mind*). If you put on the wrong music, people knew you weren't a regular. Like one time I put on some Fatboy Slim and I was nearly kicked out of the bar. It just isn't done. Whitman's customers are very particular about their music. Thomas, Whit and Jill's only bartender, had a remote control and if someone played something too offensive, he would just skip the jukebox ahead a song and restore peace to the galaxy. Thomas invited me to play chess once. I beat him the first game, but he never stopped smiling. He was just sizing me up. We played a second game and he beat me in like ten moves. Thomas told me about his parents. About how they died in a fire started by his mom's cigarette. He got insurance money and wandered between Brattleboro and New York City for a while. He tells me his dreams of New York, his memories of times there. He makes it sound like he grew up there but I later learn he's really from Brattleboro, born and raised, Brattleboro High, the whole nine. He says his mother "gave" him New York City by taking him on a trip there once. (And, I fill in the dots, that's why after his parents died, he spent so much time there.) Thomas invites me for a whiskey-drinking night, a gentlemen's trip around some of the better whiskeys Whit's stocks, in his opinion, and we do it. We take our whiskey tour nice and slow, talk at length about Thomas' obsession and love for New York City, down to the bars that he drinks in and the streets that he goes to. A bar isn't just a bar to Thomas, it's the poetry of the carved wooden decorations above the doorway, inside, on the walls, above the bar, below the bar where nobody ever looks. And I fall in love with Thomas a little bit that night—he's a writer, a drinker, and a poet of life, someone who, like me, isn't just there for the main event. Someone who sees the intricacy of whiskey or wine or making love with the woman you love. He tells me of a time he passed out drunk in the Amtrak station in New York and woke up without his bag—now that's a setup. No money, no ID, in Penn Station, New York City, you don't know anybody—you're fucked. He tells how he got the job at Whitman's: he just showed up and didn't take no for an answer. Jill later tells me the same story. Says she didn't want to hire him but he had decided he was going to be the bartender at Whitman's and he just started coming to work every day, helping out, tending bar, and (as Jill put it) "We had to start paying him!" Then I guess it was my turn to share and I openly cried at the bar when I told him about my girlfriend who died when we both took ecstasy. I don't tell everyone that story but I kind of figured I owed it to Thomas since we shared the experience of having our favorite people up and fucking *vanish* into the dust of the universe. So Thomas and I had that in common, and maybe that was one of the reasons the universe threw us together. I told him I had been to a mental hospital in Los Angeles. That I might have bipolar. We covered a lot of ground. "I'm glad to be on *this side* tonight," Thomas says, grabbing the bar. And Jill is serving us. And when I think about Rebecca I just let the tears flow. I look at her, I look at Thomas, through wet eyes with no embarrassment and no apology. Because, no offense, but when you've been what I've been through, there is no embarrassment and there is no apology. We're way past that. - - - - One night I ask Thomas: "You know where I could get some coke around here?" He nods at a guy in a booth. I won't describe him further so that when he reads this he won't freak out and come scouring the globe trying to kill me. But when this guy gets up to leave I go outside Whitman's and as he's putting his hat on I say: "I heard you're the guy to ask if I wanted to buy some cocaine." He flips out. "Where did you hear that?" "Well I can't tell you that, can I!" "*Never, never* approach me like that. That is so uncool." "Ok, I'm drunk. I'm looking for some coke. If I'm asking the wrong guy, then that's that. Have a good night." I start back inside Whit's. "Hold on." "Uh?" "You're talking to the right guy. You just freaked me out, with the way you said it. You know. Get to know someone first." "I'm sorry I scared you. Ok. I'm sorry. But if you play a risky game, expect to take some risks." "You're freaking me out again." "Hey, you got freaked out because people know you're the guy to ask. No offense, but that's either a function of how you operate or of how fucking small this town is." "Yeah, probably the latter," he says. "I'm gonna give you my card. I'm a manager. Talent?" "Ok. You're a talent manager in Brattleboro, Vermont?" "Shut up. Just email me sometime." "Alright. Thanks, man." And he's off. And I'm hopeful. Maybe get some coke sometime. - - - - One night, sitting with a skeleton crew at Whitman's—in a snow so huge that only the hardest of the hardcore drinkers were out, and only the hardest of the hardest core bars were open—all watching some huge machine that even natives had rarely seen: a huge chute that pumped snow off the street into the open-top boxcar on an 18 wheeler. This thing was equipped with huge lights so the crew could see what they were doing, and it worked like a motherfucking charm: they scraped the snow right off Elliot Street and vacuumed it into this boxcar. We stood amazed. We really become a family, those of use who went to Whitman's every day. I was there when Thomas and his girlfriend announced their wedding. They pulled out a huge photo album of each of them as children that one of her aunts had put together and Thomas and I thumbed through each page together, not even just for his girlfriend's satisfaction. Sometimes I'd be keeping Thomas's girlfriend company while she waited for him at the bar, waited for him to get off work. Thomas's girlfriend doesn't drink, and I'm not attracted to her, I just can't stand to see my friend's fiancée sit alone at the corner of a bar drinking waters. I bought her lemonades and milk while I drank my G&Ts and I even slowed down a little so her company wouldn't be drunk while she was sober. I 'd just talk to her about things—anything—ask her about her life, shit like that. I can talk to a stranger on a bus for three states before there's a moment of silence, so I sure as hell could keep Thomas' girlfriend company while she waited for him to get off. Thomas thanked me later for keeping his girl company, saying that he trusts me and me saying yeah, me keeping her company is really something I'm doing for you—not me, not even her—and Thomas holds my face in his hands and says he knows and that I'm a beautiful person. - - - - And then there was the day Thomas demonstrated to the Professor how many shots were in six martinis. Thomas felt he needed to show the Professor how fucking drunk he was, visually. So Thomas begins setting the appropriate number of shot glasses on the bar and I think it was something like three shots per martini so Thomas had the whole of Whitman's watching while he lined up 18 shot glasses across the bar and said: "From now on you're limited to three." "Three martinis? Then I won't come in here anymore." "Then don't come in." "You don't have the power to do this. Wait till Jill finds out." But Jill and Whit backed Thomas up. They said he had the right to choose who he served and how much he served them. In fact, when Jill and Whit heard about stunt with the shot glasses, they were thrilled—they didn't even want the Professor in their bar. Sober, he was an ok guy, but one *sip* of one martini in him, he instantly turned sexist, racist, even certain kinds of *-ists* that I'd never before witnessed. He is to this day the most offensive person I've ever met. No one wanted to sit next to him once he started drinking because no one wanted to be associated with the remarks he made. This man's speech and opinions were unimaginably despicable. They were erudite and fascinating, grotesque and unbelievable, and yet insulted every slice of humanity that was sliceable, especially the slice of class. The Professor was absolutely the most classist American I've ever met. ### 18 Here's a major event, and the fact that it's a major event will tell you a few things about me. One time right when I moved to Brattleboro I drove drunk to go get Wendy's after drinking at Whit's. Driving in ice and snow to get there just to feed munchies. Feeling terrible about it and swearing I wouldn't do it again..and I don't think I did. That wasn't the event. The event was mostly walking home up the icy hill after a night of drinking, a walk I took many times to pass out in my bed, Tooler and Issa long sleeping in their room. But here it is, here's the event. Here's the thing I still think about after five years have passed: one night, coming home hungry because I didn't drive drunk to go to Wendy's and there was no food to buy in Brattleboro, I ate a slice of Tooler and Issa's pizza, totally standing in front of the refrigerator, totally drunk. I debated it before doing it, but was overcome by hunger and my conscience was dulled by drink. I ate that pizza and went to bed. I felt super guilty about it afterward because of who it meant that I was: imperfect, stealer, out of control..an alcoholic? I didn't feel horrible about eating one piece of pizza—I felt horrible because I went against my morals. Issa didn't know where it went but Tooler said I bet Matthew had the drunk munchies. "You're right, D, I had the drunk munchies and I fucking couldn't help myself. I was like compelled to eat a piece of your pizza. I'm sorry, dude." "I don't give a fuck. You're welcome to my leftover pizza anytime." "Yeah, but I took it without asking." "I fucking know I don't want you to *wake me up* to ask if you can have a slice of freezer section pizza! Do *that* shit and I'll be pissed as hell." I felt like I was on the executioner's block and I couldn't get my executioner to drop the blade, and I'm kneeling there looking up and the ghoul like: *Drop the motherfucker!* And my executioner is like: *It's no problem, dude!* But I stole. In my mind, and in actuality, I stole, and I felt awful because I took without asking..and it was an indicator of my alcohol problem—that was the real pinch of the thing. That was five years ago, and I still feel guilty about it. Tooler and Issa have laughingly forgiven me, years and years ago, and they probably haven't thought about it since then. But I still think about it like it was yesterday, and I still hate myself for doing it. Maybe it's even more twisted than stealing *or* being an alcoholic. Maybe I know that one piece of pizza doesn't matter, to Tooler Issa or me..but I'm *using it* as a way to hate myself, to think I'm a piece of shit, to think I'm a loser—because *that* is the true underlying need. - - - - Stray memory of a psycho. I saw this thing recently on your chances of meeting a serial killer. Forget what the answer was but I think one of the closest times I've ever come is meeting this guy in Brattleboro who just wasn't right. His name was Vic. He just gave off this vibe. He seemed to be helpful, like I met him in the bar and when he found out I didn't have a job he offered me snow-cleaning work with him. But it was just going to me and him. Like we would hand out flyers and hope people called us back. But whatever, that's good work in Vermont, so let's give him a pass on this one. Then he'd invite me to his apartment to eat a rotisserie chicken he was cooking, but I never took him up on it because something didn't feel right. He starts a rotisserie chicken, leaves the house, goes to a bar for some drinks, then goes back to the chicken? I couldn't tell if he was gay or just weirdly friendly..or..most likely..a stray motherfucking serial murdering motherfucker. I was pretty sure it was the last. Like if you went into his house to get a whiff of that rotisserie chicken, you'd never leave with your brains intact. That was just the feeling I got. I know I'm imaginative—some would say psychotic—but I'm also very intuitive and I feel extremely good about my decision never to go with Vic to his apartment. I'm sorry. There was just something about his face. Something always seemed suspicious. Something always seemed wrong. Something always seemed off about him, so I deleted his number and never ever took any calls from him. I avoided him in the bar as much as possible. I was hoping the borough of Brattle would add those little safety kiosks like they have on college campuses but these would be for reporting a possible serial killer. But even though to my mind Vic seems like a possible serial killer, really, he was most likely just not socialized the right way and this meant I had to stay away from him. He seemed like just the type to start a successful American business—just enough of a sociopath, just enough disregard for the human—to be successful here. - - - - I saw the upstairs neighbor, Maggie, out with her boyfriend on Valentine's day. Let's just call her boyfriend Larry..or Frank. Which do you prefer, Larry or Frank? We just need a name to indicate he was a dumb football-loving all-American piece of shit. How about Mick? Maggie and Mick—that works. Anyway Maggie had Mick up to Brattleboro from wherever but she had to work so somehow it fell to *me* to babysit Mick while Maggie was off organizing tours for National Geographic or whatever she did. So he's a guy, right, I figured he couldn't say no to *hiking a mountain* and he didn't. He had come the day before and I was fucking glad for Maggie as this was the first company she'd had in a month and a half of me living in that house. So I hiked Wantastiquet with Mick's boring ass. I would have rather hiked alone—no—I would have rather hiked with a Roman slave walking behind me chanting, "All fame is fleeting," and showing a slideshow of my dad verbally abusing me as a child. But I was stuck with Mick. He was one of these quick hikers who don't stop to look at the newts growing in the little streams you cross. He stepped right over snakes that he never saw. When we got to the top I had my usual spiritual moment while he droned on about some trivial bullshit which I'll be getting to *in a second*. But trust me, this guy was a bore. Perfect for Maggie. So I return Mick to Maggie when she gets home from work and I go out to dinner. I wanted a steak so I went to the only place you could get a steak after the fire and what do you know, Maggie and Mick are at the same restaurant as me. I saw the look on their face like *how sad, Matthew's dining alone on Valentine's day* and I was like *don't feel sorry for me, I'm going to have a much more enjoyable dinner than either of you tonight*. I sat, I ate my steak, I drank my wine, I talked with my waitress, I wrote in my notebook, and I didn't have to impress anyone or please anyone and I didn't know of anyone nearby who would make better company for me than myself. There were no games, no expectations, no disappointments. True, there was no sex after, but there were still surprises—in general I make an excellent date for myself..especially on a hyped-up day like Valentine's Day. I was thirty-three years old at this time—impressing someone else for sex was not on my list of things to do. Enjoying an extra-rare steak, a glass of chianti—much higher on my list of things to do. And if you think it bothered me being the only table of one on the ultimate date night in a restaurant packed with tables of two..well..then you don't know me at all. Couples looked at me with pity—the men did—disdain even, perhaps as a defense, like underneath they were threatened by an unmatched male. Their women made eyes at me and I politely smiled and nodded, then looked the other way. I do what I like and I flirt with who I like. I'll tell you a story. I was once at dinner with my friend Ashley and I sent a note to a teenager having dinner with her parents—the girl was looking at me and I was looking at her and there was obviously some connection. The note said, in crayon, on a piece of the paper table covering, *You're cute*. Her parents were obviously disturbed (I was twenty three at the time, she was maybe sixteen) but the girl wrote me back and sent it by the same waiter who had delivered my note to her. Hers said, *You're cute, too*. And we left it at that. We didn't fuck. I didn't ask her for her *number*. But Jesus Christ, if a post-pubescent girl is flirting with me, and I like her, you better believe I'm gonna flirt back. Flirting is safe when you're with safe people. I agree we shouldn't violate underage kids, but it's silly to deny when there is sexual energy across the eighteen-year-old line. Maggie and Mick arrived after I was seated and left before I was finished with my meal. Days later, Maggie confided in me that she'd had a horrible time. She'd had the steak, too—it was horrible. She'd had a glass of wine—it was horrible. I didn't say what I was thinking, which was that both of those probably had less to do with the food itself and more to do with the person sitting across from you..and even more they had to do with the person sitting in the same seat as you, breathing with the same lungs as you, and thinking with your same brain. If there was any flirtation in her telling me her Valentine's date went horribly, I didn't care—I'd fantasized wild encounters with Maggie but when she got up close and personal, she was just..boring. Back to Wantastiquet. The hike to the top. Maggie's dull-as-bone boyfriend talking about all sorts of unreliable sports minutiae and waiting till we got to the very top of the mountain and I was having my spiritual experience to ask me if I heard them fucking. He didn't phrase it that way. (So timid, so young, so sensitive and embarrassed..believe me, friend, in ten years you won't care if anyone heard you fucking, it won't even be worthy as a topic of conversation. But to you it's still like you think it's some big secret that you stuck your dick in Maggie on Valentine's day—*hello!, you're her boyfriend, that's what we're all expecting you to do!*) Anyway so he says something like: "Matthew?" "Yes?" "Are the rooms arranged the same on the first floor as they are on the second floor?" "I don't know 'cause I've never been in Maggie's apartment." He explains the layout of Maggie's apartment. Where the bedrooms are. Where the kitchen is. Where the bathrooms are. I'm like looking over the sweeping mountainscapes of southern Vermont and this 20 year old is sneaking around the edges of a question I could see coming before we started our hike. "So..did you..hear anything last night?" "What like an intruder?" "No." "Like what? Was some homeless person sleeping in the foyer? Sometimes they come in for warmth when we forget to lock the outside door." "No. Did you hear..so wait..is Tooler and Issa's bedroom under the front right corner of the house?" "The front right corner as you look out, from inside the house?" "Yes." "Yeah, their bedroom goes across the whole front of the house." "So where's your bedroom?" "Um, you know the stairs that go up to Maggie's apartment?" "Yeah." "My room is underneath that. I mean my closet is literally under the stairs." He didn't seem to understand so I said: "Like in Harry Potter." "Oh, good," he said, exhaling heavily. I thought we were done and I was back pondering the hugeness of the space when Mick is like: "How thin are the floors? Do you ever hear Maggie moving around or walking?" "No. The only thing we ever hear is when she vacuums." Which was a total lie. The floors were paper thin and we could hear every step Maggie took, every flush of the toilet, every onion she chopped—every time she wiped her vagina with a square of single-ply toilet tissue we could hear it. But this guy was going to freak out if I told him that and I was enjoying the quiet of my mountains. "Tooler and Issa are out of town by the way." "They are?!" "Yeah they're in like California doing some political action that's going to make it harder for police to murder black people." That shut him up. - - - - I had fantasies of fucking Maggie but she was so straight laced she would never go for me and in the middle of the fantasy she always did something so incredibly boring and neurotic (even for me) that I had abandoned trying to get off to Maggie long ago, at least semi-realistic versions of her. I hardly ever saw her but I did knock on her door once to smooth things over between her and the downstairs apartment about the snow-shoveling problem. She was quite angry and I tried to sooth her. I often used her laundry detergent when I was poor (read: spent too much money drinking at Whitman's). I never flirted with her—in actuality I just wanted things to go well at the house. Issa and Tooler were indeed out of town, but each evening Mick was in attendance at the house—once the night he arrived, once the night of Valentine's Day—I heard a thumping coming from Maggie's apartment—and it didn't sound like vacuuming. It sounded like Maggie getting her uptight pussy fucked by her no-frills boyfriend who could hardly carry on a conversation with me during an hour-long mountain climb. But the thumping continued and went harder and louder and then was the sound of Maggie cumming—a heavy-duty orgasm from a woman who hadn't had dick in a long time. I was glad she came. It was a pleasant sound, but controlled, like the rest of Maggie. I wanted to buy her a vibrator, the really nasty kind with the pronged clit stimulator and the rotating anal beads. Maggie seemed like a nice person, a sane person with a degree and a good job and a much more stable mind than the one I'm operating with. But she didn't seem like she was exactly sucking the marrow out of life—you know what I mean? Whatever. It's not my place to judge. ### 19 I made a commitment against driving drunk. I made a commitment against stealing Tooler's pizza. I settled on getting steak grinders from a pizza joint called Frankie's, which was right across the street from Whit's. The first time I went in there I asked for a cheesesteak. "What's a cheesesteak?" That's what the register person said to me: *What's a cheesesteak?* Honestly I was speechless. I thought about going into a history lesson on how not too far from here there was a city called Philadelphia and in that city a common food was.. But the owner/cook stepped in to help. "They don't call 'em cheesesteaks up here." "What do they call them?" "A steak grinder." "Oh! I'd like a steak grinder, then." "It's weird, I know," says the cook, the owner, Frankie. "No," I say. "Different places, different names." "You'll like ours," he says. "If you like a real Philly steak." "Alright, that sounds like a challenge." Frankie smiles. Frankie lives across the street from me. I learned to love Frankie real fast. The register girl, who is like a young 15, says: "One steak grinder, then? You want a large or a small?" "Large." "Anything else. Chips? You want a soda?" "Nah I'm good." "What would like to add?" "I just want steak, grilled onions, provolone, and banana peppers." "I can tell you're from Philly by the way you order," Frankie says. "I used to live there." The register girl half-turns to Frankie. "What's a banana pepper?" "You mean a pepperoncini," Frankie asks me. "Yeah." "We don't have any." "You got jalapeños?" Frankie smiles, nodding his head largely. Old guy. Bald. Gray beard. He's already making my sandwich. "Can you make it double meat?" I say. Frankie gives me the thumbs up. "So what's your name?" I ask this little register girl. If I was fifteen I'd totally be all over her. "Clear Waters." "Nice name." "I have hippie parents." "I guessed." "You look like you've done drugs," she says. Then she looks to Frankie and shrugs. "What? He does." "I have." "What ones?" "LSD. Mushrooms. Ecstasy. Mostly I like hallucinogens but I've done about every regular drug there is." "Like what else?" "Heroin, coke, crystal." "I would *never* do crystal meth." "Good idea. I used to say the same thing myself." "I know. But it's different once you get out in the world. I'm planning a road trip." She looks at Frankie. "It's ok! The job is temporary! I know you're leaving!" "No, I just didn't know if you minded me talking about drug shit with customers." "Of course, is good, you make friends, you talk about whatever customer wants to talk about." "Well I guess it's ok since you brought it up," she says, raising herself off her seat by leaning on the counter. "I'm pretty sure you brought it up," I say. "No it was you." "I would never bring up a hardcore drug conversation with someone half my age, trust me." "You don't look bad for being *twice my age*." I laugh. "Thanks. Anyway we're prob'ly gonna do drugs on my road trip. Can I have a cigarette?" I'm playing with a pack of Kamels. I hadn't realized it. "Frankie, do you mind if I take Clear Waters outside for a minute and I'll come back and get that grinder?" "Just bring her back in roughly the state that you found her." "She'll be pristine. We'll be right outside your door." When I was a kid, Nintendo had this saying: *Now you're playing with power.* And, when a 33 year old talks with a 15 year old, you're playing with power. You both are. And most people are too coarse and too eager and not specific enough in their thinking to figure out the difference between *playing with power* and *abusing power*. The 15 year old is going to abuse power: that's ok. It's not ok for the 33 year old to abuse power. But it's ok if you can find moments where two people in a potentially dangerous situation can safely *play* with each other. Clear Waters and I had a cigarette, talked straight-up about all the drugs she had *really* done that she didn't want to talk about in front of Frankie, asked me about the drugs I had tried that she hadn't, listened to my grand revelations and my brief warnings, then she said: "I've heard sex on ecstasy is the bomb." "It is." "You've done it? With a guy or a girl?" "A girl." "I heard it just like blows all your senses." "That's pretty much right." And we talked more. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she gave me her perspective and I gave her mine. Then we put our cigarettes out and went inside. That's the last and only night I ever saw that girl. I hope it's because she went on a road trip and never came back. - - - - I held up my steak grinder, wrapped in brown paper, as I left Frankie's, as my way of saying goodnight and thank you to Frankie and Clear Waters, and I walked my steak grinder up a back street, crossed over to High, and got home to eat alone in my Harry Potter apartment. I was prob'ly watching some movie on my laptop—that's all I ever do. It was a lonely ritual for me. I did write this in my notebook that night: > something else I don't often consider, that I should: > > if I have, in all likelihood, youth on my side > > that: I am fairly young and attractive..that I have time as an asset I'm not saying I could have fucked that girl who was the cashier at Frankie's. I'm just saying: teenagers will still talk to me as though I'm in their realm, and through some serious American brainwashing, that makes me feel better about myself. Mostly, though—and if you know me you know this is true—I don't give a shit about the teenager working as a cashier at Frankie's. I would never even try to be with her because she's uninteresting to me (as a mate). But what is interesting to me is having time to write—living long enough that I get to write my books, to tell this world what I think about itself. *That* I care about. And that was how I felt at 33. I'm 38 and I still feel the same way. Talk about an obsession. I shun the larger part of life to sit in front of a computer and try to make tapestries out of the web of sin and life that I know so little of. > And maybe this, as a goal, for writing: > > Write something that causes someone else to fall more in love with the world > > As a goal, for life: > > Myself, to fall more in love with the world - - - - Let's go back a little, before Valentine's Day and Maggie's no-frills pussy getting fucked by her no-frills boyfriend's no-frills dick, before flirting with that little 15-year-old road tripper at Frankie's. Rewind a little, back a few drinks, back a few *nights* of drinking, and to this text entry where I try to talk myself out of drinking altogether and psych myself up to write another novel. > **February 7, 2011** > > I need to give myself a break. Get in touch with my spirit, with some esteem-able acts. I have to stop drinking again. Haven't gone so far back down the drinking path that that will be difficult—not too difficult. But I definitely have started drinking again, and done it too much, done it to the point of making myself feel bad. I'm going to take the next few days and months and just live simply again in that way, just don't do it, don't drink. Take a walk around the block instead, if I feel like drinking. Hike instead. Or get out the weights and work out my arms. I want to be thinner, I want to lose weight so my body does less work on a moment-to-moment basis. I feel better when I'm sober..and I am a worthwhile person, I deserve to feel better. And, simply, oddly, amazingly, and confoundingly, I am the person who can make that happen. That needs to be a basis of my hierarchy of needs and accomplishment. I have so many things going for me, and I have challenges, too. I don't want to spend my life struggling with that; I want to spend my life in other domains, learning and struggling with other things! Make room, Matthew, make room Zha, the space of sobriety in which my mind has a chance to think and feel and explore in peaceful ways. I am more optimistic when I'm sober; my mind has a better chance to imagine how wonderful my life could be. Do that, please; have some foresight and some broad vision into how I can be happier, simpler. > > Consider, my self, my friend, my family, that you are in a unique position to do something—and do that. That I am uniquely created, suited, to write the book I'm writing now..that there is value and meaning and purpose and ok-ness in that. Feel good about myself. Cut myself some slack, but do the right things. Take right action. Make right action. Love myself, like I would love the person I cared for most in the world. > > It's ok to be serious. To be fun, yes, but I'm a serious dude. Thinker, worker. Remind myself that they way I am is ok—it's good! I don't need to dumb myself down with alcohol so I can fit into social situations, so that I can meet people and talk to people. It's ok to be myself, my true self. Remember that, Matt, Zha, and be ok with..me. > > Here's what you do: for February, just write 2k/3k/day on HARD, get back to not-drinking, not-smoking, and give yourself a break. Pay March rent, and in March, look for a job. In February, do the overflow shelter days I've committed to, but don't necessarily do this again in March. I may need to get on a regular sleep schedule, for myself, and work on my own life during that month and months beyond, so that I'm in a better position to help. > > And: give yourself a break on writing. This isn't public NaNoWriMo drill. Write in private, don't pressure yourself to show what you're working on to anyone, ever. Make your life so that it sustains itself through work that I can do (non-writing work) or already-written work, and write for pure joy, for the foot of a lamb *[my way, since high school, of saying]* for no reason, at my own specification (none other) and at my own pace (none other). Don't rush, don't expect that it will be shown to anyone else, ever, just do it for my own sake, with my current/new projects—give myself the peace and freedom and simplicity of that. > > And give myself a break with Twitter, and blogging, and Dad, and even Mom. I don't have to report shit. I don't have to check in. No one is watching, and no one needs to watch. I can do my life without telling anyone about it. Talk with Joanne on the phone, keep up with Leona, but I can give myself the peace and privacy of just living my life, being in my own space, etc. > > (I don't have to report in =) > > Yeah, and I like this: getting in touch with creating for my own sake, for creation's sake. Forgetting about publication and showing fellow writers and readers my work. Think of writing a book as an activity that a single person does with himself, for his own enjoyment. Hold it that way as long as possible, maybe until I'm done writing books, maybe for years..store up multiple book projects before I ever re-enter the showing-stuff-to-people mode. That's a happy, creative place to be. Maybe I stay there forever, and periodically release an animal from the playpen..look at writing more as a general project I do for myself, from which a book escapes once in a long while, not as the main thing having been done there, but as a small portion of what has been. That might be fun. And now let us consider how I failed, and how many times I have failed. How many times have I written myself notes like this, and how many times have I gone back to drinking? For reasons that the current version of our narrator doesn't understand even as well as I do now (which is not that much), I always return to drink, to drug, to maniac behavior. I am insane. I have few friends. And it has been that way a long, long time. - - - - I stopped drinking for my sister's visit. That, at least, I could do. Joanne came up from New York for the weekend. We pretty much watched *The Deadliest Catch* the whole time, which was pretty much perfect. Perfect speed. Perfect level of mental commitment. Perfect level of immobility. We ate sushi. It wasn't as good as Monster Sushi in New York or sushi in LA but it's fucking Brattleboro, what do you expect? Just be glad you have sushi at all. Joanne and I got coffee (for her) and orange juice (for me) and breakfast sandwiches (for both) at Walmart when it was still at the base of Mt. Wantastiquet, sat for a long time talking, then climbed the mountain in deep snow via the short path (that would be the more vertical path with fewer switchbacks). I let her choose. Joanne, years later, when I was retelling this story in some family setting, admitted that to her it was less like *hiking* and more like *mountain climbing*..but we did it, and not unexpectedly, Joanne's stoic self did not complain once as we hiked that mountain. It was priceless to enjoy the view as brother and sister. Joanne had to pay for everything that weekend since I didn't have my unemployment check yet—I felt horrible, just one more data point on the already-full *loser older brother* graph. I enjoyed the break from drinking—once I stop I don't miss it. I enjoyed the break from random bar company to spend time with one of the few people in this world who truly loves me. For a moment in time, I wasn't so *out there*—alone—*Banished to the Moon*, as I had felt in my two quarters of college, many an age ago. When I think of Joanne I think of rain, of the sudden rains in Philadelphia where we used to live together. Random guys who jump out of nowhere to sell you an umbrella that's so cheap you end up with twenty or so of these semi-disposable umbrellas thrown down just inside your door. And yet, when you leave the house you never take one with you, and you end up buying another, just to keep dry for a few minutes of a sudden rainstorm. But deeper, I think of rain, when I think of Joanne. I think of rain when I think of siblings, best friends like Mike or Rebecca. And I think of rain as a symbol of grief. Mike and I developed a whole psychology of grief embodied by rain one night on ecstasy and I will never forget that night or the things we said. I go back and back and back to the symbol of rain for grief, watching those men on *The Deadliest Catch* in constant rain, freezing their asses off and the *cold* part never comes through the laptop screen adequately. But the wet does. Joanne and I, as children, sleeping in a tent next to Mom and Dad's tent. Camping in some woods in the south somewhere. Louisiana or Arkansas. Dad checked on us once in the night with a flashlight and asked how we were. We cheerfully said we were fine. Did he just take our word for it? Did he *open his eyes* and take in the actuality of the situation? They checked on us the next morning and a *river* was running through our tent, our sleeping bags were right in the middle of it and we were totally soaked. But that's how stoic we both were, even then, how cheerfully indestructible we were. We wouldn't have complained if there had been a dinosaur in our tent or we were sleeping on a bed of snakes. We grew up the child of an eternal optimist (Dad) and do you know what happens when you are so closely influenced by an eternal optimist? You become post-optimistic, you don't even pay attention to the evidence anymore. You could be piloting a two-by-four through the Bering Sea with a cloth napkin and a cigarette lighter and think everything is fine. We also grew up knowing that any misspoken word from us could cause the Wrath of Mom and we had to comfort *ourselves* during our childhood. Our parents were emotionally unsafe. We knew when we could speak and when we couldn't—and, in some metaphorical tent, throughout our childhood, Joanne and I were clinging to each other for dear life..not from rain, but mostly to protect us from our parents. ### 20 Tooler asked me about the cats. "I know you're allergic, but.." "I'm not *that* allergic," I say. "So can we get them?" She had her hand locked in a clasp and was jumping up and down like a little kid—what could I say? "Sure," I said, "as long as they're *your* cats. I don't want to have a bunch of extra work to do. I mean, I'm focused on my writing. Not that I won't help *some*..I will, I just—I'm not some creepy bastard that's gonna refuse to feed the cats when they're *hungry*, but—I'm sorry, I'm sounding like a real asshole right now. I'll help, ok. I'll do whatever has to be done." "I understand," Tooler says, and in the same breath tells me she and Issa are going on vacation for Issa to meet Tooler's parents, so I'm going to be with the cats during some of the of their first days on the planet. At first it was wonderful. Tooler and Issa named the cats Bongo and Bola—which Issa only much later told me means *cock*. And then, after it was wonderful, it was just shit-smelling fatness from a litter box that Tooler and Issa never cleaned. Issa insisted they were *Tooler's* cats and she didn't do anything to help with the litter box. I don't know why they smelled so bad except to say that other houses where the cats really stank were houses where the rest of the house wasn't clean. We didn't take out the garbage often enough so Bongo would drag trash all over the kitchen. They didn't even use the litter box—that could have been part of the problem. One night I woke up to piss and when I stepped on the mat in front of the toilet my heel squished right down into three logs of cat shit neatly laid there like a gift. Bongo was a very sexual cat. He would sniff Tooler's underwear (only Tooler's) and he would drag them into the living room to play with. That wasn't a problem *per se* but it was just the general added chaos of the house. I couldn't live like that. And at the beginning it was wonderful—they were so small they needed us to feed them from bottles and it was sickly how they could hardly walk..but the smaller, sicker one (Bola), after months of beating by the gray kitty (Bongo), the small one ended up being the alpha kitty, crazy, always attacking the gray one, doing parkour-like acrobatic moves involving the wall, leap-frogging Bongo so that suddenly Bola was attacking from the front instead of the back. This seemed like some kind of omen or lesson or warning to me: that the cat who is beat up most in the earlier parts of life will grow up to become the much greater bully in later life. I mean at the beginning they were so tiny we all thought they might not survive. We were feeding them just drops from a bottle. Oh and that panty-sniffing cat, Bongo, reminds me of that night when Aaron and Darling Nikki came over? Remember when asshole was trying to make a bong out of a soda can? Well the other three who left because I didn't have enough couches and someone was going to have to sit on the floor or god forbid an inflatable mattress..right..those three..before they left they went into Tooler and Issa's room after I told them not to. I said, "That's my housemates' room." But they went in almost *because* I said this and picked up the girls' dirty panties from the floor and danced around and I thought: what is this? Disneyland? You think this is a movie set created for your enjoyment or do you think *two real people* live here? And it came back to me: finally, after asshole left and it was just me, putting the furniture back in place and washing my boots in the shower. Washed the vomit right out of those motherfuckers. Anyway, we got cats. - - - - And one of my clearest memories, one of my key memories from Brattleboro, is sitting on this one bench in front of a public office building just down from the post office after a night or more of drinking and debauchery, deciding to stop drinking, not actually stopping, and going all the way to the edge with my funds and making it just to when my next unemployment check came and making it through not drunk driving and not getting arrested or dead from doing some illegal drug and now I had money in my account again—enough for a reasonable person to live on—and feeling safe and relieved that I made it through one more episode of self-imposed chaos..I survived myself! Sitting there after coming from the post office and getting another unemployment form I filled out (lying about searching for jobs because there *were* no fucking jobs) and mailed. Then going across the street to deposit my check. Then going to my bench where I sat there like an astronaut who had been to space and was back on solid ground, like a whole-self sigh of relief that I made it through to this point. Can I get to a place where I don't harm myself, where in the moment I can act in ways that are holistically healthy? Can I not *get* there—can I be there now? Maybe that's an angle of being in the present moment..that Buddhist idea of not-striving..of being here now..of not-hoping and not-trying for what I might become, what enlightenment I might reach..but being here now. Maybe I am here now =) I would think that on that bench, and with my continual resolutions not to be a maniac in my life, for a few minutes on the bench I had peace. - - - - I went drinking on St. Patrick's Day at Whit's just out of curiosity. Real drinkers quite vocally refer to New Year's Eve, St. Patty's Day, The Fourth of July..as amateur nights. Normally a real drinker wouldn't even go to a bar on those days. We don't like to see normal people drink—it's disgusting. I mean green beer? Beer in general. Serious drinkers drink liquor and we drink about six times the normal person drinks. Normal people don't get wild when they get drunk—they just get stupid—and there is a difference. When I walked in, Whit's was completely full of no one I'd ever seen before..a completely different crowd. Every seat was filled. People were elbow to elbow. There were *placemats* on the bar. Folks were having these ridiculous conversations about church and work and God—all the stuff a real drinker lives life to avoid. Kip controlled the jukebox from behind the counter and he was playing country gospel "hits"—if there even is such a thing. I ate a patty melt and drank a bottle of chianti in eleven minutes flat and I was out of that place like I was escaping a fucking nuthouse. I don't do New Year's Eve parties, either. I hate champagne, for one. If I'm at a New Year's Eve party and someone hands me a glass of champagne, when the clock strikes twelve I raise my glass and toast with the best of them—but when the glasses chink and everybody's kissing, I'm the guy finding a plant or a sink or a window to dump that shit out in. Normal drinkers don't *understand* alcohol the way serious drinkers do. You know those people who say, "I don't drink to get drunk." Yeah. You wanna avoid those people. Alcohol is a drug, and the only reason to drink it is to get drunk. Have you ever heard anyone say, "I smoke pot—but not to get high." No. No one ever says that. And you holiday drinkers, you people who don't drink to get drunk—take it from a real drunk—you're doing it wrong. Throw that glass of champagne out the window, get yourself a bottle of something strong, watch depressing movies on Netflix till you pass out, alone, face down in your bathroom—ringing in the new year. That's how real drinkers do it. My old girlfriend pegged me early as an alcoholic. She said, "It's pathetic that you drink alone." I said, "You drink just as much with your friends." She said, "That's different—I'm drinking *socially*." And I said, "*I* think it's pathetic that in order to drink, *you* need the validation of your friends. How sad is *that*?" As far back as my early twenties, I was an alcoholic. My girlfriend knew it—I did not. And I would not for many years. - - - - I kept trying to have the perfect last drink. There was a supermoon and I stared at the moon that night. I knew I had to get serious about my writing again. I changed my Tumblr picture to one that accentuated my aggressive bangs and I guess made me look like a writer. Back then, unless I was actually writing a book, I never had the feeling that I "was" a writer—in fact I never have that feeling now. It's just an accident that I'm doing this—I do it because it makes by mind feel good. Like Faulkner said, "Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing." Looking up at the supermoon, swearing this'll be the last smoke and the last drink before I got back to doing something useful. My air bed developing a leak..waking up in the night on the floor feeling like this is just one more thing..sleeping with my ass on the floor..by morning all of me was on the floor. Ordering a new bed and in the mean time sleeping on the floor on top of a couple of blankets. Then my piece of foam arrived..Tooler thought it was impossible that I could be comfortable on that thing but I have a long history of sleeping on slabs of foam and I thought I was living in the lap of luxury. This time I even bought one that was four by six instead of eight by six in an acknowledgment that I wasn't going to be having any female visitors over—I was officially celibate with the purchase of that narrow slab of foam. I get an email from the CEO of a top-notch company in Los Angeles *that I applied to like a year ago*. I really wanted to work for this company. They wanted a text-only résumé—which I thought was really cool—and I made them a sweet-looking text-only résumé with links to some amazing stuff I'd done and I sent it to them. That was back when I lived with my mom in Bowmanstown, Pennsylvania. But I never heard back. Then *a year* later, when I'm not even looking for tech jobs anymore—I've totally given up on that—this CEO emails me and says, *Our bad. We misplaced your resume. But I LOVE your skill set and the projects you've done and if you'll forgive our tardiness I'd like to video chat with you at your earliest convenience.* Uh-huh. *At my earliest convenience.* My earliest convenience was *twelve months ago*. But the company was so cool I Skyped him. Yeah. We loved each other. We asked each other all the right questions. We created that perfect balance of professionalism and comfort. But the conversation ended something like this: "I'd really like to join your team.." "I understand." "..but I just rented this house in Vermont and.." "..yeah, I would make the same decision myself." "..So I think I'm gonna stay here and work on my fiction." I turned down a job making one and a *half* times what I'd made before (and I'd made a lot) to bum it in Vermont and write my fifth novel on an unemployment check. In the past, I mean up until last year, I would have taken the job, but I finally learned something about those jobs, which is this: the money they pay you, goes away, and you're left with nothing. You don't own shit, except your valuable experience. With writing, I was working at something that resulted in *me owning something*—worthless as it may have been in a monetary sense—I was creating works for which *I owned the copyright*. I was doing something for myself. For the first time in my life I was doing this. And somehow, a copyright on a book that no one was reading, no one was buying, but that *I owned*, felt a lot better than working my ass off and giving of my considerable mind to companies who weren't even giving me stock. I ran a few errands. (Which for me meant going to bars.) I went to the Inferno and had a well gin, neat, my last drink for a while. Fifteen weeks later I went back in there and said hi to the owner and I was still off alcohol and he said: "Are you still not drinking?" He remembered that I had my last drink at his bar. There was something about doing this somewhere other than Whitman's. It was a private ritual of stopping and starting drinking that I can't tell you why, but I just wanted to do on my own, in private, and the Inferno in the daytime didn't have just a few customers..it had no customers. And the bartender stood in front of me and said: "Are you getting back into the game?" "I'm getting back into it," I said. And he said, "Good, I hear you're a tech guy. After this drink maybe you can help me fix that." He pointed to his 1980s jukebox. "I doubt I can help you fix that but I will take that drink." The guy smiled and he poured. ### 21 But that was fifteen weeks later. For the many weeks previous I had been writing. And when I write I don't drink a drop. I stop drinking completely. I write every single day. I write on a schedule. That had become my general practice starting with *Things Said in Dreams*. I drank when I wrote my first book. Since then, I always wrote sober, just because I happened to be in AA when I wrote *TSID*. There were exceptions: one extremely difficult day of strategic drinking during *mURdEr cLuB cANDy* to make one of the drug-taking scenes more realistic. What was extremely difficult about it was drinking that one day and then stopping, but I did it, and it made the scene—no way I could have written that scene sober. Brattleboro, Vermont. I write *HARD*. It's the only book I write in my year in Vermont. I had a manic breakdown after I finished writing. But boy was it worth it. Each day I make the next day's food so in the mornings I don't have to stop writing to cook. I think of that quote from *Walk the Line*. The record producer says to Johnny Cash, "If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing *one* song.. *One song* that people would remember before you're dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth." *What song would it be?* I feel that's the question that one's work, that my work, that this particular book of mine, should answer—no question less. To answer that question with *HARD*, I am on a schedule for more than a hundred days where I wake up, shower, write, eat, write some more, am done by noon, and I meditate for the rest of the day. These are perfect days. I am hypomanic, which means just a little bit manic, but I control it with not drinking or doing any other drugs, maintaining a regular sleep pattern, and with writing itself. Writing several thousand words a day comforts my mind—it massages it into a peaceful state just like running relaxes the body—and it allows me to keep my brain from further escalation, but also maintain a little bit of the manic fire which helps me write two-thousand words—or three-thousand words—in just a few hours, for a hundred days in a row. I wrote HARD without a single break. My first idea for that story, for a story called *HARD*, was a story that's just a kid trying to get to school. I wanted to write this because people seem to think that things are great in this world, and I still have a bone to pick with that, an ax to grind..to me it seems like the perpetrators are the ones sitting around laughing and eating well, drinking, etc. and the people they're harming are the kids, the country, the outcast. I think people need to hear messages about how fucked up things are. Oh yeah: so in this story, it would be ridiculous, hero-style: like the kid has to fight tanks and stuff just to get up the street..he's got ridiculous elements in his way, and at the end we learn that all this fucking kid is trying to do is get to his classroom and open a book. It would be superhero, comic book-ish, totally over the top. But I discarded that idea. And I had even more ideas for that book that I threw away. I think a lot about a book before I start to write. > I will write true to myself. I will write what I want to be there. Part of my target is creating something that resonates with other people. To create crack. I totally disagree with writing to genres and especially marketing demographics in order to achieve this, but I am interested in choosing characters with the intention of placing them well, placing them such that they will be crack. With some distance from it, I think TSID's character does this well. Some literary agents may disagree. And I may be wrong. But so far that character seems to work for people..they read it, they say it's brilliant, they post sentences from it to their Twitter. I do think there is something magical about the narrative monologue in first person. It is a substrate appropriate for what Mamet talks about: showing [on the screen](#) someone that the audience member enjoys imagining they *are*. I thought about my old friend Julian. > Story of a musician who hasn't played a show in years, he stopped, and the people around him who swirl around, and finally he plays a show again > > travel story > > desperation > > homelessness in Austin > > call it: > > Up Against The Sky It would be: > part of a larger piece..The Reminding..aspects of people's lives > > finding what they lost > > reminded of what they forgot And someday later I would try to write that story. Or a: > story of a family with two adopted children > > and someone who commits suicide > > a serious story about a family, and a special child Maybe I should have thought more about that note, abut a special child who kills himself. It's all right there, always, the ending is buried in the beginning and it's so plain it's slapping you in the face with a large trout—but you have no idea. During this time when I was waltzing around with the idea of writing this book, it was so cold outside they had advisories not to go outside at all. It was 20 or 30 below. You couldn't stand outside—but I stole seconds here and there fully dressed in my baddest hiking gear standing two feet from the house, talking to Penny across the ocean and coordinating our cigarettes. I went to the back porch and at 20 below the cold didn't feel like cold anymore, it felt like death—like death and complete stillness and total utter absolutely motherfucking quiet. I was psyching myself up to write, building up my mind with other people's advice and some of my own. > Keep it guttah, keep it grimy. > > Don't ever forget that. > > Write for an audience of two: the lowest god and the highest devil. > > And keep it guttah. Keep it grimy —Busta Rhymes > > You haven't gone too far. > > You haven't gone far enough. And on day I was done psyching myself up, I was sober enough, and I started writing *HARD*, like a monk, no alcohol, only trips outside to the grocery store, meditating after writing, making writing a meditation, with my strict daily schedule which involved afternoon play sessions with the growing kittens, I stayed in the zone for a hundred and seven days or something like that. I rewarded myself for my every day writing with a weekly massage focusing on the hands. I started with chair massage but Libby talked me into a couple of table massages. It had been a while since I'd had a massage and I was afraid I'd get an erection while she had me lying on my back because I was attracted to this masseuse sexually, which is a little scary. But we talked and I discovered I was attracted to her holistically. Libby is one of those people who if all I could do was follow them around as their angel, and I got to be with them even though they would never know I was there and could never give back to me, I would do it, because I liked them that much. I liked Libby that way—she was a special person, a gifted person. She was a one-in-a-lifetime person, my massage therapist, Libby. I continued liking her as a man likes a women but mostly we had the most amazing and clear conversations about pain: pain that means something's wrong, like kidney stone pain—or birth pains, she says, which are hard but don't send signals to your brain that something is wrong. I always enjoyed the several types of pain she gave me when she massaged me. In fact, Libby was so good, the other massage therapists at their shop always had Libby do *their* massages. She was that good. I will say, with all the massage therapists I've ever met, which is quite a few, that Libby..well..it makes me glow to think of her skill. She sings, too, she told me. She may have other aptitudes. But she has mastered massage, and in her twenties or thirties, she's the most accomplished massage therapist I've encountered. In heaven, it will certainly be Libby who gives massages. I came back from a massage one day, easily walking the sidewalks which were no longer ice, and Darling Nikki was out jogging High Street. She acknowledges me with such a warm smile and wave that I have to examine my own head to see what part of her seeming-sexual welcoming is real and what is in my head—though it gave me a nice small-town feel just that the person I saw out jogging was someone I had met before. I waved back. And that continued to happen all the while I lived in Brattleboro—seeing familiar people everywhere—and that comforted me—it created the impression that the world was small. - - - - I only went out one night while I was writing *HARD*, and that was to go bowling with Tooler and Issa. They invited me in the morning and I declined, then later in the day I asked them if I was still invited. I wanted some sociality. We met friends of theirs, a couple, and the woman was so beautiful in this Winnie Cooper from *Wonder Years* sort of way..just..perfect symmetry of face, nothing visibly freakish or brilliant about her, but she was intelligent and constantly funny, kind of like she had a team of writers feeding her dialogue. She was married to this dumb-as-nails guy and she was pregnant with his baby and I had this feeling of disgust all night that someone so pretty and normal and caring and mother-like would choose to be with this guy whose obvious only strength was his education—a bunch of political theorists he had choked on like dicks. In reality, I didn't know much about him, but usually my intuition is spot on, even after meeting someone for a few seconds. I spent four or five hours with this guy and hated him—I thought he wasn't good enough for Winnie (or whatever her real name was) and I tried to put myself inside her mind to see what attracted her to him. To me he was undeserving, boring, rude, a simpleton with a stable job and a house and a Subaru and that's probably just exactly what all the Winnie Coopers of this fucked-up world really want. It's not sex and conversation—it's financial stability so they can have babies. And those kids are going to grow up with the dullest dads imaginable. Winnie Coopers never go for guys like me. To a Winnie Cooper, I'm an uncouth, unstable, insolvent wannabe artist who will fail at art and fail at life and she doesn't want to be stuck with someone like that when she turns forty. I'm too unpredictable to raise a family—me and Winnie Cooper agree on this one. Anyway I caught as many secret glances of her as I could all night and just wished and wished that some sequence of events would unfold where I would get to fuck her. I bet she wears plain panties—white with a white little gusset—and I wanted to fuck her in such a way that the next day she'd go out and buy some sexy ones. Even though most everyone was drinking, I stayed away from the alcohol. At one point, going to the bar to buy nachos, I saw Tooler and Issa looking at me and I wondered if they thought I was getting a drink. But I don't drink when I write. If my *wife* asked me not to drink, if *my first son* did, I'd probably tell them to fuck themselves. But for a novel, yeah, I'll sober up real quick and I'll stay sober till that fucking thing is done. - - - - When I finish writing the book—and back up the first draft in like three different places online—on the day of and after the last period of writing, I go downtown, my first time leaving the house before noon in months, I call Joanne and she is proud of me. I wander around downtown in a late snow talking with my sister for an hour. I'm happy. I even mention to Joanne the idea of continuing to write—starting a new project right away—just for the calming effects writing has on my life. But I don't do that. I lose control of the wave of hypomania that I wrote my book on, and without a rigorous daily schedule, mania takes over. It chips away at my mind bit by bit by bit. In six months my entire life in Brattleboro will be destroyed. ### 22 I start drinking again. And I get manic in the summers. I kept getting massages from Libby after I finished my book. Do you know what mania is? Well you can look up a medical dictionary definition, but, please, allow me to save you the trouble. Mania is the time I was so irate I flipped out at a Burger King drive-through because they wanted to *sell* me packets of ketchup. Each meal came with *two* packets of ketchup and I wanted *four*. So I flipped the fuck out and told the window operator, his boss, her boss, and everyone within earshot that their ketchup policy was *Texas rancher bullshit* and this Burger King didn't deserve to *stand*. I wished them *earthquakes, fires, floods, plagues of rabbits*. Yes, I *screamed* at them that I hoped *rabbits* fell from the sky and punctured the windshields of their cars, squeaked their business to a halt, and they all had to find other jobs working at *real* Burger Kings, BK's that just *give* people the condiments they need. Then I proceeded to lecture them on how giving people the condiments they requested was a way to build customer satisfaction and a regular clientele..all the while the store manager was politely asking me to, "Please pull forward so that you're not blocking the line, sir." Sir? I'll stick that *sir* up your motherfucking *ass*. You're not going to find that in the medical dictionary, nor in your Google searches for "mania"—but that's what mania is. I got my first drink from Inferno—a neat gin—and that guy's jukebox was still broken. I got a massage from Libby. And then, even though I could have kept it reasonable, had one drink, and gone on with..whatever people do when they're not drinking (I wasn't much sure about this quadrant of activity)..even though I could have done that, I didn't. I walked out of the new age massage dojo, turned left, and like a robot walked 50 feet up Elliot. I decided to try Whit's again. The decision to continue drinking after being sober for months was a child's puzzle in my mind. I may have toyed with it, but I knew what I was going to do. The weight of that decision, though, was not a weight a child could handle. Mostly I concerned myself with what my drinks would be, as if that would help me drink reasonably somehow. Maybe if I just buy one bottle of chianti. Maybe if I just drink G&Ts. But none of that mattered. I was stepping onto the edge of the well, and some dark spiral invited me to *take a step* and *take a step*. I didn't have to make the decision all at once—just one drink at a time. And as much fun as I had at Whit's before, Whitman's Act II was a much better show for me. Now, every day, there was a guy named Mike, drinking at the exact opposite of this long-ass bar to where I sat. He drank weird drinks consisting of mixtures of beer and liquor. We yelled at each other across the distance for a while, then eventually I moved my seat out of the dark corner by the video poker machine and right over to where Mike was, but where he was on the short end in the other corner, I was now just around the bend of the bar on the long end next to him. "You wanna smoke a butt?" was Mike's refrain—did I want to smoke a cigarette. I bummed from him for a while but eventually started buying packs of Kamel's again. "How do you smoke those things?" Kamel Reds. The most beautiful cigarette in the world. "I don't know. I just love 'em." "I notice you smoke Parliaments with Justine." "I'd smoke *dog shit* with Justine. I mean if a dog came up this sidewalk and shat right there I would lean down and smoke that shit with Justine." Mike and I were drinking buddies because we went to the bar at roughly the same time. I went when they opened—noon. Mike went as soon as he could possibly leave his job, which I understood from experience was a moving target that got earlier and earlier the more one hated one's job. At first he got to Whit's art four, then three, then two-thirty. That was when I could reasonably expect Mike to arrive at Whit's, at which point we would match drinks, alternate cigarettes, walk across the street to get more cash, and stay as long as Mike could possibly stay, this last variable being determined by how many times Mike's wife had called him at the bar asking where the hell he was and when the hell he was coming home. I mean, she knew where he was, but she asked anyway. I never, ever met Mike's wife the entire time I lived in Vermont. And also now there every day was a girl named Walsh. She had red hair, freckles, she was acquaintances with Mike and Jill and Whit and Thomas knew her, but she never talked to me. She sat next to Mike and drank like somebody who has a life they want to forget—just not as beaten up by life yet as Jane, the homeless former prostitute I told you about? Walsh kept me at a distance but she would sit there and let Mike and I buy her drinks while Mike and I chatted up the fucking *ceiling*. Walsh would roll her eyes at our old-man jokes (Mike and I were in our early thirties, Walsh was 25) but, you know, she knew the value of her smile and she would flash me one sometimes. Eventually the three of us arrived at a sort of equilibrium where no one was flirting with anyone and we were just there to drink. The three of us—me Mike and Walsh—became the day drinkers of Whitman's. Walsh was a pre-school teacher, by the way. And sometimes the Professor would grace us with his presence but with a hardcore day-drinking bloc like Mike Walsh and I, the Professor could never start the fire of one of his bigoted conversations—it would always be snuffed out by the drunk takedowns of one or all of the other three day drinkers there—and any one of us could take on the Professor, drink for drink—there were no lightweights there. "Walsh, I bet you don't know the history of the name of the country you were named after," said the Professor. And I said, "We're drinking—no history lessons!" "Anyway," Walsh said, "I wasn't named after a country. I was named after one of my father's high school girlfriends." "I bet your mother liked that!" the Professor says, raising his martini. "She *did!* They were all friends. Don't try to start a fight where there isn't one! They just liked the sound of the name." "Well I will drink to that," the Professor says. "You have a beautiful name." Mostly Mike and I controlled the conversation, with—the classic bar conversation—talk about work. When things got too heated between the Professor and Walsh, Mike would look at me like a Muppet and say: "You wanna smoke a butt?" - - - - And sometimes Walsh and this guy named Manny and I would go to Walsh's house and do cocaine, looking out over her windows at the river, and it was awkward because me and Manny both wanted to fuck Walsh, but Manny pulls me aside one night and says, "She's into you, man—you should hit that." Walsh must have had the best view of any apartment in Brattleboro. You could see the train tracks, the river, the bridge, the mountain. When I say I wanted to fuck Walsh, not only could she drink like a champion, not only did she not give a fuck about the rules and do coke and binge-watch *Simpsons*, but while I was packed away in my room writing *HARD*, she lost like ten or twenty pounds, so she was just the right amount of skinny now and wore shirts that showed her belly and her beautiful belly button, which was an innie. I wanted to fuck her without a condom then pull out and cum all over her belly, filling her belly button with cum. - - - - Mike and I stand outside chain smoking just to avoid the Professor and I would tell him stories about my old work in California: "I mean I yelled so hard at this guy that I never went back to that Burger King, even though before that it had been my everyday spot." "And why was this that you *yelled* at an innocent Burger King employee?" "It's the motherfucking condiments, man! They wanted to charge me *extra* for ketchup and barbecue sauce and I refused to pay it and I flipped out at them for not giving it to me." Gave them the unrighteous smackdown, for sure—totally uncalled for. "I'm going in," Walsh says. "You two can figure this one out by yourselves." "So?" Mike says. "So," I say, "like, this Burger King thing was totally insane. I don't know what happened to me. I might have *threatened* them. I was paranoid for weeks about them knowing my license plate or what my car looked like. I thought they were gonna call the police I was like telling them I hope they lose their jobs and their business goes under and a plague of rabbits cracks their windshields. Just shit like that, man." "Did you ever go back and apologize?" "I never went back *at all*. I never even took that exit on the highway. I might have made some death threats, I don't know." "You need to chill out, man." "Yeah, well that job sucked. I needed to get out of these. And after I drove through that BK window, I called Joshua—this fucking *faggot* who's supposed to be my supervisor and I gave him the unrighteous smackdown over the phone. I became the devil, man. He said come back to the office and let's talk about this. I said I'm not coming back to the office..go work it out with Peter (who was the boss) but I said Joshua you are *unacceptable*, your behavior toward me from day one has been *totally over the line* and you know it. You're technically unqualified for your job—" "You *said* that?" "Yes and I said Joshua, you know it. You won't use my expertise because you have an ego problem. Joshua is like, 'Matt—' and I'm like *Just shut up and listen.* You go downstairs, you work this shit out with Peter, but the way you treated me this morning is the last time that's gonna happen. Do you understand that? No answer so I'm like: *Joshua, do you understand that?* He says, 'Yes.' I say, 'Good. Now fuck you. I hope you heard that.' Joshua is like, Maybe you should calm down and think before you say anything else. And I'm like, 'No, Joshua, *fuck you*.' Fuck you for being such an asshole toward me from day one of this fucking company. And you can tell Peter I said that. In fact, *I'll* tell him. If I ever hear another unkind word from you I will fucking *hurt* you—don't ever forget you heard me say those words." "*Damn.*" "I hang up that phone and go to Red Robin, order drinks and appetizers and burgers and more drinks and I ignore all calls and texts from Joshua and Peter—and there were many." "Did they fire you?" "No. They needed me because I could program stuff that no one else there could program. But Joshua was a real moron: when I would go drinking with him on these pseudo-company outings, he would explain to me his theory that somewhere out there was the perfect appetizer that would 'soak up' the alcohol so that if you ate this mythical appetizer while you were drinking, you would get less drunk." Mike laughs. I continue. "This wasn't just a theory he had while he was drunk, either—he discussed this with me in the mornings when he was completely sober. I hate to be the one alcoholic in the room to suggest this, but: why not just *drink less alcohol*? Because that *will* have the desired effect of you getting less drunk." I shake my head. Mike's latest cigarette is done. "One more?" he asks. But you know what my answer was gonna be. He holds the door open and we go back inside Whitman's for another drink. ### 23 Libby seeing me outside Kips smoking on her walk home. About their whole naturalistic crew and how I fancied being a part of it, everyone who worked at her dojo of healing, to me they seemed like perfect friends, even though I was on a different path—the path of base culture, of cigarettes and alcohol and cocaine and learning what people say in bars so I could write about it. I wanted to be seen as pure by Libby, wanted to magically be part of their community, but I'm not pure—far from it. I developed a spiritual crush on my massage therapist. Didn't want to be with her..wanted to be like her..or what I imagined her as being. Wanted to live healthy and be spiritual, even though that's just not me. I always like people like that, though, who seem to spend their lives on a meditation cushion. I relished Libby's and my conversations about different kinds of pain—who else did I know I could have that conversation with? I had a crush on the whole crew who worked at that holistic healing center—in my fantasy world they were counterparts to all my old Ohio friends even though my old Ohio friends weren't spirit and health people, but druggies like me. Me and Libby were on entirely different tracks and it hurt me that it was so. Libby seeing me smoking outside Whitman's right after she had given me a massage and I felt like I was letting her down, showing her that I was really someone lesser than who she thought—though most likely that judgement was in my head and not in hers. She was an example of how *I* wanted to be—I wanted to be healthy, sober, doing something useful for the world and getting paid enough to live, rent, eat (because that is the only way this economy knows how to show that it considers you worthy to live). Libby smiled at me though and I nodded and she walked on by. - - - - I got sick (which is always depressing). I was still jobless. I had drank too much and had no money to pay the rent. Manic after writing *HARD*, I think about becoming a male gay porn video artist on the web, but I'm fat in the belly and skinny in the arms, my cock is not a cock that some stranger could fetishize. Me as a male webcam model would be like trying to jerk off to a misshapen starving turkey..like if a turkey was one of those Somalian kids dying with flies all over their body and only one eye still working—imagine some gay dude trying to get off to that and you have some idea of what it would be like to try to get off to me. I browse around. The opportunities for women abound—if I was a girl I'd set up a sheet as a background and a sexy-looking bed and stick cucumbers up my ass. Cash would be rolling in. In my spare time I could earn my degree. But I'm not a woman and my body's worth nothing to sell. I only have weird mental talents that require acrobatics of matching and placement to monetize—acrobatics that I cannot do at this time. A programmer is worth nothing in a small town—the only place my skills are worth money is in an especially large or especially innovative company. There are none of those in Brattleboro. And my writing? It's probably been saving my life mentally, spiritually since about the fourth grade—and starting five or six years ago, it's given me a sense of meaning and purpose in my life—which to me is priceless. But in terms of money, in terms of value to others, it's worth nothing. Fuck, maybe I'll stick a cucumber up my ass anyway—just for fun. - - - - One day at Whit's, drinking dangerously close to my rent money, I ask Mike how old he is. "Thirty-one," he says. "Why." "You're *younger* than me?" "Why? How old are you?" "Thirty-three. Fuck. This messes with my whole conception of the day drinkers—excluding the professor. I'm the oldest of the day drinkers?! *Shit*, I gotta get my life together," I say. "You thought since I'm balding that I was older than you," Mike suggests. "Yeah, I did. Fuck." "Nope," he says. "Only thirty-one." "I feel like I have to be all wise and shit now when really I'm just a degenerate drinker on a check, unpublished writer, loser, freak—" "Don't forget drug addict," Mike says. "Thanks, I won't." Mike has a wife and a house and two cars and tens of thousands of dollars in the bank. I'm destitute, in debt, living off an unemployment check—and by living I mean barely maintaining a few loose relationships and drinking everything but my rent money. Mike buys my next drink. "You've been a good friend to me," he says. "Thank you," I say, and I genuinely nod. After Mike went home, I acted like I was going home but instead I went down the hill, turned left on Main Street, and went to Butch's bar (which was re-opened after the fire—he only had water damage). I think I mentioned I used to do this in Tucson—drink at one bar, then move to another, then another. Do three to five different bars in a day, that way no one bartender knows how much you're drinking. And if they do know, they can at least pretend not to know. When I drank at LA, me and my film school buddy and apartment mate—whose name was also Mike—stopped driving to the nice convenience store and started driving to this ghetto convenience store that looked like you were going to get shot every time you went in. It was within walking distance—I mean it was about a two-minute walk from our apartment. But we drove there anyway, both of us together, each of us alone. Sometimes one of us would make up to three trips to that same convenience store in the same day and it was the same guy—the owner—who was always working..*always*. So this guy knew exactly how much we drank. Mike's girlfriend and my old friend Courtney noted when all three of us dropped the pretense of buying regular-sized wine bottles and just went for the big fat honking Sutter Home's—merlot, cab, we didn't care. We'd buy two big bottles. "Tastes like shit but that's only the first glass," was Courtney's wise philosophy. She was right—after the first glass it didn't matter what you were drinking—it all tastes the same. One time we found Courtney face down on the dining room floor sobbing and yelling at herself. There was an empty bottle of Hpnotiq on the kitchen table, which I had bought. After that we disallowed Hpnotiq from the house. One time Mike went to the convenience store right before they closed—his second trip of the day—and as the owner was wrapping Mike's bottle of Smirnoff in a brown paper bag, the owner just looked at Mike with a sad face and shook his head. So that's why I went to Butch's bar that night after Whitman's—I didn't want anybody shaking their head at me, thinking about how much I was drinking. Butch wasn't there, but his second in command was, a sober bartender prob'ly sixty years old with a shaved head and a wife and a plan one day to open a bar of his own. I hadn't been there in months but he remembered my drink and didn't even ask—he just made me a gin and tonic with Bombay original. We smiled and shook hands. The only other person at the bar was this guy singing loudly with one earphone in his head, mixing music on a MacBook he had propped in his lap. He was a wild drunk. We talk. Go out for a smoke together. Decide to hang out. Etc. Like every other single guy I meet in Brattleboro, this guy claims to be a DJ and I'm like, whatever, everyone with a MacBook is a fucking DJ just by virtue of the software that it comes with. "You wanna hang out?" he says. I'm drunk enough to say yes. So we walk through bone-drenching cold to this guy's house, which is only a few blocks from my apartment. We drink—I have no idea what. We do a bunch of pharmaceuticals—I have no idea what, I just wanted to escape myself, you know, and alcohol doesn't always do it but the company of some strange insane Vermont DJ starts to do it. Standing in the cold on his front porch smoking cigs on top of all the alcohol and pills and talking about moving in together—that starts to do it. And then I learn that this guy is a counselor at the Refuge—the mental hospital in town—and I'm like, wow, this guy is counseling little kids in the daytime and at nighttime he's just *monsterchomping* prescription pills and showing strangers (me) these wicked remixes of Charlie Sheen "winning!" > *I was bangin' seven-gram rocks* > > *That's how I roll*—*winning* > > *I have one gear: GO*—*epic winning* > > *Are you bipolar?*—*I'm bi-winning!* > > *Win here, win there, win win everywhere* It was like every drunken night with every drunken stranger: you go from being complete strangers to best friends in five minutes and then you hang out and maybe fuck for six hours, then the next morning you're strangers again. I figured after he got me blackout high and said I could sleep in his bed and told me the pills would make me feel, "real relaxed in a few minutes" that we were going to do something sexual like at least suck each other's dicks but I just passed out on in his bed while he was still putting together the world's next great Charlie Sheen mix. When I woke up there was no sign that anything sexual had happened, which was kind of disappointing even though I'm not gay. Dude was zombie state next to be in bed, so I left and walked the cold walk home. Tooler and Issa were all excited that I hadn't come home. "We figured maybe you hooked up with someone." "Well, I went to this guy's house—" "Oooooh!!" Now they were really excited at the fact that their housemate might not be 100% straight himself. "But nothing happened." "Awwww." "But we already decided that he's coming over here tonight—I hope that's ok." "Oh, yes!!!" They were more than happy to facilitate me possibly getting laid. When he did come over, the four of us sat on the house's famed porch and smoked shisha and drank a little and then Tooler and Issa disappeared into their room and dude and I hung out on the couch but nothing happened. He had even less of a gay vibe than me—fuck, I was just desperate for any kind of attention I could get. It wasn't even really sexual, what I desired—it was more like intimacy. ### 24 Hypersexuality is a textbook symptom of bipolar mania. It was me flirting with Jill, me seeking out a sexual partner that would be unusual for me (the Charlie Sheen DJ), it was me wanting to have sex with most every little piece of pussy I came across, whether they were straight or gay or what. Jill and Whit's had an open relationship. Justine's boyfriend flirted with Jill, and I flirted with Jill, too. Jill was telling me the story about how she first discovered that Whit was colorblind. I was so drunk I don't remember exactly what words I said to her but I know I asked her if we could think about arranging a time when we could spend some time alone together and—you know—fuck. Jill raised her eyebrows and said: "Yeah, we can think about that." That's part of what I mean when I say I get manic in the summers. Flirting with Jill was certainly a manic thing to do—Jill's old enough to be my *mother*. This is another part of what I mean when I say I get manic in the summers: meeting some drug dealer in Whitman's and making a commitment to buy, crazily, even though I didn't have enough money to buy from him since I had drank it all that night. I had to sneak out of Whitman's under this drug dealer's nose and take the back streets home so he wouldn't follow me and figure out where I lived. Then I avoided Whitman's for days. I'm a magnet for drug dealers. They can find me and I can find them. Instantly. Any town. Any culture. I can just look at you and tell if you can get me drugs. And the reverse is true. If you're a normal person, and you don't do drugs, you won't be able to tell that I do drugs. But if you're a drug dealer or a drug addict, you can just look at me and tell that I'm your customer. I can't explain it—but it is true, undeniably. Drug people can just recognize each other like animals of one species know what animals are of that same species. A few days later I get paid again, figure it's safe to go back to Whit's. First I get shitface drunk. Then I meet some guy in Whitman's and then I'm meeting him in the grocery store parking lot, crossing the creek bridge to buy "coke" and "ecstasy" from this shyster. Getting home and it not even being cocaine or at least it was the shittiest cocaine I've ever tried—worse than Washington Square Park cocaine—and the "ecstasy" doing nothing to me. I laid in bed feeling terrible, hoping the ecstasy would kick in, hoping my roommates won't knock on my door and see me sweating my ass off—the only noticeable effect these drugs had on me. Just pretend I don't exist. Just pretend I don't exist. Drug use is a textbook symptom of bipolar mania. The uninformed think that drugs give you mental illness. Buy by and large that isn't true. Those people aren't doctors. They've never read textbooks on bipolar disorder. Half these people don't even know what mental illness *is*. They think homeless people ("bums"), drug addicts, alcoholics, and anyone who acts crazy is all just one big entity of *fucked up* that they want nothing to do with. They don't know the difference between *schizophrenia* and *borderline personality disorder*. If they have a relative who's sick, they just hold them at a distance and "send their love." Fuck 'em. If you've ever done drugs in your life, they are *certain* that the drugs are what caused you to be "crazy." They don't have the imagination or the knowledge to see that it's actually the other way around. People think their politics are why they got to where they did in life—like if they're successful in business, if they're a millionaire, they think it's because of their republican "values." They never imagine the reverse could be true: you became a republican because republican values suit the life that happened to you. You're not sick, so you don't need health care, so why should anyone? Uneducated people think the same way about drugs and mental illness. Yeah, smoking crack for twenty years is going to fuck up your brain—but that's not the same as mental illness. Doing drugs doesn't give you bipolar disorder—bipolar disorder (by the current most popular theory) is something you are genetically predisposed to that is kindled by traumatic life events. So two twins, where one has bipolar disorder, the other one won't, necessarily. There's lots of science that says that bipolar people are more likely to drink and do drugs (especially alcohol, cocaine, and sleeping pills) than people without bipolar disorder. There's no science that says any drug *causes* bipolar disorder. It's genetic—you get it from your parents. But your dumb-ass sheltered narrow-minded white college-educated uncle who works for ExxonMobil—he doesn't *care about science*—unless it's petroleum science. All he cares about is pretending that he's more of an upstanding citizen than you because you're a crazy drug addict even though *he's* the one taking blood money in exchange for destroying the planet. The reason people are so attracted to the idea that illegal drugs cause mental illness is that if that were true life would be so much simpler: just color within the lines and nothing bad will happen to you. Ehhh..sorry..not the way it works. The rain falls upon the good and the bad equally—I think it says that in the Bible. - - - - And me seeking drugs when I'm manic isn't theoretical. It's me straight-up asking a girl at a bar if she has coke and her looking at me, nodding, saying yes, wondering how I knew that of all the people in that bar, she's the one who could get it for me. But I can just tell. That one girl asking for a ride at Inferno and me saying maybe but I was drinking, her being all flirty, then I gave her my keys to go pick up her friend and I'm walking home that night and see she parked my car in a different lot (one where I got a ticket). The handle to roll up the window is broken. The car smells like cigarettes. This is from some fat crackhead in Inferno promising me she could get cocaine if I drove her home. Somehow I gave her my keys to run an errand or something, she came back, I told her I couldn't give her a ride and when I left the Inferno I saw she had moved my car from the stacked parking lot to an open lot—that was where I got the ticket. And there was an open baby diaper with shit on the hood of my Toyota. Did that bitch *change a baby* while she was out here?? Or was that some random crackhead, unrelated to this fat crackhead, who was just walking by and said *I'm gonna change my baby on the hood of this car*. And I'm like *what was I thinking?* So I drunk drive the car across the street to the proper lot. She says she knows where to get cocaine, which I want, but she never comes through and I just spend all night waiting for something that never happens. I see her later at a drug dealer's apartment and then, much later, begging for change outside Whit's, looking like she has no place to sleep anymore. There's your quick arc of the crackhead. - - - - And thinking of LA, and mania, and that Burger King where I yelled at the window and that stupid job at Optimistic Solutions. Learning to drive the one- or two-hour drive home from work. First night I did it, I stopped in a parking lot somewhere and called Shringara, to help me cope. Second night I stopped at Red Robin and ate and drank to chill myself out, drove home drunk, slowly with the rest of the traffic, and finally made it home. After that, over a period of months and years, I learned to put the moon roof down on my old-ass BMW, smoke cloves, listen to my Wu-Tang, and chill the fuck out. When I got to work in the morning, I parked in the last row of the lot, as far away from the office as possible, turned my music up, and smoked one or two more cloves just to chill out before I went to work. That was *me* time. That was something I didn't know about before. ### 25 And I think of me and Thomas' whiskey tour, from cheap to expensive, each of us sharing these tragic stories and I realize that it's possible for a person to be so influenced by an event from their life that they define themselves by the story they tell themself about that event. And it makes no sense. And we don't have to do it. We can let go. Those stories don't define us—we're actually much bigger than that. I'm walking down High Street—it's fully summer now—and the street is filled with parked cars and I'm wondering and wondering why and then I remember—cow parade!!! It's actually called The Annual Livestock and Farm Machinery Procession or something idiotic like that but all the locals call it "cow parade" and I've been looking forward to this day for a while. "You mean they just parade cows down Main Street and a bunch of people watch?" "Yep. They walk cows down Main Street and that somehow constitutes a parade in Buttfuck, Vermont." "Are you gonna be there?" This is me asking Walsh. "Fuck no. I'll be as far away from that as possible." "Doing what?" "Washing clothes at my mom's house." "You won't come to cow parade with me?" I whine. "It's not the 'with you' that's the problem, just so you know," she says. "But fuck no. You won't catch me within a mile of downtown on cow parade. All these out-of-towners, Vermont hicks that want to come see a tractor drive down a street so they can check out the fucking tractor engine. One tractor engine is like another tractor engine. Am I right? Am I right?" "I have no idea. Maybe I could come with you to your parents' to do laundry." "No. Go. You've got to see it once." Well, I was going anyway. I ain't that pussy whipped by Miss Walsh—I actually have to *get some pussy* before I get pussy whipped. Cow parade is exactly what everyone said: a bunch of out-of-towners clogging up the sidewalks and grassy hills along main street for about four blocks while people literally parade cows and sheep and pigs and other livestock *and tractors* and other farm machinery. Yes, they drive farm machinery down the street and sixty-year-old farmers get hard-ons. Remember, this is Brattleboro, Vermont, population *eleven* thousand. I took one look at it and decided to move on with my day. I saw Abby, my landlord. She told me my check bounced. Fuck. It was only a matter of time with me. I told her I would get her a new one asap and she said ok and she didn't seem too worried about it and we walked on. But it made me feel like a piece of shit. I went from upstanding citizen, deserving of enjoyment, to penniless loser in 19 seconds. I hated myself for mismanaging my money, or just for not having enough, or whatever. I don't know. I'm not a money guy. I don't balance checkbooks—never have. I just spend and have fun—to me that's what money's for. Darling Nikki was there with her dad, serving sausages. Nikki had on a blue checkered apron and the way she was sticking this fork into these sausages..well..everything Nikki did was sexual. This isn't just my imagination—she designed it that way. Every body position, every inflection, every facial expression..designed to make you think you were in bed with her *right that minute*. You've hear the phrase *bedroom eyes*? Darling Nikki had *bedroom everything*. I went up to say hi and she leaned her head back and shook her hair like she was in a shampoo commercial. Then she laughed and put a fork in one of the sausages and I was like fuck this I have to get out of here. I didn't want her to have any power over me, and every second I spent imagining her having sex, she had power over me. I saw a guy walking a pig. But that was normal. He lived in Brattleboro and always walked his pig. I wanted to go to Whitman's after cow parade but they were closed that day and I found myself feeling mad at them because I couldn't drink in their environment right at that moment. Entitled much? I went into the convenience store across the street and stood there for twenty minutes looking at the alcohol options. Everything bored me. I bought nothing and went home. You know what it was? I wasn't going to Whitman's primarily for the alcohol. I was going for the party. There was no party, and I'm not saying I won't drink alone..but I didn't that day. Kips being closed depressed the fuck out of me. I had to deal with the sunshine and the house I lived in and all the facts of live in Brattleboro that Whitman's helped me daily to avoid. - - - - Then Whit's decided to close on Sundays in general. Every Sunday. As in: I couldn't drink at Whitman's on Sunday *at any time of the day*. Previously they had moved the Sunday open time from noon to three. Now there were zero Sunday hours. Motherfucker. Hell to those of us who drank at Whit's seven days a week. It was almost like they were trying to send a signal to the four of us that we needed to occasionally sober up. Me, Mike, Walsh, and the Professor. And Mattson. Fucking Mattson. As Jill called his type: bonus people. Because as long as someone would buy him a drink, Mattson would tag along, even when the ownership, staff, and regular day drinkers didn't want him there. Mattson ruined Whit's for me more than the Professor did. Both of them would talk your ear off, each in their own distinct style. But I was why Mattson was there—part of the reason anyway—because I would buy that bastard a drink out of pity (or the Professor would), so it was always worth it for Mattson to stop by Whit's to see if any of his patrons were there. - - - - Also I was majorly fucked up financially at this time. Picture this: me driving to the food bank and getting food, my car breaking down in their parking lot. Me, barefoot, feeding the engine coolant to get it started for a little longer, just enough to make it back to the house, unload the food, and park it in the cheaper lot I was using now. When you get food at "The Walk-In Center," you answer a bunch of their questions, about what services you're there for, then about your living situation, income, drug addiction, then (believe it or not!) if you're a vegetarian or have certain ingredients you can't eat. You go from feeling like a cultural degenerate to a diner in an upscale restaurant. I mean if you have a gluten allergy these people *are not* going to give you food with wheat in it..lol..also the experience of going there for the first time is a little rough. The other clients are hanging out on the porch looking like they just walked out of the Vietnam bush and they know each other and are all friendly with each other, but they don't know *you*. You're a newly-needy citizen. You still have a car so you imagine they think you're not really all that needy even though it's a beat-up car that barely runs. Anyway you walk the gauntlet of these guys hanging out on the porch and they are *not* friendly when you say hi to them. They're sizing you up, for what purpose, I have no idea—but I feel like a Nickelodeon character tossing cheerful greetings to the inmates as I walk jauntily down death row. - - - - Then, to make my bounced rent check situation worse, I see Abby, my dutiful landlord, out and about in bars a few nights in a row *when I have never seen her out before the entire time I've lived here*. I owed her money and I was still going out drinking. In my mind, I didn't have enough to cover rent, so I figured I might as well drink the rest. But Abby never gave me a hard time or even said hi: she was like the queen bee in these places, guys all over her buying her drinks and trying to get in a little conversation. By contrast I was always by myself, one guy on a stool, drinking to get drunk. What are the chances, even in such a small town, of seeing her out three nights in a row. I felt like a schmo. And here's how stupid I am: I even sent @slashleen partial payment for using her *Don't get aids!* joke/Tweet in my novel, even though the phrase has been used before and was so generic I didn't have to pay her money to use it. But her Tweet is where I heard the joke and I felt a duty to support the artist I was borrowing from. I wished I could send her more then but pledged to send more later when I could (and I recently did, five years later). And that's great, I'm supporting the arts, giving credit where credit is due, but it exemplifies how I was taking care of others when I didn't even have enough to take care of myself. But that's my style, I guess: another internet purchase I made the same day was for Eldon, a drawing of a unicorn from *Blade Runner*. I knew the artist, and I will cherish that unicorn forever. I was killing my bank account at the ATM to go across the street to Whit's and drink. This is how it went for me at Kips, I drank under some kind of compulsion. I would make as many trips to the ATM as my bank account could handle. That was the only thing that stopped my drinking—running out of money. Other than that, my unemployment money went straight from the government to a tiny ATM in a tiny town in Vermont then into my bloodstream. One day I switched it up from G&Ts and drank some kind of potato vodka (which I loved but had also gotten me in a lot of trouble in LA). I drank it because I knew, unlike any of my regular drinks, potato vodka would *fuck me up* after just a few drinks and that's exactly what happened. I paid my bill at Whit's, walked across the street and sat on the steps of an old fire station and called a suicide hotline. A similar thing had happened to me in LA. "So how long do you have sober," asked this suicide line operator. "A year." "Yeah, well you need to get back in touch with a sponsor if you're still having suicidal feelings with a year sober." I was sobbing my eyes out into the phone. I'm sure everyone inside of Whit's could see me with perfect clarity. I wanted to yell the head off of this stupid suicide hotline operator. They always think it's about substance abuse. And yes, today I am drunk but I feel even *worse* suicidal when I'm sober. They don't understand how hard life is to live for me. Because for them, getting clean and getting a sponsor is all it took for them to get over their suicidality. They don't understand mental health, these suicide hotline operators—some of them don't. They figure everyone's a drunk and a little help from the Lord above will help any good straight Christian feel the love of life again. But they have never met me. And I didn't understand me, either. So I sat there on those steps and bawled my eyes out and took some company from the guy on the other end of the line without saying anything that would make him call the cops. I thought of Thomas standing inside Whit's, watching me, wondering how he feels about his part in this little sickness..but it's me putting down the dollars and drinking the drinks, no one else. You might think that I had had enough drinking for one day. You would be wrong. I pulled myself together, wiped my tears on my sleeves, went back to Whit's, and drank some more. - - - - One of the many assholes who hung out at Whitman's was a guy we all called BTO. I believed Jill had coined the term: Big Time Operator, or BTO, because this motherfucker always had his bluetooth in and his voice filled *the entire bar* with whatever impossibly ridiculous "business" plan he was putting together. When you talked to him and asked questions about his businesses, you could never get a straight answer. There were no specifics, no concrete players, no events or products that ever came through. But that did nothing to dull BTO's enthusiasm for his work—whatever that was. It required constant telephone conferencing, table slapping, *"Yeah!"*s and other exclamations, and at the end of one of these ever-successful telephone calls, BTO came from his table to the bar to celebrate with a drink. "It's karaoke night at the Inferno!" BTO booms. "I'm going down there later on if anyone wants to come with me." "Hey," Jill says. "What?" "You trying to take people out of my bar to go to another bar?!" "I'm sorry it's just—you don't have karaoke here. Do you think maybe we could get karaoke here?" "No. We tried that and it didn't work." "Well," BTO whispers loudly, "karaoke at Inferno tonight." Jill shakes her head. "I'm gonna stop letting you do business in here." "But where would I do business?" "I don't know! Do what most people do: get an office!" "But I don't want an office. I want here." "Then behave!!" Many drinks later, when it was dark, BTO had made his way around to my corner of the bar and he elbowed me. "Karaoke?" "No thanks." "You know you want to." "BTO. I've never done karaoke before and I'm not gonna start tonight." "*You've never done it before?*" "No and I have no interest." "Well. But. It's so much fun. Promise you'll do a duet with me." "Ok." "Do you promise?" "Yes, I fucking promise." "OH LA LA!! We've got a virgin here who just *fucking promised* to sing a duet with me at Inferno later." Jill says, "Is this true?" I shake my head and my eyes at the same time which somehow equals a *yes*. "I hope you know what you're getting into." "I'm sure I don't." "I'M SINGIN' A DUET WITH THIS MOTHERFUCKER!!" "Ok, ok. Shut up. I'll meet you over there later." "You better show up." "BTO. My promise is good." Jill says, "BTO. I guarantee his promise. If Matt says he'll be there, he'll be there." "Thank you." Jill puts her hand on mine. "I've seen you. I know you," she says. "And you'll have a lot of fun. BTO is great at karaoke." - - - - I was almost out of money at Inferno so I bought this cute fat girl a drink and after that she bought me drinks, then her friends did, then the cute fat girl was like fighting her friends to make sure she was the only one buying me drinks. I made it through the night on the promise of sex with this big girl, which I had no plan of following through on. I drank so much the whole day, my first time singing karaoke, with BTO, a song from *Grease*, I can't say I had more than two seconds of fear before it turned into addictive enjoyment of this previously-untried thing called karaoke. We sang *Summer Lovin'* and as soon as I was done I wished we were signed up twice, me and BTO, my big teddy bear business man, blasting songs from a musical that, sober, makes me want to puke. "It's addictive," isn't it? "Yeah, BTO. Thanks." BTO went one way and I went another. And who was at the bar all friendly with my fat girl? It was my mystery friend who I can't describe further but he hooked me up and 29 seconds later I was doing a line of coke in the tiny bathroom. That was maybe the extra ingredient that turned me using cute fat girl for drinks into me walking hand in hand with fat girl to her home, the hand-in-hand part meaning that we were definitely going to have sex when we got there. She was talking about it like it already happened. "As soon as I saw you at the bar, I *knew..*" "What did you know?" "That you were different. You were funny. You were *new*—I've never seen you around here before." "I moved here in January." "How come I never saw you and got to take you home for bedroom games before?" "I've been holed up in my room writing a book." "Oh. 'Cause I never miss a karaoke at Inferno. I don't have a roommate by the way. And my son's with his dad this week. So we have all night to make all the noise we want." The fat girl squeezed my hand. "I've been looking forward to your pussy," I say. She turns and looks at me. "What is that supposed to mean?" "I knew when you bought me that first drink that you were gonna give me your pussy and ever since I've been trying to think: What is fat girl's pussy like? Is it the pug-nose bulldog type? Is it is the long, slivery, no-inner-lips pussy? Am I gonna have to get in there with a crowbar? That type of shit." "You're high." "Just a bit. But I am gonna fuck the shit out of you." Our hands were all over each other's genitals even before fat girl could get her door open. My cock was fully hard all the way through the kitchen where fat girl fed us both some wine out of an open bottle on her kitchen counter ("I was pre-gaming it."), all the way up the stairs, all the way into fat girl's bed and all the way through the undressing cycle (which went quick) and all the way through the condom-application process (which fat girl performed) and all the way into her hot fat cunt which I fucked and fucked and fucked. I buried myself in that cunt and took all the heat and wet and tight it had to offer. I held onto that fat girl's face and kissed her and looked into her eyes while I fucked her and she squeezed her pussy muscles together to make it even nicer down there between her fat thighs. I fucked her and I thought of all sorts of people with nicer pussies and bodies and personalities that I'd rather be fucking but I gave her good action in the actual fat pussy I was fucking and I wished I was fucking her without a condom but what the hell. I grew tired and pulled out and then the instruction began. She put her fingers inside her and touched the top of her cunt and she was like: "If you get your fingers in here like this..two or three even..and get me going..we can have me squirting and have all sorts of fun. Here. Just put your fingers right her and you can rub me just right and I'll be squirting all over the bed and you can fuck me after I squirt and I'll be *so* hot and *so* wet for you. Here. Give me your hand. Like this. Put one finger in there. And feel that? That's my G-spot—" "I know!" "And if you get this other finger in here, right next to it, and then..yeah..this third finger..fuck..rub me like that..like that! You know all the G-spot is, is a big knot of nerves behind the clitoris—" "I know what a fucking G-spot is!" "Don't you want me to squirt?" "I don't want to feel like I'm in an instructional venue, fat girl, I want to feel like I'm in your bed and you just picked me up—a stranger—from the bar..and we're fucking..and if you squirt, you squirt. Am I not being good to you? Am I not stimulating your clitoris? Licking your pink little nips? Didn't I kiss you like a lover and now *I* sound like an instructor! I was going to lick your asshole but now I'm not sure I want to because we've talked about it first! I just want to..explore..you know..not wordlessly..I know verbal communication is a key ingredient to great lovemaking. But, you know, we just met. Can't our first time be sloppy and off-center and a little unsatisfying to both because it's so fucking *lustful* that we don't *do* everything right? I don't know. With you I feel like I'm in a classroom." At least she didn't cry. If that fat bitch had cried after my lecture I would have killed myself. She pulled me down on top of her and I laid there with my dick softening and I ran buy fingers through her hair. "I like you, fat girl." "Matthew, I like you too." We fell asleep like that. - - - - In the morning fat girl took the condom off and with my morning wood I fucked her and fucked her for my purposes only and I came in that fat girl's pussy and I came deep inside that fat pussy and I kept on fucking her all the way through my orgasm and cum was pumping out of the bottom of her cunt and dripping across her asshole onto the bed. I felt her pussy *owed* me that orgasm. I walked home in the sunlight, feeling extra light, and when I walked in the house Tooler and Issa rushed up to me. "Are you ok? We were worried about you?" "I worried you?" "We just wondered where you were..we were a little worried." "I'm so sorry I worried you. I should have called! I'm sorry. I didn't even think of calling! Oh no, Tooler, I'm sorry I worried you?" I half-hugged her. "Where were you?" "I slept over at a girl's house. Got laid!" Then everything was awkward. I wasn't sure why, if it was 'cause I slept with a girl or if it was because it wasn't Tooler or if it sounded like I was bragging or if it was just because I was inconsiderate and didn't call. But the vibe went way awkward. I was cracked out from not having had much sleep. I touched my face. "What?" Issa said. "I lost my glasses." "Call your girl," Tooler said. Tooler and Issa left the house to go to Tooler's work. I was glad, I didn't want to deal with the vibe. And of course, being a little older now, with a little more time to reflect, I know where that vibe came from. It was that Tooler didn't like how I said, "Got laid!" which was basically a brag, and she was disappointed in me that I wasn't on the pedestal of a nice guy who would never brag that he fucked a girl. Well, I don't happen to view sex as a conquest, it was just an exclamation of joy that I had had sex. I should have kept it to myself. The other reason it was awkward is because it seemed like I was bragging about it to my bros, but even though those two women accepted me into their house, Tooler and Issa were not exactly 100% my bros. I took a shower and went to sleep. It's funny what you remember about relationships. You might think it's cruel that I call that girl *the fat girl*. It's not an insult—it's just how I think of her. I never had sex with Rebecca but I remember she was an awesome kisser. I was with Rishi the longest and I don't remember what her breasts look like. I just remember that she yelled at me. ### 26 I didn't really want the Professor as my company, but I'm lonely and I take what company, what intimacy I can get. Everyone else has to work or go to school or run their business. The Professor and I drive around all day to stores buying things on each of our lists, cases of Pellegrino for me, yard tools for him, a certain type of fan he wants. We drive to Massachusetts and drink wine while the Professor does the crossword puzzle, trying to involve me. He asks me for help on every question and only extremely rarely am I of any use. The professor is disappointed because he knows I'm smart and he thought this general principle would translate into magical crossword skills. "I don't do crossword puzzles," I tell him. My favorite part of the skimpy cheese-and-cracker meals are the two or three glasses of wine we each have with our lunch, and my second-favorite part is our cigarette breaks outside, standing partially under the awning and partially under the giant black umbrella that the Professor brought just for the occasion. To me it only points out the generation gap: a) that he checked the weather in the first place, and b) that he owns an umbrella. My generation would just wear a coat with a hood. But it's ok. When he's not badgering the staff or attempting to impress everyone with his crossword skills, when it's just me and him, he's kinder, and we're like brothers. I think the Professor knew from the the very beginning that I would tolerate his injustice toward others, but that if he ever insulted me, even in jest, I would cut him out of my life. He was right. And he never insulted me to my face, though I'm sure he made jabs about me with Thomas about my craziness..me and the Professor's wild dinners and escapades. On these outings the Professor always informed the bartender that I was driving so not to serve me too many drinks, even when I wasn't driving. But one day he took me to a particularly nice restaurant in Mass, told the bartender this business about me being the designated driver, then the Professor asking me if I would drive us home, and once I agree he proceeds to get drunker than I've ever seen him. At first I drink bubbly water but sometime during the extremely fancy and exorbitantly expensive dinner I ask the bartender if I can have one of those drinks the Professor is drinking. The bartender serves me two or three, so I *am* drunk when we drive back to Brattleboro, just not nearly as drunk as the Professor. That night he was reeling me in like a fish. Playing into my weakness for steak, cigarettes, alcohol, and fine service at restaurants. We get out of this restaurant that just looks like a house and I drive us both in his Range Rover—extremely carefully—as far as the new Walmart, where Jimmy insisted we stop and buy limes for some crazy drink he felt compelled to make for me—"You just must try this drink." Then the asshole stood by the Range Rover smoking, gave me his wallet, and told me to get the limes while he smoked. I bought three limes and stole twenty dollars out of his wallet, gave it back to him and proceeded to drive us both to his house—which wasn't a house at all but a library outside of Brattleboro that he had bought and was living in. Half of it was still stacks, book after book on Slavic languages, and in the rest he had carved out an office, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bath. You know I just remembered a story. He told me about his gardener, a female college student who after she was done working the Professor's garden, would take spare clothes into his bathroom and take a shower, come out smelling and looking all fresh and clean. I wondered why he told me this story. I half-expected him to bust out some surveillance tapes he had of the bathroom, like he was watching her take her shower. But he didn't. He was either genuinely enthralled with the youth and sexuality of this young female gardener—even though he was obviously gay—or (and I consider this a real possibility, knowing him) he was telling me the story to turn me on, so I could have something straight to think about while he made his moves on me. Jimmy tricked me into sleeping at his house. As we near Brattleboro with him very drunk and me drunk driving, he says he really shouldn't be driving and would I mind driving him to his library and we could have a few more drinks and talk and crash. So I drove him to his house. Oh yeah, he also tells me he doesn't like to drive when it's dark—which is a legitimate complaint as the man is likely in his 70s. Now I'm at his house, without my car, and I'm stuck at Jimmy's house till morning when he can take me back into Brattleboro. How foolish I was. We sit in his living room area, watching the news, talking, drinking, smoking cigarettes. I showed him my language systems I'd developed, and he got really excited (genuinely, I think) because he's a linguist. He took a thorough look around some of what I'd done and sat back in his desk chair, looking up at me standing beside him. "You really impressed me with that. You don't just come across people in Brattleboro who have developed stuff like that—especially not someone so young. That really knocked me over, my friend." "Well don't knock yourself too far over. I could go for another one of those drinks—what are you calling them?" "You're mispronouncing it anyway!" Then after many drinks and a trip around the garden (where I was so drunk I just left my glass on a stone bench and decided I'd had enough for the evening), the Professor and I got friendly on the couch in his cutout of a living room, touching each other's hair and faces. Then we moved to the bedroom, kissed and got undressed and the Professor fingered my ass and I masturbated but wasn't able to cum, probably because I'm not really gay—but we worked ourselves into a frenzy. I tried to touch his cock but he wouldn't let me so I didn't know if he had something wrong down there or what but I let him do what he wanted to do, which was play with my asshole—and that felt good for me while I jerked my cock in his face and he told me how beautiful I was and I held him and told him how beautiful he was and I meant it. We slept together in his bed and everything is chill until the next day when he asks me to stay hidden because he's having a carpet delivered and he doesn't want the delivery man to know he has a young man staying over. So I hide in the bedroom for the two or three minutes it takes for this delivery to happen, and I wonder at a man so traveled, so refined, so educated, who can't stand the thought of his neighbors knowing he's gay—which they must already since I'm sure I'm not the first fly to wander into this particular spider's nest. There must be a new boy driving the Professor home in his Range Rover every night. We hung around in the morning briefly and then he drove me back to my apartment in Brattleboro. As I'm stepping out of the Range Rover on High Street he asks me: "Are you sure you don't want to hang out somewhere." "No. I'm done for. I'll see you around." He speeds off. The night before he had showed me the room in his library, downstairs, recently renovated, that he said I could live in if I wanted. And his fabulous library palace: me, wandering the stacks with my drink while Jimmy watched the news that night and I checked out books in languages I will never learn to read. Then Jimmy sticking his finger up my ass. Wondering if the Professor put something in my drink, but I didn't care, I had fun and I always like getting close to interesting people, even if it's not my exact flavor of fun. And after such intimacy, I couldn't stand being at the apartment alone—or with Tooler and Issa sleeping—so I wandered down to Whitman's and who was sitting on a barstool but the Professor. I went up to him and said hi. Then I bought a bottle of wine with the twenty I had stole from his wallet the night before. I thought for a while, trying to figure if the Professor had put something in my drink or not. In the end, I doubted he did. I think we were both very drunk and I didn't mind being sexual with him—it was fun. I enjoyed him sticking his finger up my asshole. I enjoyed him briefly sucking my cock. I wish I could have cum—it would have been satisfying for us both. But I'm not turned on by sex with men, I don't have relationships with men. It's like my friend Caroline: she's a lesbian but she's married to a man. She has sex with girls because she likes having sex with girls. And she fucks her husband because *he* likes fucking *her*, and she loves making him happy. Jimmy offers me a seat next to him at the bar, telling his other friend to move over a seat. But I take my bottle of chianti back to booth number one and open my laptop. I write sections of *Of Bicycles and Boardwalks and Oceans and Ships* (which I won't finish for another two or three years), then get drunker and more psychotic and write many crazy emails, in my usual style. I write to my father. How I hate him. How fucked up his actions have been toward me and my sisters and mom. I write to my ex-boss in LA and inform him that I am putting a curse on his company (which seems to have worked) that will limit his success to spending top dollar on lakeside offices while never turn a profit. The sun comes out and I see drug deals going on all up and down Elliot Street and I write to the Chief of Police of Brattleboro offering to be an undercover cop in which capacity I will singlehandedly bust the drug activity on that one street. I don't have the actual email since I deleted to preclude one of my drug friends finding it in my Gmail and murdering me but I can say it included phrases like: "don't ask me how but I have an eye for drug shit." "I am willing to die to clean up the drug activity on Elliot Street." "I am willing to go *deep,* deep undercover" etc. He never wrote me back prob'ly because he saw right through me as a drug addict looking for a way to do more drugs and get paid for it. I hadn't thought it through—I was drunk and out of my mind (my usual state for about 18 years somewhere in the beginning of my life there). I had very little conscious control over what I was doing. And if you're some druggie in Brattleboro who is now gonna try to seek me out 'cause I would have gone undercover and turned on you: a) You'll never make it out of Brattleboro. b) Like Joe Pesci says in Casino, "In the end I had to put his fucking head in a vice." That's what I'll do to you. "You make me pop your eye out of your head" like a fucking grapefruit!!?? I'll eat the skin off your face like rainforest ants on a Fla-Vor-Ice. Then I'll make your teeth into a necklace and take it to jail with me as a souvenir. So fuck you. And fuck you too. - - - - At some point in the future, sitting at the bar with that one musician guy and him talking about the Professor and saying: "Just watch your corn hole. That's all I'm gonna say." (The Professor is a friend of their family and he's been to their house for Thanksgiving.) I start talking about being friends with the Professor and this musician guy asks if I've ever been to his house. I say, "I have but he didn't make a move on me." "You've been to his *house??* Did you *stay over*??" "No." "Just watch your corn hole." This led me to believe that musician dude and the Professor had been together. And the more I looked, the more I noticed that the Professor was always sitting with a different guy at a different bar. They were all in their twenties or thirties. They all claimed to be Jimmy's driver—or Jimmy claimed this. He couldn't see, so he needed a driver. He was too drunk, so he needed a driver. Yeah right. I think back to my first night drinking with the Professor versus what I know about him now. Even back then he was trying to get me to sleep with him. He was a master manipulator, though, and he excelled at projecting the most odious personality while still keeping people around. He would say just enough of the most horribly offensive things you'd ever heard, that you wanted to slide over a seat, away from him at the bar. But he was also the most intelligent person I'd met in Brattleboro—I could have technical discussions about languages and symbols and all sorts of other things that no one else in the borough had any interest or patience in. He was the only person I could really talk to..and also the only person whose mind and speech were so offensive that I couldn't stand to hear 95% of what he had to say. The Professor interleaved these poles intentionally because he enjoyed making people uncomfortable (it was a power he could exert over them) and he, like me, had a psychological need for the company of anyone near as smart as him. He was starved for conversation, and I gave him the best conversation he could find in Brattleboro. When we talked, he confided in me how others were of a lower intellectual class. Thomas, for instance, he insulted for his excessive talk of New York and inability to properly make drinks. But what was really wrong with Thomas, to the Professor, was that Thomas bored him. I did not. And that's why I ended up on so many outings with the Professor—with me he could have decent dinner conversation, and I was pliable enough sexually to allow myself to end up in his bed. Walsh was hardly interested in sex and mainly interested in drugs. Thomas was almost always working. Mike stopped going to bars eventually at the advice of his lawyer. Stripes (who you'll meet later) had a boyfriend and I was in too weak a psychiatric position to even stay in Brattleboro to see what could have happened between us. And Gretchen, Gretchen (you'll meet her later, too)—she was never my friend—she was only a fan. She bought every available book of mine online, read them all, and gushed to me in the basement of the new Metropolis that I had written things down that previously she thought had only been thought in her head, that I had somehow captured *her* individual experience even though we grew up in different states in different towns at different times. I hadn't the heart to tell her that the secret to that particular bit of magic is that people, everywhere, aren't all that different from one another. I could never talk with Gretchen as an equal because she was a fan of my books and my thoughts and me in general. She was obsessed. It was one sided. Therefore, we were never friends. Don't think I'm trying to make the point that the Professor was my best friend in Brattleboro. We used each other and had a good time doing it. We were adversaries more than friends. The relationship was constant manipulation on both sides. But he was the only person in town who I could be my whole self with, mentally, physically—anyone else would have glazed over if I told them about a language system I had invented with my sister. But the Professor pulled up my website and we looked at the system together. He asked questions, we had detailed logical discussions, and at the end he leaned back in his swivel chair and told me that was the most impressive thing he'd seen in decades. Then we got idiotically drunk and had sex, so maybe he was just saying that to get me to bed. But I don't think so. I think we were probably the smartest people in that 11,000-person town, and that made us a strange, strange set of friends. - - - - I stopped the relationship, though, or put it on pause, by just never calling him or calling him back. I didn't want us to be sexual. But one night I got lonely and the Professor was my only friend, I thought, so I called and asked if I could come over, he said of course, and I walked all the way to the cheap parking lot I had moved my car to and discovered that the battery was dead. I called the professor and told him I couldn't come over that night, hoping he would offer to pick me up but he didn't. And I walked back to my apartment and was sad and glad at the same time. My only friend was someone I couldn't stand to be around. And it had been this way my whole life, from kindergarten on up. I'm too judgmental, too sensitive, too attuned to others' faults. I can't just relax and have fun unless I'm on drugs. For a moment I really missed the Professor. I knew our relationship wasn't right, but I needed a friend. Also I wanted someone to drink with, and I knew he had booze. ### 27 The next time I was in the Inferno I was shooting the shit with the bartender/owner and I was like: "I sang karaoke for the first time in your bar!" And he was like: "Right on!" And I was like: "That shit is addictive!" And he was like: "That's what I've heard." And I was like: "Could'a had something to do with the lines of coke I was snorting in the bathroom!" Then he gets all serious: "Don't tell me that. You didn't tell me that. Seriously. Don't do drugs on my premises." He walks away. I guess my Matthew's SuperfunLand Tent rules don't extend to the entire rest of the world. Fucker. You own a bar. What do you *think* people are doing in your bathroom? I was mood quashed by the owner of this fucking place so I found the fat girl and was like, "You want to get out of here?" So I take her upstairs to Emo's apartment. Emo rents a room there while these other two guys just buy and sell drugs all day and play video games. We walk in. "Emo!" "Matthew Temple. How are you?" "Great. But I got eighty dollars I want to turn into some coke." "Right this way," Emo says, and he leads me to the man that can make it happen. "*Eighty* dollars??" "Yep." "Oh, man, you don't know how much this is really gonna help me out. We have like no cash. You can really do eighty dollars?" I nod. "Alright, get comfortable, my man, you wanna play some video games with my roomie, go ahead. I'll have this ready for you in two minutes." I give him the eighty bucks and soon fat girl and I are in the dining room (no table, no chairs, just a rolled up rug, an overhead light, a wood floor and a couple of cokeheads). Me and fat girl do some lines, share with Emo, and then I do a bunch more lines. Fat girl wants to leave and go fuck. "You like having your little pussy fucked by me, huh?" And ninety-thousand other dumb-ass things to say to a fat girl. I look over and the main guy has a needle—he's shooting it, and he must already be high because he's handling a fat shot of coke without much reaction. I thought back to LA. I wanted to shoot it even though there weren't any clean needles that I knew of. But I didn't even approach him about that because I knew if I started that again, I wouldn't be able to stop. I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy. They were all partying down and all happy that I bought eighty dollars worth of coke—they needed the cash that bad. - - - - I remembered the last time I shot coke and h and crystal meth back in Hollywood. It is sort of exciting to load a syringe with a certain amount of heroin and know that three or four times that amount would kill you..so you double the amount to get a really good high, and you know you're in the danger zone, you realistically think: *this might get me high or it might kill me*. And you shoot it. Seeing that guy shoot coke, I knew I had to leave, so I packed up my sizable bag of powder and took fat girl's hand. I went home with her again, the one who would direct me in the bedroom to finger her pussy in a certain way. "You missing these?" she said, holding up my mangled glasses. "They were in the couch cushion." Must have been lost in there while we were having our monster pre-sex make out session—I did love kissing her. I loved it more than sex, with her, I just loved making out on the couch like teenagers. After a while we went upstairs. I had to speak to her: "During sex, telling your partner what you want is fine. But I don't want to feel like I'm watching an instructional video." "Ok." "I know where your G-spot is..right here, huh?" "Uhhhh.." "Now I'm gonna fuck your G-spot and touch your G-spot with my fingers any time I want. I don't necessarily want you to squirt. I might. I might not. But you know what I want to do now?" She shakes her head, eyes pointed up at me, hands on my bare cock, thumb rubbing a bead of precum in to the head of my dick. "I'm gonna fuck you like you've been a nasty nasty girl and I caught you fucking my coke dealer and now I need to show you who this pussy belongs to, ok? Do you think you need to learn a lesson?" Fat girl starts sucking my cock. I can feel her pussy wet. I push her head back. "Now turn over and press your face into that pillow 'cause what I'm about to do to you might hurt you at first, ok bad girl? Is this what you wanted?" She nods like the nasty bitch she is. "The turn over and put your face in that pillow." I held her neck with one hand and pumped her good like I was riding a camel or a donkey. The bed was like a Slip 'N Slide when I was done with her. She was grateful to fuck and jerk my cock until I came in her nose, all over her lips, in her eye. - - - - It was tough to get off with fat girl in her pussy though—it was a lot of work. It was the same with this fat girl from LA, the costume designer. And it wasn't their pussy. It was just that they weren't sexy to me and I that's why I had trouble cumming with them. I know they had trouble cumming with me, too—I was a little overweight myself and I don't have any kind of monster cock so it was second-class sex, sex between strangers. The LA girl said to me on Christmas eve that it was very intimate sex..yeah, I looked you in your eyes and held your face in my hands and pretended that your cuteness was the cuteness of Rebecca, who I never got to fuck. And that let me enjoy fucking your fat little pussy *to a point*, but it was never enough to get me off while I was drinking. Only once I sobered up and had my morning wood could I cum in these women. While I mention that I'm fucking fat girls, and it's the fat girls in bars that are approaching me, let me mention that at the height of my weight gain, I weighed 215, partly due to the antipsychotic Risperdal, which makes you extra hungry. But when I fucked both of those fat girls, I didn't have Risperdal as an excuse—I was just overweight. Not obese, but overweight, and yet through some form of reverse body dysmorphia, I thought I was my healthy weight and making a concession to fuck this woman who in my twenties I would never even considered a sexual object because of her weight. Back then I had choices—I fucked almost every woman who was my friend (and some who weren't). Etc. But they were all skinny and hot. Sex was always hot was when I was eighteen, nineteen—fucking Ashley the first time I fucked anyone, feeling like intercourse was *perfect*—like it was designed to feel this way. *Damn.* Fucking Charisma's perfect pussy so tight I couldn't help but cum in her the first time we fucked *and every time we fucked*. I would wake that girl up four times a night to cum in her. Deidre's perfect pussy, her perfect ass—we fucked twice a day for four months and then she dumped me because she "needed to be with herself." Maybe she was tired of cheating on her husband. Maybe it was because I was too crazy—that was the reason she told my friend, who later told me. But I don't care about any of that—I loved Deirdre and I always will. The point is Deidre's pussy was *perfect*—I'm not going to go into the details—but compared to the pussy back then, fat girl pussy, mom pussy..it's just never been the same. I don't think it's the pussy itself—it's the personality. I need that spark. The fat girl didn't have it. Walsh had the looks but not the spark. The only person in Brattleboro who I wanted in every way, who I would have done anything for, never expecting anything in return, was—I know you think I'm gonna say Justine, but it's not—it's Stripes, from the Refuge—my fellow suicidal—one of the few truly cool people in Brattleboro. And, yes, of course I would have fucked Justine—fucking little twenty-one-year-old minx—if I had ever got up the nerve to ask her, and if the wild part in her had said yes. Faith—bipolar Faith, from the Refuge—was a whole other thing. If I hadn't sold my car, I would drive up to Rutledge, collect Faith, then drive across the country with her, Rainbow and Clyde style. We might have sex—we might not—but we'd be totally crazy, totally wild, and totally bipolar. Back then girls were sucking my dick in the Burger King parking lot, sucking me off while I was driving. Now, it's probably been ten years since a girl made me cum with her mouth, or I really got to get a woman off with my mouth and my fingers so good she was grabbing my head and screaming and cumming in my face. - - - - Well a one day in ole Brattleboro I was strolling by Tooler's shop and I stopped in and I said: "Tooler, have you had lunch?" And she said, "No." And I said, "Me either, but I'm thinking of getting something good." And I left. And 15 minutes later I came back with sushi platter on top of sushi platters and I unloaded this sideways paper bag all over the sales counter and Tooler's face turned pink and she smiled and said: "You remembered." "Tooler, how could I forget?" So we mmm'd and aaah'd and ate our way through enough sushi for about six people. "This is fucking extravagant. How much did this cost?" "Look, I'm an extravagant person and I'm so extravagant, in fact, that I did't get a receipt so I have no idea how much it cost but I'd say let's enjoy ourselves before a meteor hits the Earth or something, eh?" Tooler and I cheers'd with a piece of sushi each and ate up. "You full now?" "I'm *stuffed*." "Do you require anything?" "Matthew, thank you, I'm fine." "I'll bring you anything you like, Tools, offer good one day only." "You've done enough," she smiles. "Alright," I say. "Well I have a full day of drinking planned and I have to leave—" (I check my nonexistent watch.) "—oooh! Five minutes ago! See ya!" and I run out the store, dump the trash in a street side can and head my little ass up to Whit's. "Matthew!" It's Tooler's voice. She's leaning out of her shop and she says: "It's a nice day." "That it is." "I was thinking shisha with you and Issa." "Like after work?" "No, like..now. Would you go get her and the gear and bring it down here?" "Yes I will." Tooler jumps up and down and claps. "Are you sure?" "Tooler, this is your day. Anything you want, we're making it happen." So I drag a grumpy Issa out of bed (this is 1pm or so) and we take the hookah, some blueberry shisha, a container of ice, charcoal, a decent lighter, and we huff it down the hill from our apartment to Tooler's shop. Then the three of us set up chairs and smoke ourselves up right in front of this t-shirt shop where Tooler works that never has any customers and people are slowing down their cars and going, "Right on, man!" and people are stopping on the sidewalk and asking us what that is and Tooler and Issa trade off explaining what shisha is (flavored tobacco) and we generally enjoy the weather and the fact that we survived Vermont winter and Israel security forces haven't come after Issa and she hasn't been deported and I finished my book and Tooler's masters program is going well and then the cops show up. One cop. He walks up to us. We all roll our eyes. He says, "What's in there?" We say, "Shisha." He says, "What's the flavor? It smells like.." "Blueberry," Tooler fills in. "It's perfectly legal." "Oh yeah, it's legal," the guy says. "But that doesn't stop people from calling into us and saying there's kids smoking pot on the sidewalk in downtown. You know these people, they got nothing better to do, they don't understand shisha—" "You want a hit?" Tooler asks. She holds the pipe out to him. "No thanks." "It's really good." "I can smell that. It smells incredible. Anyway, I'm not harassing you or anything, I just had to come down to check it out since we were getting so many calls." "This is my shop so we're legal sitting here, too," Tooler says. "I know. You're well within your rights and I say more power to ya. If it was me we would decriminalize everything." "Fuck yeah." "I mean look at the Netherlands," this cop says, and she and Tooler go off on a political discussion a mile wide and three fathoms deep. How deep is a fathom anyway? Do you know? I have no clue but it sounds deep. Anyway they go off on drug policy and human rights and the overcrowding of American jails and then this guy has to leave and the fact that the police came up to us while our fellow citizens were complaining *and he didn't do crap* made us feel like we owned Brattleboro—or at least ourselves, at least our little hookah and three squares of sidewalk, just for 30 minutes. Plus it always gives a true American a warm fuzzy feeling when a cop shows up and nobody gets killed. Tooler, Issa, and I all get cravings for junk food. I drive to McDonald's, we get food and drinks, then I drop the two of them at Tooler's work. I drive to our apartment and see they forgot their Cokes when I dropped them off. There's really no place to park around there so I walked those two Cokes into town so Tooler and Issa would have the appropriate drink for their junk food. That was my good deed for the year. - - - - What follows may be mania. I didn't have any money, but I went anyway directly from Tooler's work over to Whit's where I proceeded to order a string of drinks I could not pay for, hoping that the Professor would offer to pay. Consider that for a second. Ok, yeah, that's crazy. Mike is there, we're smoking it up and jabbing and Thomas is tending bar and I figure I'll just sneak out on one of my smoke breaks and pay Thomas next time I get an unemployment check. That was my plan. Then a certain mystery gentleman who I'm actually combining with a number of master gentlemen around Brattleboro who had their own personal coke for snorting or they sold it, or both. One of these mystery gentlemen comes into Whit's and makes a certain facial expression which I have no trouble interpreting. It means: *get up, leave your drink and these drunks and come with me to my apartment just down the road and we'll snort massive amounts of coke!* So I get up, I ignore Thomas yelling at me to pay my tab and Mike yelling at me that I have an open tab at Whitman's (a no-no) and ignoring the Professor inviting me to his place and then somehow the Professor is driving his Range Rover very slowly beside the four of us who were going up to an apartment for some sniff and the Professor is yelling at me that I had committed to go with him to his house (which was true) and this was no way to treat your friends (which was true, but I justified by saying the Professor wasn't really my friend—which was true too). I just walk out, completely drunk, ignoring all this yelling at me and I go do coke in the upstairs apt with people I hardly know. - - - - When we're doing introductions the main guy asks me what my name is. "Matthew Temple." He reels back on the couch and looks like satan himself just sat down on the couch next to me. "That's my old name," I say. "I changed it to Inhaesio Zha and I usually go by Zha now." "But it was Matthew Temple before?" "Yeah." "How long have you lived in Brattleboro?" "Like six months." "Are you an actor." "No," I say, confused. "Don't use that name. I almost just kicked you out of my apartment. There was a Matthew Temple who lived here before. He screwed a lot of people over and moved to LA to be an actor," this guy says. "Zha. Definitely go by Zha." And after this confrontation he finally offers me the wimpiest possible line of coke after everyone else has had two and three lines—everyone's big buddies with each other except me—so I do the line and go into his bathroom and take a nasty shit. If you want to take the nastiest shits possible, drink liquor and do cocaine—you'll surprise yourself. My drinking buddy Mike calls me from Whit's and is like: "What happened dude, you disappeared." And I'm like, "I don't know." And he's like, "You're doing coke, aren't you—decided not to go with the professor." And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, Wise choice. Anyway, bud, I thought I'd call you to let you know that you left an open tab at Whit's." "I did?" "Yeah." "And I don't know if you know..Whit and Jill are cool with a lot of things, but leaving an open tab is not one of them." "Ok, thanks Mike, I'll be over there in a few minutes to take care of it." "Uh..no you won't. You're high on coke, dude, you're gonna be *right where you are..all night long*." I was quiet. I really fucked myself up at Whit's. "Alright, well, cya dude." Mike clicks off. The guy whose house it is introduces me to his girlfriend. "Juliet." "Matthew." You're gonna recognize a pattern here but Juliet looks like someone I'd like to fuck and more to the point she is way to good for mystery man and I can't see *anything* about this hyperactive asshole that would attract a girl like Juliet while I was still fucking fat girls. They all do lines and completely ignore me—just don't offer me any when it would be my turn and I'm like: *I didn't come over here to* buy *coke, I came over here to* do *coke with my new friends—right?* I just sat there on the couch. No one would even talk to me. Occasionally Juliet would cut me a tiny little half-line and motion me to the kitchen to snort it. The guy said something about the stinky shit in the bathroom and I wanted to be like, *What are you, some high-class coke-doing motherfuckers because when I did coke back home in Ohio we were like doing it till our noses wouldn't* snort *coke anymore and we were snorting our phlegm all up our sinuses in front of each other—it was disgusting—am I among* high-class *coke motherfuckers in Brattleboro, Vermont?* Juliet was the only one who would give me the time of day except after a long while mystery man sat down on the couch next to me saying he wanted to hear about my programming stuff and he shoved a MacBook in front of me but soon the computer was on his lap and he was the one doing all the talking. He was a DJ, too—he played me all his mixes and I nodded and said they were all amazing. It got dark and Juliet was leaning over me to yell at people outside through their open window. We ran out of coke. I was so frustrated sexually and offended by these people's inability to integrate with a new person that I finally decided if there wasn't going to be any more coke that I was leaving. "So. Can we do some more coke?" I said. Might as well be forward and direct. "We can buy some if you have money." "I don't have any money." Apparently not a single other person in this apartment did, either? "I can call and see if my unemployment check came in. If it did I could get some cash." From the moment I said that, every motherfucker in that room was my friend..until the moment I called my bank and discovered that my balance was still negative. We went back to having no coke and I went back to being a nobody. I'm a guest in these people's house and they're bugging *me* for dough for more cocaine? That's how this shit works—everyone's a fucking taker. ### 28 One morning Tooler wakes up all chipper and she says: "Today I'm going to teach Issa to drive!" That night when I come home, Tooler and Issa are sitting on the couch. There's no Subaru in the driveway. "Where's your car?" "Well, we might need to talk about borrowing *yours* for a while." "What happened to yours?" "Ah..Issa..kind of crashed it." "Are you two ok?" "Oh yeah we're fine." "Oh, good, well that's the most important thing," I say. "But now we have no car." "You can use my car no problem—it's a piece of shit but..oh my god..I'm glad you two are ok!" Tooler and Issa stand up and we do a group hug. "It was kind of scary." "Was it?" "The car *rolled*," Issa says. "Like it rolled down a mountain," Tooler says. She has tears in the bottom of her eyes. "Oh, Tooler!" "Like..if it had rolled one more time it would rolled *off* the mountain." "Oh my god, Tooler, I'm so glad you two are here, safe. I'll give you the keys to my car—use it all you want, I never use it. It's got some problems and expired tags—" "But it's not totaled." "Oh, geez, you know, one thing happens and you can roll off the side of a mountain," I say. "I bet you weren't thinking that when you left the house this morning. Tragedy, you know, it's always someone else until it happens to you." "Well it could have been a whole lot worse." "I'm glad it wasn't." "There was a tree." Issa makes a pinching motion. "It was a tree this big and it was holding us from the mountain." I hug her, tiny little Issa. And I realize I love these two. Poor Tooler: she's just trying to give Issa a chance to learn to drive and Issa almost kills them. And Issa: poor her because she has to live with the responsibility. We all chilled out the rest of the evening and gave each other glad-you're-still-alive looks. The next day while Tooler worked, Issa and I went on a mission to put a new battery in my car. On the way to get the battery, I asked Issa if she wanted to get a drink. "Uhhh.." "Let's just get a beer, take a moment, reflect on the world as it is." "Alright, Matthew, if you want to get a beer I will get a beer with you." When we sat at Whit's she said, "That's not a beer!" "No," I said. "That's a gin and tonic!" We clinked glasses: her Guinness, my gin. Issa was quiet till the end of her first beer. Then she opened up. "There's this girl. She's in California. And when I went to California—Tooler does not know this, and you can't tell her, swear." "Ok." "Swear." "I swear I will not tell Tooler anything as long as you swear never to tell Tooler you told me, if this ever comes out." "I swear," Issa said. "I slept with her in California. This girl." "I see." "Yes. And I'm planning on moving to California to be with her after..after Tooler makes me a citizen." "What's she like?" I said. And Issa bloomed, telling me all about this beautiful girl from California and how with her and Tooler they didn't have the sexual spark but between Issa and this California girl..they had the spark. Issa told me that all day long, even when she's in bed with Tooler, she's chatting on her netbook with the girl from California, making plans and sexting and shit. "I feel bad," Issa said. "What good's feeling bad going to do you? Just do what you do, respect Tooler as much as you can, don't hurt her if you can avoid it—" "If I can avoid it." "Well maybe you can't. Tooler will survive." "Tooler will survive," Issa said. "Do you want another drink?" she asked. "It's on me." "It's definitely on you 'cause I don't have any money." Issa punched me in the arm. But she bought us drinks. - - - - We bought a new battery for my car, carried the heavy thing a few blocks from the automotive store to my car, borrowed tools from some Harley dudes, and installed the motherfucker. Hearing the car start was a relief: my piece of shit car wasn't quite a piece of shit yet: it still had life in it. After we got the car fixed, Issa and I stood on Elliot Street gawking at the high school girls. "We both have this in common," Issa said. "What's that?" "We both like pussy." I laughed. "And you like it very young," she said. "So do you!" "But I'm twenty-three!" "So!" "So you're ten years older!" "Ahh. Who cares. I don't fuck little girls, I just like to look at their asses." "And their vagina lips," Issa said. "With this Spandex, you can see their.." "I know! They show you everything. You can see the fucking outline of their vagina lips, you know practically everything about the girl and you're still on the street in broad daylight. You've got a perfect picture of her labia." "That's good, I guess." "Why?" I say. "So," says Issa, "you know what you're getting into. Maybe you like fat labia, maybe you like string bean labia—" "String bean labia! I'm going to tell Tooler you said that." "Don't you dare." She punches me in the shoulder, this time harder. Yeah Issa and I stood around Elliot Street for a while and discovered we had the exact taste in women: young, little titties, and fat labia. We congratulated ourselves on how sick we were sexually, and made up some fantasies about what the two of us could do to some of these young girls, tag team. It was pretty sick shit involving military-style torture and animals and..well..let's just say Issa and I were in the same gear when it came to what we wanted to do to the 13 year olds of Brattleboro, Vermont. - - - - I taught Issa how to drive, in my Toyota, in the days after we fixed the battery. We practiced on the top level of the municipal parking garage. Six levels up there weren't many cars, only some teenagers using the sunset to make hand puppets on a nearby building. I didn't figure practicing on the side of a mountain was a good idea (no offense to Tooler's method) so we just drove forward and backward the length of the parking lot over and over again. Issa quickly bored of this and our lessons ended. Tooler went back to teaching her on the mountain. On one of their lessons the engine started to smoke, and kept smoking even though they added antifreeze from the bottle I kept in the trunk. I said, "Well, that car's been through a lot. I used to drive it from Tucson to LA and back all the time and I drove it all the way across the country, so..I mean..it's on its last legs." "Do you think it's fixable." "Sorry, I know nothing about cars." One day it gets especially bad, smoking and lurching and they drop it off at the auto shop literally one house away from where we lived. The next day I walk over and without any identification say my housemate Tooler dropped my car off and he says they drove it around the block with no problems and he handed me the keys—no charge. That was good for me cause I still had no money. In fact the whole house seemed to be having problems in that department. I noticed that instead of two containers of laundry detergent beside the stairway washer/dryer, there was just one, and I figured Tooler and Issa were using Maggie's detergent, too. Actually there were more concrete reasons to think that none of us had money. Tooler and Issa started getting tons of free food from the government because Issa was a political refugee. I was getting food at the place where Brattleboro homeless people go to shower etc. (the Drop In Center). We all shared together, everything. One night I cooked for Issa and Tooler. They said they want to keep the house through their summer trip to Atlanta (first I learned of it). They didn't know if Abby would allow them to sublet. I said it will work out somehow. Issa spoke of the three of us going to Egypt together, and the two young women said *how would they ever find a housemate like Matthew* if they did switch houses at some point. I grabbed their hands and I think the sentiment was clear: it is mutual. - - - - Then in a very selfish move I sold my car for drinking money. I paid Issa back for the battery and Tooler for some fixes she'd made to the engine and I sold the car to Donald Mutebe (Darling Nikki's ex-husband) for $600. I drank that in a few days, buying drinks for Walsh of course. I said: "Walsh, from now on, as long as you and I are sitting in the same bar, you will never pay for drinks again." Mutebe was obsessed with the aesthetics of the car. His African eyes must have seen my junked-out Toyota Corolla as some antique cultural symbol. He had a job. The $600 was nothing to him. But to me, to have unlimited cash for a few days at Whit's, the cash-only establishment that I loved to haunt a thousand times more than my own bedroom, I thought giving up my car was a good deal. I wasn't planning on going anywhere. ### 29 Fully manic now, done editing *HARD*, no project to tie down my mind, I decided to dye my hair orange. I went into the salon and *took over*. I was ultra-friendly with *everyone*. I was assigned a stylist. And we had fun. Boy, did we have fun. It ended up costing three times what I expected but that was normal for my spending sprees. I wanted *the whole thing* dyed orange but they did this little *partial orange* thing which was way more upscale. What I wanted could have been accomplished in my bathroom for twenty dollars—this, with all the various services and pigments and whatnot was like two-hundred sixty-five dollars! But I was having fun. Great fun. Big fun! My own brand of insanity where no one gets hurt, everyone has a good time, and we all come away feeling more alive, and feeling more of what life has to offer—the joy that can be felt down to each particle. *That's* how I felt. I was talking to my stylist, asking her all about her life and her boyfriend. I was talking to the owners, where they were from and how they had come to start this business. We had so much fun doing my hair that day. I walked in saying, "Fix me!" (The haircut girl at the previous place I went destroyed what was left of my awesome shatter cut that I had gotten my second day in Brattleboro.) I felt like I was right there at the lake that my stylist and her boyfriend went to. On subsequent dates I would bring in my laptop with pictures I had collected, and I asked her to cut my hair to look like some movie star or Beckham, and I finally shaved my head that fall, which broke my stylist's heart. She was totally mad at me!—But that's what I wanted to go with my new diagnosis, my new fall lifestyle: no drink, no drugs, no hair, some kind of cross between a monk and a prisoner. But on the day of orange hair I was buying everyone (like me and three people) drinks at Whitman's. I guess something about this or my hair or my energy caught Walsh's attention but she didn't let on until later that night. A woman at the bar asks me if she can be honest with me and I say yes. She says my hair is "hideous." I say, "Well thank you very much for your opinion. That was riveting. Do you feel better having told me that?" "Yes, very," she says, and turns to leave (hopefully to pull the stick from her ass). I yell after her, "Glad to help!" Then I leave the bar, manic, buying zillions of used DVDs at the record store (too many to carry), a sex toy (artificial pussy), food, jewelry, drink—spending all my money in one day. Going out again that night. Seeing Walsh. Wow. Maybe seeing Walsh for the first time. Walsh wasn't a fat girl. She was a fine girl. We fucked after a night of drinking at Whit's, smoking out front, and smoking pot at her painter friend's house who was high and she and the other three female bartenders had quit the hippie bar *en masse* in protest of the owner making sexist and abusive remarks toward them. He would just sit at his own bar all day and heckle his own bartenders! So even though there were no other jobs in Brattleboro, these four women banded together and quit—it was a power move like no other. Walsh's ex-boyfriend saw us after we left the painter friend's house, drunk, high on nicotine and THC, as Walsh and I passed in front of Whitman's and this dull-looking ex-boyfriend said—I remember precisely: "Go get fucked." We went to Walsh's apartment and watched *South Park* while we did lines of the coke I had brought. We watched infinite episodes of *South Park* and smoked infinite amounts of pot and my mouth got all dry kissing her softly on the couch before we went into the bedroom. After Walsh and I had been sitting on her two-seater couch with her accepting my tentative kisses, Walsh gets up and says, "Well I'm going to bed." She moves into the hallway. I stand. "Can I come with you?" And she nods, raises her eyebrows, shrugs, like—*yeah!* And she goes into her bedroom. And I follow. And she says close the door. And she says turn the light off. And I get on top of her. And I start taking off her clothes. And my dick is instantly hard. And it gets down to that moment were the only piece of clothing left is her panties, where if those weren't there we'd be fucking, and we both know those are coming off and we both know we will be fucking, and in some weird way, that is the sweetest moment. She says, "There's something I have to tell you. It's that time of the month." "*Which* time, Walsh, you're cracking me up." "I might be a little..bloody. I don't mind if you don't mind." Pshffttt. "I don't mind." We fucked without a condom and she had a sweet pussy. I didn't come, and we were both making almost-cumming noises and buildup noises and I wanted to fuck her more but she said she was getting messy from her period and pushed me away. I got up so our faces were together and we were breathing and grunting together and our breathing and fucking and grunting quickened and it sounded to both of us like the other was going to cum, but we didn't. Her blood was too slippery and I couldn't get enough friction. I pulled out and later got back on top of her but she pushed me away again and said my dick was disturbing her period blood and breaking it loose and she didn't want to be messy. She put her panties back on with a liner. I wish we had cum together—it would have been to much better—but Walsh is a cool girl, and I'm glad we got the chance to fuck at all. And I'll come clean about a couple of lies I told so far in my so-called non-fictional memoir: I never came with those fat girls. I never fucked them with my morning wood. That one never sucked me off so that I squirted in her eye. I didn't cum with them and I didn't cum with Walsh so you might as well call this book A Fat Thirty-Something Man Who Can's Cum. I think Walsh decided that day at Whit's the day I dyed my hair orange, that she was gonna fuck me, because something of the manic in me attracted her. And I'll knew it was going to happen, too—I could tell by the way she was setting her drinks down on the bar. And I'll never forget the whole day os suspense, holding hands with her while we hung out with her pot smoking ex-bartender painter friend. Even the sweet moment of us holding hands while we waltzed past her ex-boyfriend outside Whitman's and him knowing even more certainly than me that I was about to fuck Walsh Killingsly and then eventually sleeping with Walsh—oh god, fucking my day-drinking friend without a condom and feeling her sweet and oh-so-bloody pussy. The sweetest part, though, was Walsh telling me she had seizures sometimes and not to freak out. And she had one after we fucked and I was lying in bed with her after sex this sweet little girl is convulsing and gripping and I wonder if I should call 911—the whole thing reminded me of Rebecca, when Rebecca went into a coma and died. She had seizures first. But I just held her (Walsh), feeling like I was caring for her, doing something useful and loving, imagining us in a relationship and finally having someone to care for who really needed me. But Walsh came through it in a few minutes and she said: "Am I ok?" She didn't remember a thing. "Did I have one?" "Yes." "Did I hurt myself?" "I don't think so." "It's ok," she laughed. "You don't have to be all worried for me or anything. As long as I didn't break any glass or fall off the bed or anything..that's all I'm asking you." "Then you're fine." But she let me hold her—which is strictly against fuck buddy etiquette. And if I had to write my nostalgia in one line it would be how I miss Walsh and cow parade and Whitman's and if I had money or a job I might have lived there forever. I was thirty-three. Walsh was twenty-seven (or somewhere in her twenties). Yes, the age difference was a minor part of the attraction. Mostly I liked her 'cause she's so damn cool: red hair, sexy body, day drinker, and one-hundred percent girl—but when it came to breaking the law, snorting coke, smoking pot, burning cigs, and fucking your friends, Walsh was always one of the guys. ### 30 Flashback to: one of the first nights I spent in Brattleboro, going by this bar called the Metropolis and having a glass of wine with the owner *because he was the only one in there*. The place was empty, and after I shared one drink with its owner I could tell why: this guy was King Sourpuss and was ready to sell the business and move on, he just didn't know it yet. Cut to: months later, meeting the owners of the new Metropolis: super friendly, amazing couple, Alan (who never failed, when I said my trademark *Thank you very much* to quip in return *You're welcome even more!*) and Alyssa, and their friend Stripes, the New York chef who's doing their tapas menu. Stripes isn't there, they just tell me about her and she's listed on the sign out front. There are signs of the mythical creature known as Stripes, but Stripes is like a puma in the wild—you never see them unless they're about to pounce. Now there was variety for the discerning drinker on Elliot Street. Inferno was a young kid bar, it reminded me of bars back in Athens, Ohio, college bars, bars where they pour twelve shots at once and half the liquor ends up on some matte-black surface which isn't even a real bar, it's just some plywood spray-painted black. Now it was Whit's versus the new Metropolis, and the clients started going back and forth. Metropolis had a better wine selection—they had a wine selection at all instead of Whit's: four kinds of generic wine I wouldn't buy in a grocery store. Metropolis had fusion liquors, which I had learned to love in LA, and (sorry Thomas) but Alan and Alyssa just made better drinks. This didn't mean Whit's was obsolete. Not at all! If I wanted to drink one really good gin and tonic, I went to the new Metropolis. If I wanted to drink six ok gin and tonics, I went to Kips and made a day of it. Kips had a bigger bar so when things got crowded you didn't feel like you were taking up somebody else's spot. Whit's had my people: Whit's had Mike and Walsh, though Walsh drank at Metro too. Metro was upscale. Whit's was hardcore. Metro was like New York. Whit's was like small-town America. So it wasn't an either/or. It was a great improvement for the street. I met Gretchen at the new Metropolis. This town was so small. This is how small this town was: Brattleboro was the kind of small where Gretchen and I are walking up Elliot Street and we see Alyssa waving from her car but don't even know it's her until we get the sun out of our eyes as we come across the street. And then Alyssa says she just saw Tom (Gretchen's husband) at Metropolis and Tom had asked where Gretchen was and Tom had said she's hanging out with her new boyfriend and Alyssa says Matthew? Ha! Small-ass town. Everyone knows everything, there are no secrets, just this extended family..and so small that I turn around right in that moment and it's Donald Mutebe standing right behind us, observing this whole interaction =) This town is that small. And did you ever think about the concept of falling half in love..or half-falling in love..of being half in love with someone because if you were all the way in love it would be a problem, so you stay halfway in love. I think I do that a lot. At the new Metropolis Gretchen orders us drinks while I write in my iPad. > I don't know if that's Brattleboro Stories or Columbia or something else, but I think I need to shoot for the stars..set out to do exactly what you want to do, exactly what you want to accomplish..I am capable of doing a theme-hot pillbox of a book, or an interlocking epic with many lines and many characters..believe it is possible, the greatest or the exact thing I dream of, that I want to see, and then use techniques and process and time to get from a to b. Decide the destination, then invent and find the tools needed to get there. > > *[See, all the way back then I was thinking of writing my memoir, before my memoir even happened.]* > > fear anger hate suffering > > Love .. Bliss Ecstasy > > Push the style and form envelope while maintaining ease of understanding..make it invent style and form, in terms of formatting, sequence, construction; but keep, create, maintain perfect easy reading, perfect simplicity of comprehension I didn't even know Gretchen was married. I didn't even know Gretchen. I just started talking to this person and even though she was a stalker vampire she was amazing to talk to at least compared to everyone else in Brattleboro and we struck it off right away, talking and talking and flirting and drinking and all the while I had no idea the guy sitting on the other side of her was her husband. How would I know? It's not like they *talked* to each other. That first day I met Gretchen, that was the day Mattson brought an underage girl to the new Metropolis. She wasn't actually ordering drinks, she was just drinking Mattson's and Mattson must have just got paid because he was slamming this bitch with alcohol and they were all flirty, but she was flirting with everyone, including me—just a dumb, random flirter who was throwing darts everywhere, never even hitting the mat. She had two drinks and then went fucking *craaaaazy* like the had the tolerance of a three year old or she had taken some other drug or something..but she went from seeming sober-but-silly to like..everyone in the bar, drinkers and owners, were like we don't care how tiny and cute and funny and sexy this little mousekrat is or how fucking *blonde* she is or how much she's turning me on bouncing her little ass in my lap *get her out of her and somewhere she can sleep this shit off*. I mean she was whirling around like she was at a motherfucking rave! Mattson came to the rescue with his bike trailer meant for carrying an actual *kid*, but this girl/woman fit right in that kid carrier and Matt Mattson drove her off down Elliot Street and we all took bets as to whether and how he was gonna fuck that fucked-up girl's tweeny little pussy. Alan was like, "I hope Matt Mattson's dick is small 'cause I know that little chipmunk's thing isn't any bigger than my little finger." Of course he holds up his little finger to illustrate. "She gonna wake up with three babies in a trailer park in upstate New Hampshire." "Fucking did you see how *drunk* that girl was??" "She only had like one or two drinks!!" (In all fairness, the one or two tall drinks she had were having roughly the expected effect on a person with a body that size, it's just that the rest of us were hardcore drinkers so the equivalent of two large Long Island iced teas didn't seem like much alcohol to anyone else in the building but that little blonde bitch.) "Is it rape if you fuck a 13 year old and she's so passed out she never knows it happens?" "YES!!" "What if you don't cum in her and after she wakes up you ask permission?" "YES!!" Alan hits my arm. "You dirty motherfucker." "What if—?" "SHUT UP!!" the entire bar says. "I was just gonna say what if he's chugging a PBR and he jerks it in her mouth then he shits a little and reaches around and smears the shit on her face so when she wakes up she has shit in her eyes and she's like, Mattson, why is there shit in my eyes and then he hits her in the face with a tire iron and fucks that little bitch's pussy *so long* that *she turns eighteen* while he's fucking her." "Then what?" "Then is that..like..ok?" "You are a sick motherfucker I'm gonna have to keep an eye on you." "Nah, I'm harmless." - - - - Gretchen is looking at me fascinated, head rested in her hand, elbow on the bar. She talks to me confidentially, quietly, like we're already in a relationship. I will say this about her: she actually listened when I talked. Then Walsh busts through the door like Kramer and announces she's been raped. "I know him. We used to be in a relationship together. He just kept going and going and I was like I think I'm gonna have a seizure if you force it and he forced it anyway I MEAN HE FORCED HIS FUCKING COCK IN ME. Fucking asshole." "Walsh. Are you serious?" "No, I'm trying out for a part on a reality TV show about girls who get raped by their exes YES I'M SERIOUS." "Here, here, sit here, I'll get you a drink." "I don't have any money." I look at her sideways. "Just get her a Guinness and a chilled Absolute Vanilla, neat—and have another one of those ready." She puts her arms around me, which makes me really uncomfortable. I don't want affection from a girl who just got raped because she just got the wrong kind of affection you know so it makes it like..confusing..I think it does anyway. Walsh sits at the bar and drinks her Guinness with both hands. She looks like a child drinking a glass of milk. Fuck. Roy raped Walsh. Motherfucker. Obviously that's not his real name. He's a Brattleboro famous ex-boyfriend of Walsh and I would love to print his real name here so his predatory ass would live in infLeona, in this book, and people would stop by his pathetic apartment when he was 80 and be like, "You're the guy that raped Walsh—we just read it in this book." And Roy would be like, "That's right. You boys want a beer?" And they'd be like, "No, we're here to rape your ass with a chainsaw." Or maybe a broom handle. That would be more realistic. Definitely a broom handle. The sad part is no one ever really believed Walsh that her boyfriend raped her. I mean even her girlfriends. To her face they'd be like, "Aww," and "Oh my god!" and all that shit but in their heart of hearts—and in conversations where Walsh wasn't present—people just thought she and Roy had sex and Walsh decided to call it rape to get the attention. Now—this is going to sound conceited but—if you're kind of smart like my fellow day drinkers and Walsh's little girlfriends, you might entertain that theory: that it was consensual and Walsh turned on her long-time ex (who she was friends with) and cried rape just 'cause she had a grudge or she was twisted on cocaine or whatever. But if you're a little bit smarter—yes, like me—you instantly see that Walsh had no reason to do that. She likes Roy. (Ooooh, I wish I could write his real name.) Roy is her best friend. Not her friend. Her *best* friend. And sometimes (have your kids leave the room) best friends rape each other. That's right, people who like each other as human beings and as sexual objects and are best friends sometimes get drunk and rape the shit out of each other. So grow the fuck up and accept Miss Killingsly's story at face value, ok? It's the smart thing to do. I talked with Gretchen. Walsh drank her drinks. Then I turned around on my bar stool and I said to Walsh: "So that fucker raped you, huh?" "Yeah." "Well, wanna do some lines?" She double takes. "Did you just say, 'You wanna do some lines?' " I smile like the Cheshire Cat. And I nod. Walsh grabs my arm and we get the fuck out of there. We go to her apartment and watch *Simpsons* and we don't talk at all. I just lay out line after line after line and we do every other one (with her doing two in a row every once in a while since she *is* the one who got raped and all). You should have seen Walsh's face when I asked her if she wanted to go to some lines. Excited like a kid going to Disney. As soon as the last line was done I stood up from her couch. I didn't even hug her. She said, "Thanks." And I left. By the time I go back to the new Metropolis, Gretchen is sitting by herself. I sit down next to her. Alan says, "Tell me you did not fuck that girl." "Hah," I say. "No. Not in a million years. Just spent some friendly company and left her to her thoughts." "I knew I trusted you," Alan said. And Alan was the kind of guy you cared if he trusted you. He was a smart man, an artist, and a human being. And he had a great sense of humor. Playfulness about life. Anyway, whatever—it sounds like I'm eulogizing him—he's probably still out there making infusion drinks and being charming and shit. I had been doing coke all night, since the bathroom at Kips, before I ever got to the new Metropolis and Matt Mattson strolled that little girl away in his bike trailer. Walsh's eyes brighting when I asked her to do some lines. And me gone as soon as possible. It was just a utilitarian thing—her high and me goodbye. - - - - My drinking buddy from Whit's bent my ear: "You *have* hit that, though." "Yes," I said quietly. "Be careful. Today she's going around saying her ex raped her. Next it'll be you." I told him I'd take his advice under consideration but that I wasn't worried for reasons given 20 paragraphs ago. Jesus Christ. When a woman says she got raped, *she usually got raped*. I'm a scumbag and I understand this. Then Gretchen and I got into it. We had our legs intertwined and we drank a couple bottles of wine. I was touching her nipples inside her half-unbuttoned shirt and by cock was hard as a bar of soap. But then she had to go. "Tom's going to be waiting for me." "Who's Tom?" "The guy? Who was sitting next to me? That's my husband, Tom." "Do you have an open relationship?" "No." "Well, Jesus Christ, Gretchen, at least let me walk you out." We kissed on the street and I pulled her close and that first goodbye, that first night I met Gretchen, is the closest I ever came to fucking her. I was saying in the poet's way everything a man can say to get a woman to come home with him. I didn't give a fuck about Tom. G and I had a good conversation, I wanted to fuck. And we held each other very close in the night of Elliot Street, but ultimately she detached and flowed south to wherever her apartment was. But then she stopped. And she came back. And she gave me Tom's business card, which she wrote her email address on. Then she went for good. But the night gets better (if you're thinking in terms of this story) and the night gets worse (if you're thinking in terms of what happened to people's lives). - - - - It must have been very late because Thomas got of work at Whitman's and he had his girl and me and Thomas and Thomas's fiancée and my drinking buddy Mike and me decided to head over to Inferno and knock a few back. I said I had to go to the bathroom. I went into the bathroom at the new Metropolis, I took the poster of the wall when I was *wery wery* drunk and high on cocaine. I rolled it up and stuck it down the back of my pants where my belt would hold it in place and no one would have any clue that I had it on me. It wasn't meant as a sleight against Alan and Alyssa—in fact it was a special torture the next day knowing that I had stolen it, and then a special torture on top of that knowing that if someone who had been to the New Metropolis came to my apartment and saw the poster, they would know it was me who had stolen it. I was weak. I threw it away on the Refuge grounds, in a closed-top trash can, the farthest place from the Metropolis that I could find. You have to understand, people like me, you can't be friends with. We're evil. You might see the intelligence and the creativity and the friendliness and love. And all that is real. But so is the demon we carry inside us, that will drop you off the edge of a cliff, camping, if we just happen to feel like doing it. I try to encapsulate myself, wall myself off, for years at a time, to mitigate the damage. - - - - There's not much more to tell about that night so I'll be quick about it. Thomas. Thomas' fiancée. Mike. Me. One non-drinker and three expert drinkers. You might think I meant to say *seasoned* there but I did not. I meant to say expert. These three expert drinkers fill a table with empty glasses. If you had looked at this table when we were done you would have thought it was a crime scene photo—something from *The Crow*. We drank. And drank. And drank. Then the night ended. Thomas and fiancée went one way, Mike and I went the other. And Mike said, "You want a ride home?" And I said, "Sure." And two blocks after we pulled out of the parking structure we got pulled over by the cops. And the cops said, "Have you guys been drinking tonight?" And we said, "Yeah, a little." And they asked Mike to step out of the car. And they gave him a field sobriety test. Which he failed. They breathalyzed him. He blew over—how far over I'll never know. Then the cuffed my friend, towed his car, and took him away. And I had the weirdest experience, standing there in the parking lot of the auto repair shop that was one house from my house. I had committed crimes that night. I had drank as much as Mike, maybe more. But Mike was driving and I wasn't. So they took Mike to jail and I stood there, free, chatting it up with the policeman. "You live far from here?" "I live literally one house in that direction." "Ok, well, have a good night," the police officer tells me, and he gets in his car and goes. And it's just me and my lonesome standing in this parking lot looking up at the stars and saying, *What world is this.* I was so drunk I knelt, then laid face down in the parking lot, weeping. I was drunk, yes, but also, I subconsciously knew that that could have been me, many times..weeping against my possible future, weeping for my many narrowly avoided pasts. I called Matt Mattson and we met on the lawn of the funeral home on High Street. He listened to my story and then told me how he's always wanted to walk on this grass, it looked so soft and thin, like a different type of grass than grows on the rest of the street, but he never had the chance until I called him out here in the middle of the night to talk about Mike's DUI. He had us both get barefoot and stand and sit and lie in the beautiful grass. "Did you fuck that girl?" I say. "Oh, yeah," he says, and he describes the inside of her pussy—in infinite detail—as relayed to him by his dick. "Thank you for calling me out here," Matt Mattson says, and he slips on his shoes and bikes away. That guy is some kind of a poet—too sensitive for this world—the kind of guy who can't work a normal job and gets strung out on heroin with his ex-girlfriend. I saw them on Elliot Street once, sharing a pizza from Frankie's, and within a few minutes I knew they were back on h, even though people on heroin always lie to you about it. I mean even if you've done coke with them a thousand times and sat barefoot in the fine grass of funeral parlors in the 4am dew, people will always keep it a secret from you that they're back on heroin. ### 31 The next night I had to drink. I was kind of looking for Mike, but of course Mike wouldn't be out drinking the night after his DUI—his lawyer would have instructed him not to go to a bar, not to be seen near a bar, not to buy beer in a grocery store. The town was too small. In fact, I would not see Mike in a bar the rest of the time I was in Brattleboro. I took a quick look at Whit's—"Hi Thomas"—then crossed the street to the new Metropolis and somewhere in the middle of a bottle of Syrah in walk two very interesting people: Gretchen and Tom, looking for me. They sit next to me at the bar. Gretchen introduces me to her husband. Then Gretchen proceeds to talk to me—I offer her a glass of my wine—and she completely ignores Tom, who talks with Alyssa, who's tending bar. Gretchen and I were never not flirtatious. It didn't matter if Tom was around or not. I remembered last night..following her onto the street to give her a hug and a kiss when she left, inviting her home with me..not remembering how much of a kiss we had had..I mean I'm drunk and high on coke, you can't throw married women at me. And why had Tom sat there, so unassuming I didn't even realize the man sitting next to Gretchen was not *a stranger to her*. And now this next gentle conversation with G. G who liked me. G who listened. G who acted as if I had something important to say. G who cared about me, as a person, something I couldn't say about Walsh. I mean G had her life set up—maybe not happily—but she got to know me, got to know—in general—where I had come from in life. And we had some nice times just drinking wine and learning each other's psychological surfaces. Skip forward to: Gretchen's and my gentle relations turn to the pretense of ownership and the carrying out of abuse. That terrible look Gretchen gave me when I was simply conversing with a woman whose husband had bipolar disorder and I was hearing her tales of how she'd had to support him but how he's the love of her life and a great artist and I was trying to learn something about myself by listening to her and G came by and gave me one of the meanest looks anyone has ever given me and I was like: *holy shit, Gretchen has to go. That shit is unacceptable. No one gets to look at me like that.* And after I was done with the woman with the bipolar husband Gretchen was like, "What do you think you're doing?" And I was like, "Having a conversation. You don't own me. This is not working out between us." I wanted to scream, so many times, "GRETCHEN, YOU'RE *MARRIED*. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME." But I never said that. I would like to say that it's because I'm too nice—but that's not true. I was lonely and I was taking whatever company I could get. See: previous 200 pages. I was so stupid. Gretchen blocked the possibility of other relationships—possibly with Stripes. And when I sat in the new Metropolis writing in my journal or writing on my iPad, I was always having more fun either bantering with whichever owner was working or just being by myself when the bar was empty or full of strangers than when Gretchen showed up. When Gretchen showed up, things got worse for me. She demanded all of my attention. She wrapped our legs together between our bar stools in a way that made me feel I was betraying Tom. Plus, I was only attracted to her two times, sexually—the first night we met, when I was drunk and didn't know she had a husband, and the night she came over to my house when I was super emotional after listening to Cat Stevens (*The Wind*, on repeat) all night and drinking two bottles of wine. Those were the two nights I wanted to have sex with her. Our conversations weren't that good. What seemed like an equal interest in the beginning turned out to be just an obsession on her part. I was some impossible way out of her marriage—which she wanted to get out of but wasn't ready to say by to Tom in. G would never cheat on Tom. She wouldn't divorce him, either. And it became *very not fun* for me to be the one she fixated on. I won't even say she was attracted to me. She was just fixated on me, like people whose lives are a mess buy a dog and fixate on it. It helps them to forget their life is a mess when they have this cute little thing to fixate on. So to me Gretchen became just an annoyance. She was just like Jimmy, really—I was in a weak position and these were the people who took advantage of me. Not fully, of course—they were somewhat-prudent predators—each of them gave me something I needed, and then took so much more from me. What's the lesson? Don't need things from others—the more you need, the less genuine your relationships will be. The less either of you needs from each other, the better shot you have at a healthy relationship. ### 32 Oh yeah so this whole time I had been looking for a job, knowing my unemployment would run out eventually and I wanted to keep living in Brattleboro. I found a company called Trash Can Inc. They sold trash cans. I figured it had to be better than my previous job: fraudulent billing, egos the size of Macy's Day Parade floats, technical idiocy. So they call me. We have a two o'clock phone interview that day. I decide to have two glasses of wine before the interview for my own entertainment..showing that I can talk to someone while slightly drunk and them have no idea. The interview goes excellently. It's me talking to their CEO, who I call (for reasons which shall remain private) Tiny Paul Bunyan. Tiny Paul Bunyan likes me, I like him. Mostly he drones on about how he's created the ultimate business selling trash cans, which I find profoundly interesting. Carl Sagan might as well be explaining the intricacies of the universe to me in the comfort of my own home, and afterward, on the promise of spending my life writing software to help sell trash cans, I finish that bottle of wine and drink a whole lot more. We set up another interview, the next one in person. The way this company works, see, is when a company like Google opens a new office building and needs trash cans, they buy them from Trash Can Inc. Trash Can Inc. doesn't make trash cans. No. They then call a company who *does*, and they order the trash cans and have them shipped to Google. It's called a drop ship company, and it basically means they don't do shit. Their entire value is in the fact that their web site shows up on page one of a Google search for "trash can." The Wikipedia definition of drop shipping cracks me up: > Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. It's a "supply chain management technique!" LOL!! It's a company that *does nothing*. They pick up the phone, a guy asks for a trash can, then they sell it to him, then they pick up another phone and buy it at a cheaper price and have someone else send it to the original guy in the mail!! It's a supply chain management technique, bro! Like so many other things in business and government, it's a big name that boils down to mean absolutely nothing. Anyway, that's what this fucking business was. But if it let me live in Brattleboro, I was willing to do it. - - - - The next day I went up on the mountain to try to quit drinking, after one last G&T purchased with change at the bar. I went in Whit's, went straight to the middle of the bar, and put down my change. "I want a gin and tonic." Thomas looked at my change and said, "Well, this is interesting." "Have you seen Mike?" "He hasn't been in once." Thomas gives me my drink. As is usual, when I need a drink to get me extra drunk, it does. I was as drunk as if I had drank four of those things. Thomas saw my gear. "Where are you headed?" "I'm going up the mountain. When I come down, I'm not drinking any more. I got a job. I'm going to be a straight man from here on out!" Thomas gave me a second drink on the house and I left, I huffed it up the mountain and I got off the trail and I hiked into a dense, mosquito-infested, thorny patch of land. This whole side of the mountain would be packed with mosquitos. If I went all the way to the top, or down the other side especially, there wouldn't be any mosquitos, but they were as lazy as I was so we all sat there together in the dirt and ate bits of food from Tooler and Issa's refugee stash. The Professor calls. "Matthew?" "Yeah, what, I'm detoxing, I don't have time for a phone call." "I'm worried about you." "Why, because Thomas told you I bought my last drink with change?" "That's part of the reason." "Well Thomas should keep his mouth to himself! That's part of what makes this town so impossible to live in..everyone flapping their cheeks all the time about the person who just left the room." "I want to pick you up, Matthew. I'll meet you on the road if you tell me where you're coming down." "WHY?! What are we gonna do? I have to make it in this town by myself, and another meal or another drink isn't going to help anything. It's just going to prolong the inevitable, so..I don't know..Professor..what are you offering, exactly?" "Just to be your friend." "Alright call me back in five minutes let me think about it." "Alri—" But I hung up. The Professor calls like three times and I do need help but I don't want it from him and I can't distinguish, with the Professor, whether he's trying to help me or use me—with him it was always a bit of both. But imagine the scenario from his point of view: he goes to Whit's and orders his anemic martini. While Thomas is making it, Thomas can't resist saying: "You won't believe who was just in here." (Etc. Etc. Thomas tells him I paid for one G&T with change, drank it like water, and said I was going up on the mountain to get sober.) For all Jimmy knows I went up there to kill myself—he had to call. But he knew, too, that I was vulnerable, and even though his desire to help me was genuine, so was his desire to use my weakness to get me to do exactly what he wanted. "You can stay at my house," he pleaded. "Just as friends." Yeah, right. But I do know he was worried about me. I sobbed as we spoke—I let him see that side of me. After a point he was just offering to drive me home. "Meet me on the street—where the Walmart used to be. Just let me drive you home. You can't stay up there. You're my friend and I'm not hanging up this phone until you agree to climb down that mountain and let me drive you home. Do you want to go to Whit's?" "No, no," I was sobbing. I told him how I had to stop drinking completely. I'm eating cans of pineapples and my skin is so hot, so dehydrated from months of alcohol, that I'm slurping every last bit of juice out of cans, licking my fingers clean, just fucking sitting in the dirt with bugs crawling all over me and this is where I was going to have my mental transformation (god dammit). But there are too many mosquitos, and I have to go home, I know. If I sleep up here I'll have so many mosquito bites I'd have to go to the hospital. Also, somehow, that last gin and tonic, mixed with the heat, became like this supermonster gin and tonic. I've never been that drunk off a couple drinks. Maybe my brain amped them up because it knew that I needed to be more drunk but didn't have the money. It could have been withdrawal, my body being fucked up because I'd had *less* to drink that day than usual. Whatever it was, I was thirsty, delirious, psychotic on that mountain. But there's no fucking way I was leaning on the Professor. But I had to leave. Fuck. I packed up my empty pineapple cans and huffed it to the trail, then skipped down that trail like it was nothing, jumping over boulders and landing with just the right slack in my legs that I could have jumped down twenty feet and never felt it. I came out of the woods. I walked along side streets in New Hampshire. Crossed the bridge into Vermont. Stayed far away from Elliot Street. If I saw the professor, it would be midnight before I left Whit's, drunk with the professor's money, prolonging the inevitable one more pointless day. - - - - Tooler sees me when I come in. She looks at me how she would if a literal zombie walked into her apartment on High Street. "Are you ok?" Our eyes lock. And they don't unlock for a long time. I open my mouth and I tell her the whole story, crying—tears streaking down my fucking face, ok?—helpless..how I had my last drink and I was going to go to the mountain to sober up but couldn't because of the mosquitos. Tooler hugs me and says, "Sleep here. Get some rest." So I break down my pack and return the rest of the refugee pineapples to our cupboard. I shower, drink about two liters of water, and fall asleep on my foam pad. I hardly had time to think before I was gone from this world, but in the minute or so before I went to sleep, as I laid on my side and sobbed alone in my room, I knew I had done something right: I was an alcoholic and I was just about to have made it through the day with only one drink—well, two. - - - - I wasn't the only one who moved to the mountain. Not a month later Matthew Mattson lost his construction job, was out of money, got kicked out of his place to live, and was talking to me about what kind of crime he could commit that would get him through the winter—as in, the sentence would put him in jail for just the right amount of time that he wouldn't have to sleep outside for Vermont's deadly winter, then release him in the spring or summer. "Maybe a really minor robbery." "What's a really *minor* robbery?" "Like stealing a screwdriver or something." "You're gonna steal a *screwdriver*?" "I'm just saying! Shoplifting! It's not that bad. Think it'd get me like six months?" "I doubt it. You wouldn't even go to jail for that." "Why not? Don't they need to punish shoplifters?" "Do you have a history of shoplifting?" "No," Matt whined. "You wouldn't even go to jail." "Well what, then? Like a simple kidnapping?" "What the fuck is a *simple* kidnapping? There's nothing simple about kidnapping and that'd get you a whole lot more than six months." "Fuck," Matt said. "Fuck fuck fuck." And later, seeing Mattson getting his pack together in Whit's and hearing Jill say: "He's living on the mountain now." Thomas' eyes widen. Jill is talking about Mattson in the bar while Mattson is at the door with all his things laid out in the entryway, and Mattson doesn't even hear Jill talking about him. "Did you hear he's back with Jenny?" "Oh that's good news." "Yeah they're strung out." Jill shakes her head. "It's sad," she says. " 'Cause a kid like that is on the edge to begin with. You know they have a kid." Thomas nods. "And then you put drugs into the mix. Heroin and losing your day job don't mix. I guess with construction he was holding it together." Jill goes on. She describes. She summarizes. She passes judgment. Jill is the town crier. ### 33 The day after my trip to the mountain, I start going to AA. I imagine myself working sober, living a great life in this beautiful town. I'd always been to Narcotics Anonymous before, but Brattleboro has more AA meetings so I made that my community. I went to a seven o'clock a.m. meeting the next day and I went to that meeting for all of its six meetings a week (every day but Sunday). I went every week, week after week after week until I began to get a little sobriety under my belt. I went to Beadnik's—this huge store that sold beads—and I made myself a bracelet to mark my cessation of drinking and initiation of other choices I made around that time..a bead to remind me of sobriety, a bead to remind me of my own brilliance, a bead to remind me to drink beet juice, a bead to remind me of eating pescatarian—my preferred diet. My morning AA meeting was just past Whit's up Elliot Street. Even though I used to go in Whit's every day, there was now this long period of time I just walked by Whit's going one direction and then walk by Whit's going the other direction, after my meeting, without looking at the building. And then eventually I didn't even notice I was going by Whit's—it didn't have any special meaning for me anymore, it was just another business on Elliot Street that was irrelevant to me. I'd see Justine in the mornings, going to my AA meeting early, seeing the rocks collected by the crossing guard on High Street and in the next block seeing Justine pooping her dog before 7am. She'd be dressed in sweats, hair frazzled, and I just wanted to lie her down and lick every inch of her petite little body. We're both up early..and wanting to fuck her so bad..and shy not? She's up early? I'm up early? What more do you need? Penis? Vagina? Let's get these two together and make ourselves cum! I waved at her politely and smiled and wished her a wonderful day. "Where are you *going*?" she asked. "To an AA meeting." We both smiled, then laughed, then were both cracking up. Justine looked down at her dog and shook her head. "No," she said, "it's true. The wheel goes around. You never know, one day you might see *me* at one of those meetings." "And you never know, you might see me at Whit's." "You never know," she says. And she goes back to pooping her dog. After the meetings, sometimes I went for breakfast at the Backside Cafe and Big Katie always served me. "You want something to drink?" she says. "No thanks." "You can get alcohol. The bar's open." "I'm not drinking right now." Big Katie turns her head sideways. She takes my menu. I think I hear her saying, "Huh," as she walks away. When she comes back with my grapefruit juice, she says, "Like not drinking at all?" "Exactly." "How did this come about?" I told her something that I stole from Justine about the wheel turning and I threw in some of my own mumbo jumbo about rotating the crops, "But the real truth is I'm just sick of it." "Yeah, I get sick of it sometimes, too. I mean there's only so much Jameson you can mainline. You want Vermont syrup with that?" "Yeah." Months later I would be sitting in the same booth in the same restaurant with the same server and the same meal and I would tell big Katie how I sabotaged my previous employer (Trash Can Inc.'s) web site while drunk, then woke up at the crack of dawn thinking I was going to go to jail for it, and promptly got myself to a 7am AA meeting where I told everyone I wanted to kill myself and bawled my eyes out during my share. On that day Katie would ask me: "So just pancakes this morning?" "Yes, please." "Vermont syrup?" "Of course! What am I? A fucking idiot?" " 'Cause it's fifty cents extra," she says. "Katie, Kate, big Kate, on the day when all the money I have is fifty cents I'll come in here and spend it on Vermont syrup." "You are a true Vermonter," she says. "Only a true Vermonter would say such a thing." "Thank you. And I'll have a gin and tonic." That's later, though. Right now I'm still going to AA and trying to be an upstanding citizen with a job and shit. - - - - I start seeing a substance abuse counselor named Carol. She advises me, among other things, to find one friend. I tell her I can't pay her until my job pays me and she says it's ok, your insurance covered it. I had state insurance from Vermont since I didn't make enough money to pay for my own. Just the fact that I'm able to pay for going to counseling is such good fortune for me, the way my life has been going, that I can hardly believe it. I had imagined all sorts of scenarios where to get a little mental help I had to put myself into debt that I would never be able to repay. But no. The universe gave me a pass. Going to AA meetings and getting really into the sharing and philosophizing. Some old-timer giving me his big book so I would have one to study when I was away from the meetings. That act, of some spritely sober drunk who could have been my grandpa, giving me his big book—even when I don't even really believe in AA—it fucking touched me, it really fucking did. But AA came with its own pile of bullshit and it was the real stinky kind. Like when whatever community center moved out of downtown into a strip mall outside of town because the building owner was going to make more money selling the building to a Chinese restaurant. So now you have a community center that people without cars and people in wheelchairs can't get to, and my 7am AA meeting scrambled to find a new place in town to meet—meeting at the community center in the strip mall outside of town would be pointless since most of us who went to that meeting didn't have cars. A lot of us who needed the services offered at that community center—like AA and NA meetings—were in phases of our lives where things weren't going so well..or places where we were just putting our lives together after they had fallen apart. And in phases like that, one tends not to have a car. Or is not allowed to drive. Or not able. Putting the community center in a strip mall far enough down the road that it was inaccessible for pedestrians, bicyclers, and those in wheelchairs was only the minor scandal, though. The major scandal was that the noon AA meeting, which rented a dedicated space in the First Baptist Church, would not let the 7am meeting use its space to have our meeting. Let's recap: the noon meeting rented a room from the church which was used for nothing but the noon AA meeting. The room was permanently set up as an AA meeting space and was only used from noon to 1pm, only, and that noon group refused to let our displaced 7am group meet in their space after we got kicked out of the community center which was being sold to make a Chinese restaurant. Shit like this is always when I lose faith in AA, the program, the people, everything about it, and I stop going. It's happened to me millions of times. In refusing to let the 7am group use their space *at a time when it was unused*, the noon group really showed their true colors. But to me they already had. The seats in that meeting were set up church-style, all facing the same direction in rows. There was a seat up front facing the group, designated for the moderator, which was a rotating position as in all 12-step groups. But there was also a table up front, set away from the rows of all the *regular* alcoholics, where a few old white guys who were too good to sit with the rest of us, sat. They were too far recovered, they had graduated, that they didn't have to follow the same rules as the rest of us. They didn't share about how they got sober—that was so long ago that they figured they had practically never even *been* drunks. Instead of using their share time—and they shared at every meeting, long shares that took up an inordinate amount of the group's time—instead of using that time to share their experience, strength, and hope (the basic formula for an ideal share), they shared *at* people, giving direct advice as though they were God, not mere recovering alcoholics and addicts like the rest of us. For some insane reason—I guess just because I could make the meeting often due to its time—I decided to make that my home group meeting. Making a group your home group just means you'll go to most or all of that group's meetings and help pass out the daily readings, make coffee, or clean coffee cups after the meeting. In this group's tradition, becoming a home group member simply involved writing your name and sobriety date in a book they kept on the front table. Before the meeting, one day, I made the difficult walk to that table and signed my name to that book with my sobriety date next to it. I sat down and watched one of these Godlike old-timers get up from his seat, go to the book, open it, and read my information. He didn't then come to me to welcome me, or say something comforting, or introduce himself, or anything kind and sensible like that. He read what I had written out loud, mispronounced my name, and said, "Been sober a week—good luck with that." Thanks, buddy, for announcing that to the other forty people in the room. Not everyone knew I had relapsed. That was *my* information to share as *I* wanted to. I felt so betrayed by this asshole that the day I joined that noon meeting as my home group was practically the last day I attended it. - - - - Once at that noontime farce of an AA meeting, this woman from a recovery house gives an amazing share about how she got deeper and deeper into pills, ultimately shooting Oxys and thinking she had found her way to cope with life, that shit was so pure. The story moving, talked about her recovery path, how she got into the girl house she's in now, how it's hard, which is why it has to be one day at a time for her. Then this asshole home group member thanks her for her share, saying, "This is an *AA* meeting, so a lot of us and I know I have trouble relating to the drug stuff, but we wish you well in your recovery and you're welcome here any time." *WHAAAUUTT??!!* Does this motherfucker not understand that drinking alcohol is just as badass a drug as shooting Oxys? That there's no real difference? Does he need to feel superior that he's never done "drugs?" WAKE THE FUCK UP!! *Alcohol is a drug.* Just 'cause it's legal doesn't make it *better than*. The real mistake these people make is trusting their government. Alcohol and cigarettes belong in the DEA Class I slot, but right before all those drugs got classified and made illegal, Congress passed a law that said *to exclude alcohol and cigarettes*. The reason they gave? Because taxes off those two drugs were *so much money* pumped back into the US economy that we were afraid of making them illegal for all the money we would lose. That shit is actually in the statute. Look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of people, even smart people, make the mistake of thinking their government has their best interest at heart. My mom, even—she's an educated, smart, even wise person. But when I start bringing up scientific data that shows that LSD, cannabis, and ecstasy are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes, she checks out of the conversation. She can't believe it. I think it's because she can't believe what a horrible crime the government has committed against us by making alcohol and cigarettes legal, while demonizing LSD, weed, MDMA. Her dad died of alcoholism, so. I can see how that would be a hard fact for her to swallow: that the US knew alcohol was deadlier than ecstasy, but they excluded it from DEA classification and kept it legal because we were making too much money from the taxes on alcohol. That's evil. To make a calculated decision to keep alcohol and cigarettes legal, when cigarettes contribute to one in five deaths in the US, just for the tax money, while putting people in jail for holding pot, ecstasy, LSD—drugs we know are less dangerous than our two main legal drugs. That's when this saying comes into play: *Part of growing up is realizing that not all the rules are there to keep you safe.* Have you ever heard that one? Well, you've heard it now. - - - - When those holier-than-thou recovered drunks denied the 7am group use of their space, it solidified my earlier assessment that these old white guys who ran this meeting were more interested in having a lodge or a clubhouse than running an AA meeting that operated in line with the literature established by AA's founders. AA clearly states in writing that its primary purpose is to help alcoholics stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. If that was really your primary purpose, then why would you deny anther AA group use of your unused space so they could continue to have their meeting after getting kicked out of their community center. It's one of the most fucked-up things I've seen happen in AA. And it made a group of three or four long-time Brattleboro AAers mad as a hornet's nest crossed with a blowtorch and these sober adults scheduled a special *meeting after the meeting* with the old white guys and this group of four recovering addicts who weren't even regular attendees of the 7am group politely and respectfully tore those old white motherfuckers new assholes. The most outspoken one in the group was this black woman who was like a cross between Melissa Harris-Perry and Che Guevara. I mean this woman could have taught at Princeton, taken over a small country, written poetry, sweet-talked her ass out of Guantanamo, what*ever*—you would not want to be on the receiving end of this woman's righteous smackdown, and that's exactly where the leaders of that noon meeting found themselves. I stayed for five minutes of that AA infight, decided it wasn't helping my recovery, and left. Fools will be fools. But on that day I saw a small group of principled, clear-headed people take to task a bunch of power/establishment control-hungry AAers who had lost sight of that organization's primary purpose, and even five minutes of it gave me chills *and* tears. I have rarely in my life met people who stand up for what is right, and even as I sat through my therapy session that afternoon, right down the hall in that same church, just knowing that group was over there speaking what was right and speaking it against evil..it restored a big chunk of my faith in humanity. *Big chunk.* ### 34 My phone is ringing and it comes up as Gretchen. My instinct says don't pick up. But I have this little voice in my head that is my counselor telling me to make just one friend. I think, I think, I think. I pick up. "Hello." "It's Gretchen." "I know." "I want to see you." "Well, I'm not drinking anymore, you should know that." "No problem. The only reason I was going out was to see you." "You're sweet, Gretchen, but—I mean—what about Tom?" "Tom is ok with it. Tom is standing right here listening to this conversation." "I need us to just be friends," I say. "I haven't offered anything else," she says. "Yeah but I mean like we can't be holding hands, having our legs entwined, kissing, and shit like that. Is Tom ok with that? I don't know. I don't know your relationship—" "I just want to see you. Will you please meet me..in the..you know that little glass thing? Meet me there. We'll talk for an hour. No touchy stuff." "Ok," I said, and I should have listened to me own voice and not my counselor's because we talked for *three* hours and there was *all kinds* of touchy stuff. I mean when you're sitting face-on and your legs are every other and sometimes when you grab my leg it makes my cock hard..I've been with married women before and I'm trying to raise my own bar a little bit. But my therapist said make a friend. So I tried making friends with Gretchen. And it did not work. I'll admit fault in the situation, but there are only certain people I can be friends with. That might sound weird. But that is the fact. And I can't be friends with needy people, potential stalkers, or anyone who isn't just *stellar*. I mean maybe this sounds egotistical to some of you, but I'm not here to be BFF with basic people. I only connect with *developed* people, people who have been through a lot and done a lot of work on themselves and are so extraordinary they're almost not still human. That might seem like a high bar—but that's the bar. We sat in this glass place downtown and she showed me *hundreds* of pictures of people I don't know—pointless, time-wasting interaction between the two of us. Maybe she was nervous. You know? Maybe I should be more sensitive to how *she* was feeling. She put me on a pedestal and that slideshow was just her way of filling the time with something that she knew how to do. But it offended me because not only did she show me *every* photo on her phone *and* tell me details about each one. I found that offensive because I viewed it as her wasting my time. Maybe she has nothing better to do. Maybe she would be hurt to find out that I didn't give a shit about *any* of the photos in her phone *or any of the people in them*. Is this how we connect with each other's families these days? Because we'll never meet them, we do slideshows with our friends as a way to say: *I'm inviting you in [to my family].* I don't know. Maybe mentally healthy people *like* to look at hundreds of pictures of strangers..maybe it makes them feel closer to the person who's showing them..but it doesn't make me feel like that. It makes me feel angry. Angry that you would misjudge me as someone who wastes large chunks of my day on non-productive activities. Angry that you would *impose*. Angry that you would *assume I care*. Angry that you're disturbing my peace? That might be it. I don't know. But I've had more than one person do this to me with the hours-long photo show and I'm sick of each and every one of you. I think you have no respect and no general awareness of other people and the difficult-to-grasp concept that *they might not want anything to do with you*. I might not give a shit about your life or the life of anyone you know. Is that *that difficult* to understand? Then she pulled out a copy of one of my books she had bought online (it was *Camp Lake* and I saw there were highlighted passages *on every page* and I thought *oh my sweet Jesus are we going to go through* all *of them?* And the answer, my friends, was yes. Gretchen was like a rollercoaster that I had reluctantly agreed to ride which I soon discovered actually ran the length of the entire *country*. I mean it was fun at parts, but would the fucker ever end? "I feel like you're inside my mind," she'd say. And I'd say, "I understand that you feel that way, and I'm glad—really glad—that you're connecting with my writing, but I'm not inside your mind. I have no special insight into you as a person or into your particular history. The only reason you feel like I'm inside your mind is that people all over the world are having similar experiences. We're connected—you know—like a web, and what's going on over here affects what's going on over there so there are all these youth groups or scouting groups or Outward Bound groups and they're all having the same experiences even though they're in different places and they've never met each other. It doesn't matter, because we're part of a universal consciousness. But that doesn't mean that I know anything about you. In fact, I hardly know you. I very hardly know you." But she'd say, "I think it's more than that." Gretchen felt connected to me deeply, but the connection was one way..there was magic in it for her but not for me. - - - - Once, many years before this, my therapist Kathryn suggested that part of the reason I got involved with Rishi (a verbally and emotionally abusive woman) is that I was so lonely and so desperate when I met her that I was more willing to enter into a relationship my intuition had told me *no* about from the first week of knowing her. Kathryn said: "Can you go out to clubs or bars and have casual sex so you're not so hungry all the time, so desperate?" I was offended. I said: "No, I don't think I *can* do that. It's not a moral thing—I have no objection to casual sex. But I just don't do that," I said. It was true at the time and even though it's not literally true now, it's generally true about me that I have no interest in casual sex. If there aren't sparks, the connection of at least a potentially meaningful friendship, I have absolutely no interest in or sexual excitement about a person. At twenty-three years old, I was more old fashioned than my forty-something therapist. Casual sex? I don't eat casually, I don't drive casually, I don't talk casually, I don't work casually. Why am I gonna stick my dick in someone casually? I honestly wish I was more into casual sex—that I had had more sex with more people, starting earlier. But I'm some type of Puritan when it comes to certain parts of life and I don't just fuck anyone—I have standards and there's something sacred about it to me (or at least there used to be)—I have fucked my friends, but I'm mostly not interested in fucking my friends..I'm mostly interested in falling truly, madly, deeply in love and if that only happens for me once in my lifetime, so be it. If it only happened once, at least what I did that one time would be true, would be deep, and would be love that went all the way. - - - - Here I was in a similar situation: having had no friends in years, I felt like my only choice was Gretchen. I knew there was only so much of Thomas I could take, ditto Walsh—she was no good friend for me. I don't think she liked me nearly as much as she liked the collection of chaos she was carrying around in her life. Mike, my drinking buddy with the shiny new DUI, would have been a good friend for me. In fact, earlier the evening of that DUI, when he and I were out front of Whit's smoking, he said the only reason he goes to Whit's is to see me and Walsh, and I said it was the same for me. Then he says, "I have canoes." And I say, "I want to stop drinking." Then he says, "Let's get together, you know, do some stuff outside of Whit's, outside of Bratt." "Yeah, why give Whit's all our money?" He told me his checking account was light because of Whit's. "Mine too, mine too." "So let's do a canoe trip or kayaks—I have kayaks too—and there's a regular lake me and Jenny go to..or say we do..but we never do." The we decide we'll quit smoking too because why not we're in an extra-New Year's New Year's resolution conversation anyway! "I only started smoking when I started drinking every day!" "I know. I know! Me too!" "We'll take out a canoe, look at the wildlife, have a couple beers in the bottom of the canoe—you know, no hard liquor, just a little somethin'-somethin' to take the edge off. I don't need to be doing *six, eight* drinks in here every day. And I know you must be doing at least that many," Mike tells me. We were going to save our wallets and hang out and enjoy nature and drink a couple of beers. Stop wasting our money at Whitman's. Stop inconveniencing ourselves to honor their ridiculous cash-only policy. Sober up a bit. Lose some weight. (Mike pats his belly.) But my heart sank as soon as he mentioned the "couple of beers" because I had been around this block a few times and I knew that people like Mike and I never drink "a couple of beers." I don't spew a bunch of AA dogma but I know enough to know that, even though throughout my life I've tried, I don't drink responsibly and I have never had "just one drink" or done "just a line," *ever*, in my entire life. And I never fucking will. And that was the night that me and Mike and Thomas and Thomas's fiancée went to the Inferno and by the end of the night the table was *littered* with glasses. I mean (and this is coming from a hardcore alcoholic) it was hard to conceptualize, looking at that table how four people had generated all those empty glasses, even considering Thomas's girl only contributed one glass. We didn't even know how drunk we were. And Mike said: "You want a ride home?" And I said, "Yes," not thinking: *we are drunk as fuck. No one should be driving.* Thomas and his fiancée walked home—they were one block away. I could have offered Mike my couch to sleep on. I didn't realize that till weeks later, when I ran into Mike at the post office. He's throwing junk mail away in a trash can near where I'm feloniously filling out my unemployment forms. "Mike?" "Matthew, hey." "Is this awkward, 'cause I can leave you alone and go back to my silly forms." "No, I've missed you, man." "What is going on? Is everything ok? I mean: are you ok?" "Well, a lot's changed for me since the last time I saw you." "Was that the company car?" "Yeah. I got fired." "I'm sorry." "I was mad at you for the longest time." "Because I didn't stop you from driving." "Yeah. Why didn't you?" "I was so drunk, Mike, I never considered it. I mean the thought that we shouldn't have been driving was never in my mind. I'm sorry. I wish I had." "No, no, you don't have to be sorry. It's on me. We drank a lot that night." "Yeah," I say. "Way too much." "If I'd only turned on those headlights." "I know." "It's just that we sat there, remember, listening to music. If we had got in the car and gone right away, I would have turned on my headlights just naturally. But sitting there with the music and the lights off, I just never..switched into..driving mode, you know?" "Yeah, I know, man, I felt horrible." "Yeah," he smirks. "Me too." "Have you been drinking?" "Haven't had a drop. I'm going back to school. I don't know if you know that but I never got my degree, but, Jenny and I have some money saved so I'm going back to school! I'm not drinking for one year..I figure after that, if I can make it that far, I'll see if I can handle it again, you know, start slow, just a couple of drinks a day." I zone out. Mike hits my arm. "Hey man, it's not your fault. If I hadn't been taking you home I would have been taking myself home and the same thing would have happened. I just wish I had turned those headlights on." *I know. That's how life happens. One more drink than you should have. Forgetting to turn on the headlights. A slip on the ice, and maybe you break your ankle, like Butch, or maybe you break your neck. You drive home a different way to drop off your drinking buddy and the cops catch you for a DUI (driving the company car), you go to jail, lose your job, stop going to Whit's at all, never see your fellow day drinkers again, perhaps. We didn't even have each other's phone numbers—we just knew we'd see each other every day at the same bar, sit on the same stools, tell each other the same stories. Yeah, the stories are different from detail to details, but it's the same old shit: unhappy with the wife, working on the house, job sucks, gotta get more cigarettes, fucked the cutie from Elliot Street—Wanna smoke a butt?* - - - - That's what Mike always said when he wanted us to go outside and smoke a cigarette. "Wanna smoke a butt?" "Yeah." So we went outside, he stood with his back against the Whitman's door and I stood facing him with my back to the whoring of Elliot street. Sometimes Walsh was there. Sometimes Thomas came out on a break. The Professor sometimes imposed upon us all with his left-field discussion of high-class England, fifty years ago, when he was sport-fucking young boys from the school where he taught Scandinavian languages, knew Winston Churchill, Hitler, Madonna, and all the other world leaders. But most of the time it was just me and Mike, and I know it sounds like I'm saying I was in love with him or something, but what I'm saying is that Mike is the one who mattered, to me, of the day drinkers. Of course I wanted to fuck Walsh, because she's a girl and she has a goddamn pussy and I feel special when my dick is inside a girl's pussy. I like the sounds women make and the way they move and the way they smell and they way they look and the way they think differently than men. And Thomas was special because he's a writer, and we could talk about that. But I went to Whitman's, every day for a while there, to see Mike. That was the central relationship around which the Whitman's day drinkers revolved. Before us it was someone else—that musician guy, probably, and Walsh. And if there are day drinkers today at Whitman's, it's almost certain to be someone else entirely. But for a while there it was me and Mike, and he would drink his weird half-beef/half-liquor drinks he designed specifically with the purpose of not getting drunk as fast, and I would drink a rainbow of liquor and wine—something different every day, from G&Ts to straight shots of vanilla Stoli to White Russians (ironically, to honor The Dude) to bottles of Whitman's chianti. Mike and I were like a couple of girls. We didn't go to the bathroom together because it was single occupancy but we did go outside to smoke together, go across Elliot Street to the convenience store ATM to get cash so we could buy cigarettes and be able to pay our bar tabs in cash. If one of us put ten dollars in the jukebox, we'd leave five dollars for the other one to pick songs. I made fun of his drinks designed not to get you drunk and it reminded me of Joshua French, of course, that dingbat programmer I worked with in California who believed that if you ate bread as you drank, it would "soak up the alcohol" and you wouldn't get as drunk. (For all his supposed brilliance, I don't think Joshua understood how digestion works. Except with very special substances, kept at emergency rooms and used on suicide patients, you generally can't *sneak* some of what you ate past your intestines. You certainly can't do it with bread. That guy told me one night he was, "on a mission to find the perfect appetizer to eat while drinking so that he could drink longer without getting drunk.") Mike tried to do the same thing by mixing beer and liquor in the same drink, a new combination every day, and it never worked. After six of them he was always drunk. It just shows you, even people who are really smart, are in some ways really dumb. In Whitman's, as I was drinking (I mean *as I had a drink in my hand*) Mike listened to me tell him a hundred times that I was stopping drinking. He lifted his glass to me and he said: "Good luck with that. I'll see you tomorrow." He was totally nice about it, totally respectful. He'd even say: "I've told myself a million times this will be my last day at Whit's and every day I'm back. But good luck. I fully support you and I hope you succeed." Then we'd both drink, and order another drink and another. And the next day, when Mike left work early as he did every day to come to Whit's, he opened the door and saw what he expected to see: me, sitting in my usual chair, with a G&T in one hand, Thomas adding a hash mark to my tab, the two of us talking it up loud about some obscure feature of literary theory, not a single other person in the joint. Also: Nina Simone on the jukebox, which Thomas had turned up to full volume with the remote control. Mike came all the way into the bar and felt exactly what I felt whenever I walked into that place: *home*. It's no accident that Nina Simone was host of our crowd of crazy personalities. We played *Sinnerman* every day and we didn't just like it, we didn't even just *love* it—we worshipped the motherfucker. Nina Simone is a god. - - - - And if you're wondering if Mike gave me hard time about saying I was quitting drinking one day, and then beating him to Whitman's the next—of course he didn't. Whether we were destroying our bodies, whether we were destroying our checking accounts—none of that mattered—Mike was as happy to see me (and I was as happy to see him) as two brothers—one lost, thought dead—would be to see each other after years of believing that they had been lost to each other forever. Then came the DUI. And not just a DUI. A DUI in the company car—instant firage. I didn't see Mike for a month or more. I stopped drinking and started going to AA on the regs. I met weekly with a therapist specializing in substance abuse. Then I ran into Mike at the post office. I was filling out my important paperwork, as usual, using a mixture of fact and fiction to convince the government not to let me starve this week, and I saw that the guy standing next to me shredding junk mail was Mike. When he said he was going to not drink for one year and if he could do that, he'd go back to it, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I said I hadn't seen him around Whit's—duh—and he said his DUI lawyer said this wouldn't be a good time for him to be seen around bars. After I heard him say that thing about going back to drinking after staying sober a year I immediately went to a meeting—I had been in and out of 12-step programs enough to know it doesn't work that way for an addict. You never get healed. You never stop. And every time you go back to it you just find new and unique ways to destroy your life. ### 35 In a future AA meeting, the same noon one I went to that day, Gretchen's friend, Castro was telling me about his coma experience after he learns of my suicide attempt from Gretchen. He pulls me aside before a meeting and tells me that there's nothing out there after life, "only blackness." He's trying to convince me to stick around. He told me before a meeting that he was in a coma for six days and that there's nothing outside of this life—"nothing there"—encouraging me not so subtly not to kill myself after I told him why I was in the Refuge. (Don't worry, you didn't miss anything. We haven't gotten there yet I'm just giving a sneak peek.) In another meeting I heard Castro's story—a speaker meeting—him ruining and ruining and finally fixing his relationship with his kids. That's what I would say the theme was. He would have been homeless if he hadn't been able to sleep on Tom and Gretchen's couch. He got evicted from like a million apartments. He and Gretchen play spy/guns on the street every time they see each other, hiding around corners and crowding behind trash cans, pointing imaginary guns at each other. Gretchen says she's always loved Steve—he's a good guy, but he's a bad alcoholic, and that is part of the reason she understands me. ### 36 I get incredibly sick and lie in bed listening to Eckhart Tolle's *The Power of Now* on iTunes, on repeat, for two weeks. It was sinus pain, ringing in the ears, a horrible cough. During this time, I think, I write in my journals, I meditate. I have epiphanies. When I get better, I look under my soaking foam pad I sleep on and there's black liquid there..I guess what my body got rid of when I sweated things out!? Jesus, I was filled with demons. While I'm sick, I try to eBay my laptop so I can pay rent for another month. I don't verify shipment soon enough (because I needed some of the money from the sale to buy postage) and the buyer backs out. This was probably fortunate since I've written a handful of books on this laptop since then—and I'm writing this book on it right now. After I get well, one day, setting up camp in the little town square in the summer with a little bit of food from the food bank and cigarettes, I sit for hours trying to figure out my life. I'm really low on money at this point..not sure I'm going to make it financially to the start of the Trash Can job, if I even get it. I'm acting like a homeless person already, anticipating that, and even people waiting at that bus stop there look at me eating package after package of pre-cooked bacon, sitting on the raised concrete squares, barefoot, under a tree. I can tell by their looks that I am exuding the down-and-out feeling. For the second time in that town, I apply for food stamps and health care. It's a twenty-page application so I relax, light cigs, and take my time. - - - - I have my at-the-office interview with the Trash Can Conglomerate. My hair was still orange. It made me self-conscious but I figure this is Brattleboro, where are they gonna get another web programmer? I meet the person whose job I'm taking over 'cause he's moving to Seattle. He subtly tries to tell me, with the boss present, that this isn't even a programming job, it's working with HTML templates inside some shitty shopping cart software..I mean like the shittiest of the shitty..but I don't see *boring-ass job*, I see *job that can keep me in Brattleboro*, so I give them my best answers on what I'd done before and what I would first do to improve their website. Personalities click, all around, and they ask me if I mind working in a warehouse. I say I think it's cool. They tell me the story of a previous employee, a marketing person, a woman, and how from the beginning they knew it wasn't going to work out because when she saw the office she turned up her nose and especially when she saw the bathroom she was totally uncomfortable. During the interview they laugh and say that it might not be an appropriate environment for a woman. I give a little *heh* and wonder what sort of boys' club I am (again) getting myself into. At the end, the boss, Tiny Paul Bunyan, asks Alex, his tech guy moving to Seattle, what he thinks about the fit. Alex again subtly states that because I've actually built software before, I might be bored at this job and he thinks that there isn't really much to do. Tiny Paul Bunyan asked me what I thought of that. I said it sounded like Alex was right, but my main thing was wanting to live in Brattleboro, so having a more low-key job than I'd had in the past was ok with me. We all shook hands and I left. All the time the sales guy was at his desk making phone calls—we never met. I coughed horribly through the whole interview. I ask what happened to the marketing person. They all laugh and say she quit at the end of her first week. Probably best for everyone. Haha. Then I have *another* in-person trash can interview at the bagel restaurant on Main Street. My future asshole boss re-explains the job, I say that sounds like something I could help you with. He says, "I've looked at your website, and I want you to know, this isn't glamorous work." I say, "Most of my working life, I've sat in a cubicle, doing very unglamorous work." He says, "But it looks like you're more into writing novels now, and you've got good reviews and you're selling books on Amazon. I just want you to know that the kind of work we do at Trash Can Inc..it isn't going to be like you're some star player..you know..there's no glitz." "My last book," I say, "and every book I've written, the glamour profile is much like programming: it's just you, sitting at a keyboard in a quiet room, doing a whole bunch of typing. So..when you look at my website, it might look like the novel writing I do supplies a lot of fuel for my ego—or is glamorous, as you say—but it's really just quiet, observant, constructive work. If I had to say one thing it's like, I'd say weaving." "So are you working on anything right now—do you think that's going to be a conflict of interest with your work for us?" "No, I just finished a novel and it was the longest I've done yet and I'm taking a break from writing and that's part of why I'm seeking this job." He says he has to talk to the guys—he wants them to feel they're part of the decision to hire someone they're going to be working with on a daily basis. "But yeah," he smiles, "you've pretty much got the job. We're like at an eighty-percent maybe," he says. And while I hate being drug along behind the boat like this—I mean it's totally unprofessional to tell someone they *maybe* have a job—I love that, despite Tiny Paul Bunyan's unwillingness to just offer me the job on the spot, I know I have it. I found my Brattleboro job. I can let my breath go. I walk out of the trash can in-person interview feeling bliss: I'm going to be able to live in Brattleboro, have a job, walk to work, stop at Whit's on the way home everyday, and have a life!! I tell Thomas this, my life plan for Brattleboro, and how fricking relieved I feel that I can actually do it now that I found a job. And, feeling happy, knowing I have a life, that I'm not in crisis, I drink reasonably that day—two drinks—and then leave for home. "Well, my literary friend, I'm heading home." "You want to pay up already?" "Yep." Thomas says, "That's a first for you—leaving after two drinks?" I lean in. "You wanna hear a story?" "Lemme take care of this couple, I'll get you your check, and I'll hear that story." Thomas comes back in a couple minutes, puts his elbow on the bar, and looks at me. He's drinking some kind of non-alcoholic beer. "So," I say. "They did this experiment with mice." "Ok." "Two cages. One cage has a single mouse in it. There are two spickets. One has alcohol. The other has water. They give him a bowl of food, a little bed to sleep on, but that's it—there's nothing else in the cage." "Alright," Thomas is smiling. "This mouse," I say, "at first he drinks from both spickets. But pretty soon he abandons the water one and just drinks alcohol." "My kind of mouse," Thomas says, raising his non-alcoholic beer. "Mine, too, unfortunately," I say. "But I have a feeling this story isn't over," Thomas says. "Of course it's not. There's a second cage. In *this* cage are a bunch of mice, and not only that, but the cage is filled with tubes and tunnels and running wheels and little mouse slides and pools of water and mirrors—" "Do mice recognize themselves in the mirror?" "I don't know—I'm thinking not. But suffice it to say, this second cage is mouse *heaven*. Mice in there are running and sliding down the slide and splashing in the pool and they're chasing each other and fucking each other—" "As mice are wont to do." "As *everyone* is wont to do. And this second cage, the *Disneyland* of mouse cages, has two spickets too—one with water, one with alcohol. At first," I say, "all the mice drink from both spickets. But after a while, even though there's still a choice between alcohol and water, *all the mice* in the second cage *drink only water*." "I think your story is going to put Whitman's out of business." "It might. *In theory.* But I promise I won't tell it to anyone. Anyway I think the Vermont climate alone will always guarantee the existence of bars in Brattleboro." "So we'll see you soon?" Thomas pushes my change across the bar. "Once I get this job, you'll see me every day!" "Two-drink maximum from now on?" "I never said *that!* I just told you an experiment about *mice*. I never said that experiment applied to *humans!!*" I take my change, Thomas and I bow to each other, and I leave Whitman's. I walk directly across the street to the Indian convenience store. I try to get more money out of the ATM but my account is negative. I look at the change I got from Whit's. This is what I'll have to buy groceries with for the week. I walk around the store. I pay for a whole week's worth of groceries with my pennies, nickels, maybe a lucky dime or two: eggs, English muffins, no cheese because it's too expensive, a carton of OJ even though it's deadly expensive..all to last for a week. The Indian clerk hated my guts for making him re-count all the change I set out as my payment. He looked at me like I was a degenerate, and I believed it, too. - - - - I formally get the trash can job through a poorly written email from Tiny Paul Bunyan. Things are looking up. I'm still coughing horribly from the most horrible cold in my life. It turns out show tunes boy has the same cold. First day, boss is late, show tunes dude and I stand outside on the stairwell and he talks and talks when I ask him questions, but he never reciprocates. In thirty minutes of talking he allows me to ask him questions and is all too happy to talk about himself, but he never asks me a single question about me. I know from the start he's a real piece of shit. He's a theatre director and an actor, big-time personality in the booming borough of Bratt, and was a boring person compared to me, but he never know that 'cause he'll never in his life think to ask a question about the people around him..to him, it was all about him. He was the superstar! He was the show tunes singer! But really I knew all that was about his insecurity. If he felt secure in himself, in his new job, if he felt secure around another person who happened to be me, he wouldn't have spent half an hour listing his theatre accolades. Someone who felt secure would have been capable of balanced conversation—or even more frighteningly, would have been capable of saying nothing about themself at all. My boss is crazy, though. He gets there after their posted opening hour and starts talking porn before he can show me where my desk is. Trash Can boss—aka Tiny Paul Bunyan—tells us that: "I was surfing a little porn—I don't surf a lot of porn because of my wife—I mean I'm a married man, it wouldn't be right—but I come across this one site, and it's these girls—and these girls don't look like porn stars—they look like the little girls you'd see on Elliot Street! Like little high school girls! Small-town girls! And I'm clicking in and they've got a little bit you can see without a credit card so I'm like ok and then it's like these little thirteen-year-olds getting tortured and raped on this boat off like Cape Cod and I was like *these are real*..this isn't staged..this is real-life torture and rape and like *Eyes Wide Shut*-type of shit! So I figured I might have to call a town marshal or the FBI or I don't even know if you could trust this type of information to the FBI—you know, they might be in on it—so after I put my credit card in I could see—" "You put your credit card in?" "—I had to because I had to see the extent of what was going on so I'd know if I had to call the authorities! And this is some *bona fide* fucked-up shit, guys, I'm telling you, the things they were doing to these girls." Tiny Paul Bunyan looks like he's about to cry. "I was torn because I was like I've got to call someone..this isn't right..I mean these were underage girls..I've got *daughters* the same age as these girls. But it was kind of exciting. And it makes you think..what if you were in Abu Ghraib, you know—what if you were really in that situation? Would you go through with it? Or would you be the one guy who stands up and says, This is wrong, you know. But I figure these Illuminati guys on these boats, they're not gonna stand up and say *nothing!* If they do—pack, pack—two in the back, you know what I'm saying? Throw your ass overboard and never hear from you again. But the things they were doing to these girls, man. The sick thing is, I got turned on by it! I'm no child rapist or anything, but this sick fucking shit is turning me on!" "They weren't real," says the sales guy who has gotten here somewhere in the middle of Tiny Paul Bunyan's story. "They certainly looked real to me?" "Do you think the Illuminati is raping and torturing girls and then selling them for twenty-nine ninety-nine on the internet? I don't think those two businesses exactly *mix*. You got off on these girls, didn't you?" Tiny Paul Bunyan blushes. The sales guy continues. "I don't believe you. You put your credit card in and jerked off to a bunch of thirteen-year-olds pretending to get raped on a boat. You are a sick bastard." "Please. We have new employees present." "You're the one telling us what kind of porn you watched last night." "I think these girls might really be in danger," TPB says, shaking his head and looking at the floor. There's a word I really like, and I'm going to use it here. Incredulous. See? I didn't even have to use it in a sentence and you know exactly what I mean. - - - - This whole time our sales guy is trying to tell us all something. He's looking at his computer and squirming in his seat like a little kid who has to pee. Finally Tiny Paul Bunyan stops telling us what he jerked off to last night and says: "What?" The sales guy says, "Somebody got shot at the Food Co-Op." "What??" says Tiny Paul Bunyan. The show tunes singer goes to the windows and looks out. You can see the Co-Op from our office. "Yup," the sales guy says. "The wine manager shot the general manager in the head." Tiny Paul Bunyan kneels almost, braces himself, stands up. "I know him," he says. "Which one? The shooter?" "Well I know both of them. They're family friends." Which probably means they met on the street one time and my boss just wants to feel connected to the event, pretend that he's really moved that some fifty-year-old shot some other fifty-year-old in the head at a fucking hippie Food Co-Op. I agree it's horrible, but Tiny Paul Bunyan didn't *know* those guys—like really know them. They might have had a bagel together *once*. The show tunes singer goes to lunch. He makes a point of walking up and talking to the police who are guarding the bridge that goes to the Food Co-Op—we can see this from our windows. I have a convo with Tiny Paul Bunyan about one of my concerns. I get up from my newly assigned desk and am pacing a bit, squinting my face. He's like, "This is really affecting you—is it? 'Cause I don't think you should go home unless you really knew the guy. I mean he was a close friend of our family, so." "No, I'm not asking to go home." "Does stuff like this really affect you?" "Not really, I mean it's a tragedy, I'm never happy when life is wasted." "Then what are you thinking about?" "Well, I just always, since Columbine, and all these school shootings, office shootings, I just think *I hope I don't die because some guy I work with goes nuts and brings a gun to work*." "Do you own a gun, he asks me." "No, I say, of course not. Do you?" Tiny Paul Bunyan shakes his head and smiles. "No," he says. And then he asks: "Are you thinking about the show tunes singer?" "That's exactly who I'm thinking about." "Why, do you know him from before? Do you two have like a grudge match or something?" "No, it's just a sense of intuition." "Intuition?" Tiny Paul Bunyan says, "Isn't that something only women have?" I look at Tiny Paul Bunyan and say, with absolutely no inflection, "No, men can have it too." "Just making sure you're not some kind of crossdresser or something," says my new boss. I just look at him like he's fucking crazy. Which he fucking is. "But yeah, I'm a little worried that in all the excitement my new coworker the show tunes singer might come to our office and do the same thing. We had a very weird conversation this morning before you got here, and you just never know when people are going to bring guns to work and start shooting." "What if you're the type?" says Tiny Paul Bunyan. "If I was the type, I wouldn't be having this conversation with you. Notice how I show my emotion in little pieces here and there? It's the type who are consummately smiling, who never let you in, who bottle that shit up while they're pleasant to you *every single day—that's* the type that comes into an office and blows everyone away. Don't you ever read true crime? FBI profiling manuals?" "No, Matthew, I don't have time to read FBI profiling manuals." I shake my head. "How can you live in America without reading FBI profiling manuals?" It's a serious question. "Well," Tiny Paul Bunyan says, "I gotta go check on Hipsta—that's my wife. Sorry to leave you guys like this but you can handle the office, right? Might have to take the kids out of school early. Hipsta will be beside herself, I mean she cooked her famous Vermont cheesecake for this guy, and, well, now that he has a hole in his head he's not going to be eating any more cheesecake! Can you imagine getting shot in the head *while* you're eating the best piece of Vermont cheesecake you've ever had in your life? I'd wanna go during sex, he says. What about you, Matthew?" I look at the guy like he's fucking crazy. Which he fucking *is*. "I don't know," I say. "Maybe in the woods." Tiny Paul Bunyan mutters something about picking up the kids and he's out the door. "Does he even know the guy that got shot?" I ask the salesman. "Never mentioned him before in his life." "I know Vermont *cheese* is a thing, but is Vermont *cheese*cake..like..a thing Vermont is known for?" "Not that I know of, the sales guy says." "*O-k.*" "I'll tell you what, though, this place has changed," the sales guy says. "I mean this sort of thing wouldn't have happened even five years ago, I guarantee it. A few years ago there were only a few of them up here..but now it's like a goddamn migration. They come up from New York 'cause it's cheaper to live, but they do the same things up here they do down there." "*They* who?" "Blacks. They're all smoking crack over there. You know that neighborhood by the Drop In Center? They call that BrattleBrooklyn 'cause it's just a bunch of niggers smoking crack." "Really?" I say. "Oh yeah. Trust me on this one. You want to stay out of that neighborhood." (Which, for my reader, keep in mind this is Brattleboro, so the "neighborhood" the sales guy is referring to as BrattleBrooklyn is actually just a block..one block..one street. Ok. Glad we're clear on that.) The sales guy says all this crap about niggers smoking crack ostensibly to support the reasoning behind or existence of this morning's Food Co-Op killing, when even *I've* been to the Co-Op enough times to know that both the wine manager and the general manager are *white*. They're not niggers. They don't smoke crack. They just have a grudge and firearms and a lack of social skills. The sales guy sighs. He says, "You expect this in the City..but in *Brattleboro*?" Him saying this makes me want to shoot *him* in the face. - - - - My second day at work with these jokers, I go up the hill to get a burger to bring back to the office to eat for lunch and I'm at the burger cart and while I'm standing back waiting for my food, Libby comes up and orders a veggie burger and she comes back and stands next to me as she waits for her food. "You haven't come in for a while. We've missed you." "Ugh. The truth is Libby I've been low on funds. But I just got a job." "Oh, good! How's your body?" "It could use some work." "Are you still hiking?" "Not as much. I've been so stressed." "It's a vicious cycle." "I know. I know. How are you doing?" "Me?" "Yes, you, Greatest Massage Therapist In the World." Libby laughs. "I don't know if I can live up to the title." "Alright well how about Greatest Massage Therapist I've Ever Met." She blushes. She looks at me. "I know you have a partner, Libby. I'm not flirting with you. I just think you're an amazing person and when I meet amazing people I like to let them know. Because amazing people..it's sad but amazing people are some of the ones who get the fewest accolades in this world. You know? It's like I wish the news all day would just show pictures of mothers walking their babies and fathers changing diapers and people shoveling snow so cars can get by and EMT's performing mouth to mouth on cardiac patients who are obviously dead..well..the last one might be a bit much but you know what I'm saying?" "I do. What we focus on affects what we produce." "Exactly. I mean one of the things I want people to realize in certain of the 'crisis' situations we're in in this country is that *the media is the problem*. No an exacerbator of the problem. But: The Problem." "You're a special person, Matthew. You're special to me." "You're special to me, too, Libby." And we stand there for a moment watching our burgers cook. "I wonder what that fried egg is for," Libby says. "Oh that's for me." "You're having a fried egg on your burger?" "Most definitely." We stand there a moment more. Libby says, "I wonder who that avocado is for." "Oh that's for me." Libby smiles. "What about the bacon?" "Half is for you, half is for me." "I'm having a veggie burger!" "*I* know! You can put bacon on a veggie burger! Trust me, I've done it..it doesn't explode or anything." We go on like this for a while until she's forced to ask: "How do you *eat* that?" "With a knife and fork," I say. "Did you know I sing?" she says. "No, Libby, I didn't." She gives me the information for her next show. My burger is ready first. "Have a wonderful day, Libby." "You have a wonderful day, too, Libby." We are both refreshed. I crave time around her, my spirit does, just like your body craves healthy things to eat. - - - - I take my burger back to the office and eat at the conference table. Everyone asks me what I got. I can feel that creeping office feeling of everyone being in everyone's business, and I hate it. With the last bite of burger in my mouth, I ask Tiny Paul Bunyan a question about the business. (We sell recycle bins too.) I ask him: "Are the recycling bins we sell recyclable?" He turns in his chair, crunching the numbers. "I have never thought to ask this question and I not know the answer to it." Yeah, ok. Even though he's the CEO of a business that sells recycle bins, he's never wondered if recycling bins are themselves made of recyclable material. That's a day one question. By the look on his face, by his body language, by the textual answer to my questions, he also does not know if I am asking him a serious question or if I'm fucking with him, and he is clearly afraid to ask. Tiny Paul Bunyan has a weird calculation-complete look for me on his face. I have black bile disgust for Tiny Paul Bunyan in my heart. I need to wash my hands after that burger, having greased-up every flimsy paper napkin the food cart had given me. When I go to the bathroom for the first time, I see why their marketing person quit—one reason anyway. The bathroom is third world. The show tunes singer sits at his desk singing show tunes at full volume while he's turned his monitor so only he can see it and he's surfing Facebook all day..reminds me of a guy at Mead Research who ultimately got fired for looking at porn at work. He had his monitor turned so that only he could see it..it's never a good sign. - - - - I went to therapy every two weeks at lunchtime while working for the Trash Can Place. Since everyone was so into everyone else's business, I made up lies about where I had eaten lunch, when asked. I hate workmates who do this—I have to interact with your idiotic ass eight hours a day, maybe don't ask where I ate my lunch, ok? In therapy I stole magazines from the lobby with permission from my therapist. I liked the one about Eminem and also the one about Leona Winehouse who did a lot of drugs and died. I could relate to them. I talked with my therapist about the show tunes singer singing show tunes at his desk and it irking me and my therapist said: "At least that noise isn't inside your own head." "What do you mean?" "When you go home, the show tunes singer doesn't come with you—unless you choose to bring him. At least that noise is outside of you, not something you're creating internally." I didn't understand what she meant. I didn't understand what she said because I *did* have a lot of noise in my own head back then. When my therapist told me that it wasn't the show tunes singer who was bothering me—and when people in AA meetings that year and many years later told me the same thing—they planted a seed in my brain. They said it wasn't the show tunes singer's noise that was bothering me, it was *me* who was bothering me. And that made me mad every time I heard it. They said I wasn't at peace within myself—if I was, then nothing outside would bother me. This made me even madder—I felt pretty at peace with myself. Who is so Zen at work that they don't mind when some dumb-ass kid who is getting paid to sing show tunes and look at Facebook while the rest of us are working—under a boss who was too chickenshit to say anything to the show tunes singer about the show tunes singing that he never said anything until me and the sales guy said something to this boss about it? Who is Zen enough to program a website knowing and hearing that bullshit right next to you? I wasn't. There was so much noise in me that I couldn't tell where the show tunes singer stopped and I began. I will have that level of noise (and more) in my head from before this book started until after this book ends. My therapist and those AA people were right. The person who was bothering me was me. I had and have a chaotic head due to the condition of being human. And also due to special circumstances inside my brain that I had long forgotten. And also due to being an addict. ### 37 As I write this I have 18 months clean and sober, as they say. It's taken all that time and it's taken a new living situation and it's taken a new diet and meditation and doctors and pills upon pills (upon pills) to get myself quieted a little. I live in a new city in a new state and many things have happened between Vermont and now that I'll never have time to put into books. Much has changed, but some things are still the same. I still go to AA meetings. I found a meditation temple with AA meetings and the podunk town of Baton Rouge, where I lived, got so much cooler when I discovered there was an AA meditation meeting held in a Buddhist temple. I didn't even know there was a Buddhist temple in deep-south Baton Rouge. And it reminds me, one of my favorite meetings, way back in Tucson, was a meditation meeting. So I started going to this one in Baton Rouge and it was way better for me than the Bible-thumping Wednesday night men's meeting. There was a woman at this meditation meeting named Glory, and the first day Glory I went, Glory stood with me on the steps of the Buddhist temple and talked, and listened, and let me cry. Our relationship isn't one-hundred percent healthy, but she helped me a lot. A situation happened last fall where I could no longer go to the meditating AA group that had so many friends and that had begun to feel like home and that had helped get me sober for longer than I've ever been sober before. They made a rule that we were no longer allowed to lie down during meditation because it offended the tradition of the monks whose space we met in. I have an illness now—the details are unimportant—but a medicine prescribed to me by a psychiatrists damaged my brain in a way that manifests itself like Parkinson's. I can't sit or stand very long without experiencing extreme pain. My muscles clench uncontrollably. The only relief I have is lying down. And that's why I was going to that AA meeting: it's half meditation, half sharing, for a total of one hour. I lied down during the meditation and sat up during the discussion, holding myself and shaking, trying to sit still, embarrassed and in pain the whole time. So *that meeting* was the only one I could really go to, physically, and this new no-lying-down-rule excluded me from the group. The day they made the announcement, I sat up through the meditation—the most painful meditation I've ever sat through. When the ending bell rang, while the lights were still dimmed, I quietly gathered my things and left. In the past I would have argued, I might have yelled, I might have told off the AA group and the monks and let them know how fucking stupid they were—according to me. - - - - I told the show tunes singer off one day at Trash Can Central. He touched my iPad—lifted its cover and had a look around—while I was at lunch. The salesperson told me this when I returned—it might not even have been true. But Tiny Paul Bunyan was gone and it was just the three workers. For a moment, a critical mass was brought together for me at that stupid trash can company, the show tunes singer singing at his desk, touching my personal computing machinery, and of course the sales guy playing one side against the other for his own entertainment. "Show tunes singer, did you touch my iPad?" "Uh, yes, a little, when you were gone I peeked under the cover just to see how cool it was." "So you touched my iPad." "Well." "You've already admitted you did. Can I get a yes or no from you? Are you capable of that? Just a simple, 'Yes, I touched your iPad.' " "Yes." "Yes you are capable or yes you touched it." "I touched it." "When you go to lunch, do you expect me to touch your personal property?" "It depends on what it is." "Well, let me inform you, when it comes to *my* personal property, it does *not* depend. If I bring a *paperclip* in from home, and set it on my desk, you are not to touch it, understand?" "Come on—" "Do you understand? *My* paperclip—you do not touch. *Company* paperclip—have at it. Tell me you understand what I'm saying." "But—" "Just say, 'Matthew, I understand what you're saying,' and this conversation will be over!" "I think you're overreacting." "It's my iPad so I can react however I want. It's my stuff and I don't want you touching it. Do you realize how low that makes you in my book? I'm not sure I can work with you anymore and as soon as this conversation is over I'm calling Tiny Paul Bunyan and we're gonna have a talk about *which one of us—you or me*—is going to keep working at this company 'cause I don't think I can work with a no-respect *motherfucker* like you." The sales guy's eyes are bulging. The show tunes singer's eyes are welling with tears. "Do you realize how unprofessional it is for you to speak to me that way?" I hit the ceiling. "*You* started this, you dumb motherfucker. Now that you invaded *my personal property* I can talk to you any way I want *to try to get you to understand* what it is the fuck that you just did to this office and all of our ability to trust each other as we bring our coats, watches, laptops, iPads, *whatever*, into this office. *You* have fucked that up." "But—" "YOU HAVE FUCKED THAT UP!!" "I'm going to tell Tiny Paul Bunyan you yelled at me." "*I'M GOING TO TELL HIM FIRST!* YOU DON'T REALIZE HOW SERIOUS THIS IS, SHOW TUNES SINGER!!" "Ok, I agree." "Just say you're fucking sorry, asshole." He struggles with it. "If I did anything wrong, I apologize." "*That* is not an apology." "Ok I apologize!" "Thank you." I sit down to do my work. Then I look over at the show tunes singer and he's smirking. "What's so funny?" He shakes his head. "You. This whole situation. I didn't do anything wrong." "Show tunes singer, you just undid everything good we accomplished before I sat down." And I laid into him again, worse than before, and I threw at him every word in the book. Called him a thief. Said he couldn't be trusted around company property. Re-opened the issue of him taking the company laptop home every night to surf porn. Told him Tiny Paul Bunyan and I were gonna have a talk that ended that little practice, too. Finally the asshole was about to cry, so he left the office with crocodile tears and to tell you the truth I was glad the vermin was out of my elevated sight. - - - - In short, I gave the show tunes singer a scolding unlike any he's likely to ever had in his protected, pointless, no-talent life. I've given a lot of those scoldings—sometimes in email, sometimes in person, vocally. My sister calls it "the righteous smackdown" and it's something I've done many times. I was trained by the best—my mother—when I was a kid. We used to argue, awful arguments, but not to make each other hurt or cry..we were arguing the issues..and we were arguing for the same of argument. At least from the fourth grade on we would do this, at high volume, with her at the bottom and me at the top of the stairs. As either of our positions strengthened, we'd move up or down the stairs. My position could push her down the stairs, her position could push me up and back into the hallway toward my room. It was like fencing..like fencing practice between the Wart and his brother Kay in *The Once and Future King*. I learned it early, and people who knew me between the age of eighteen and thirty-six, if you seek them out, will attest that you did not want to be on the receiving end of the righteous smackdown. I think of myself as a peaceful person—but that's not exactly true. People push, and push, and all the while I'm telling them, "Stop pushing me," but they never listen. Then one day they push me too far and I will tell you without pride that none of these people who pushed me *ever* imagined, in their wildest fucking *dreams*, the demon that lives inside of me, that comes out, that uses every bit of my verbal and emotional intellect to say things that crawl under the skin and sink like fingers into their brains. I can say things that a grown man will repeat to himself the rest of his life. I can drive a sane person to madness in a single speech, and I used to enjoy doing it. Just for misquoting Abraham Lincoln (oh and being a homophobe and a racist and generally a dumb fucking cracker), I said things to my uncle Perish that riled him up like a madhouse bull. That was 2010. It's 2016 and he's still snarling and scraping his hoof and aiming his horns at me. I'm reminded of a great interchange in Michael Mann's movie *The Insider*. Russell Crowe has a meeting with his former employer, played by Michael Gambon. Russell gets riled up and says: "So, what you're saying is: it isn't enough that you fired me for no good reason. Now you question my integrity? On top of the *humiliation* of being fired! You *threaten* me?! You threaten *my family*?! It never crossed my mind not to honor my agreement. But I will tell *you*, Mr Sandefur, and Brown & Williamson, too—Fuck *me*?—Well, fuck *you!!*" Russell storms out of the room. Some asshole lawyer says, "I'm not sure he got the message." And Michael Gambon, brilliantly playing this tobacco company CEO, says, "Oh, I think he did." I'll say the same of my uncle Perish. As recently as last year, he was trying to convince my aunt to kick me out of the house I lived in because he was moving to the area and was going to be spending more time around the family. *An uncle trying to get his nephew kicked out of the house he lives in?* Do I think he got the message every time I told his dumb ass off since 2010? *Oh, I think he did.* That's a bull with an erection he can't get rid of—and that's not the kind of bull I want to be around. All I said to Perish were truths about himself that I could see that he couldn't—and that *he did not want to*—see. That's how you get under someone's skin. That's how you create an itch that can never be scratched. If I laid the righteous smackdown on a literal bull, he would lie his huge body in the dust and cry his organs out through his eyes in place of tears—*that's* how good I am at fucking people up with my words. - - - - In this AA meditation group situation, I could have done that. If you had asked me then if I thought 14 months of sobriety and meditation had changed me, I would have said no, not much at all. But that day I learned by watching my own behavior that it had. When that painful meditation sit was over, after the announcement had been made that there would be no more lying down during meditation, with the lights still dimmed, I quietly gathered my things and left. And I haven't been back since. I didn't argue with anyone. I didn't even go out of my way to let the group know how it had affected me. I didn't feel angry. I still don't feel angry—I never have about the whole event. I just made an observation that I now had to jump through too many hoops to participate in that meeting, and I stopped participating in it. I hope to find another meeting that somehow works for me. The righteous smackdown didn't even occur to me—in fact, I'm retiring it. I love the people in that group. I love the monks who give them space to meditate. And after 18 months of sobriety and meditation, of feeding myself better, body and mind, there is a lot less noise in my mind than when I was sitting next to the show tunes singer at Trash Can Central. I even love the show tunes singer now. I hope he's sitting in an office somewhere, browsing Facebook, singing show tunes as loud as he can, asserting his right to do any fucking thing he wants to disturb everyone else who works in that office, that isn't so much it gives his boss the courage to ask him to stop. ### 38 The cats were stinking up the house 'cause Tooler didn't clean their shitbox, and that was the main reason I moved upstairs. At first it was just a little bit stinky as we made meals in the kitchen. Then the shitbox wouldn't be cleaned for *weeks*, and the smell hit you as soon as you walked in the front door. Then it was like Bongo was making these acrobatic shits on the side of our trash can. I would look at him do this, jumping up and shitting on a power bar wrapper that was sticking out of the trash can and I'd be like *how did he get that there?* He was amazing with his acro-shits, and nothing, not complaining to Tooler, not Tooler getting a hood for the shitbox..*nothing* seemed fix our stinky cat problem. But I peered into the letterbox a few times and my life wouldn't be happy if I had to shit in there, either. It got to where the shit was everywhere, and the stink was pungent—it was unsuitable for cats, much less people. I move into the upstairs apartment in the attic, above Maggie, above Tooler and Issa. I didn't tell them until like the day before because I wanted to minimize static between Tooler and I. Tooler was like, "*I* wanted to move to that apartment when Issa moved to New York." "I'm sorry, Tooler, but I just can't live with the cat smell." And the messy: I mean you could never even *see* the couch because it had trash, computers, protest materials all over it. There was no way I could *bring someone over* to this apartment. "The fact that you waited so late to tell is really hurt me," Tooler says. "I thought our house situation was going well." I felt bad for her. "It was going well—in the beginning." "I just wanted a friendly roommate situation." "I did too, Tooler." That was the last Tooler and I talked for days. We avoided each other. On the day I was moving, when Abby had finished painting the attic with a new set of hideous colors, when all my stuff was in the stairwell, ready to move, when their new roommate had already moved into my old room and I was homeless until Abby gave me the keys, Issa got me and Tooler together: me on the outside of the open first floor apartment door, Tooler on the inside. "Now make up," Issa said. "I don't know if I have anything to say to him," Tooler said. "Tooler," Issa said. And I said, "Tooler, I am sincerely sorry that the way I went about this hurt you. That is *not* what I intended. My communication was poor—" "Your communication was nonexistent!" "You're right, until a few days ago, my communication was nonexistent. I didn't realize that that would hurt your feelings and I should have, I should have know that. I think of you highly, I respect you, I even like you, Tooler, believe it or not. I just can't take the mess and the cat smell is too much for me." "The cat smell isn't even that bad!!" "It's too bad for me. I'm sorry. I have sincerely enjoyed all three of our time together and I wish it was the way it was in the beginning. I thought we had a lot of fun then." "Yeah, we did, before you became Mr AA, Mr I-Don't-Drink, Mr I don't smoke shisha, Mr Button-Up-Shirt-To-Work." "I can't drink like I used to!" "You used to be more fun!" "I know, Tooler, listen, everybody likes me better when I drink, ok, it's just one of the conundrums of my life. Sober me is a little too serious—" "A *little?!?!*" "—a lot too serious for most people's tastes." "Fuck! If this is how you are when you're sober, you might as well drink! You turned into a fucking asshole." Issa puts both hands on Tooler's shoulders. "Now hug, you two, hug," Issa says. Tooler and I hug each other like we're hugging a spider, Tooler leaves for her bedroom and Issa says: "She'll be better in a few days." But she wasn't. Tooler I and only spoke generously to each other once more, and we were never friends again. - - - - I suppose this deserves mentioning briefly. The new roommate, Krystal, was a slut. When I was helping her move into her new room (my old room), she would lie down on her mattress with her legs spread in these purple yoga pants. This happened when I was showing her the place and when she was moving in. Like as soon as we started talking about something Krystal would lie down with her legs spread to talk to me, just, showing off that yoga pant gussets and everything. I never saw a woman do that before, precisely, but I didn't make a move. I mean I wanted to fuck her—not her specifically—but any woman just on the strength of her having a vagina. But the fact that she was acting like a superho scared me. She smoked pot constantly (as in, she could not complete any other task without smoking pot at the same time). She often showed up at one of the doors to the attic apartment drunk and slutty (as in, flirting with me dressed in her underwear but she should barely stand up—hardly a fuck I'd want to entertain). And she always had her legs open. Like she'd be sitting in my comfy chair talking to me upstairs and she would have her legs spread *as wide as possible* given the limits of human anatomy. I say this without judgment, but that girl is a psychotic, alcoholic slut. - - - - Abby and I sat on the bed together while she gave me the key to the new apartment. Just sitting on the bed a woman made me want to fuck her—but she's my landlord! This is maybe something about what my old therapist Kathryn said about not being so hungry that I'd go for anything. Maybe I should have fucked Krystal, who knows. But no, no, I should not have fucked Krystal. I didn't want to fuck Krystal. I did want to fuck my landlord. What if we had? Maybe we'd be living together in Morocco right now, peaceful, nomads. But it's not likely. I bought all sorts of things for that apartment once I got my first paycheck from the Trash Can Cunts, went manic buying computer devices, an exercise bike, all sorts of kitchen equipment. I was on a TCC check and unemployment money. There was overlap there—I knew and didn't know. I was manic, I was crazy—it might sound like a simple excuse to some of you but it's not. It's actually a really dangerous and out-of-control condition and there's nothing fake or funny about it. I was going to make smoothies and juice all my ingredients for every meal, get super healthy, but it was really about *buying things*, having money and *spending* it, you know?—working at that trash can job and being on a spending spree with two forms of income, Trash Can and also monthly welfare on a VISA card..I didn't even know what I was buying or with what. I ate out and drank the most expensive juices I could buy..*at least I wasn't drinking!* was my excuse. Looking back I was completely manic—biking halfway across Vermont to have some *pancakes* someone recommended..way longer bike trips than my body was ready for. Manic, filling out these welfare forms with lies. I was only partially conscious about spending money and the rest of me had no reasonable conception that I was spending so much. I mean I just walked into Kips without drinking and proposed to Jill that we have sex sometime. She said maybe we could work something out. Oh yeah, oh yeah, and this! The burger stand! I sell a trash can the first day I worked for Trash Can Incorporated and it takes the bonehead owner of that deadbeat corporation three months to order it. When I finally bring it to the burger stand—that's the guy I sold it to—I gave it to him for free because it took so long for us to provide it that it had become a joke between me and the burger stand guys about how long it takes Tiny Paul Bunyan (who they knew—remember, town of eleven thousand people) to order a motherfucking trash can! It made it embarrassing to even say I worked for the company. I mean on the first day I got the job, the burger stand owner, Chris, was like, "Alright!" "Wow!" and "I'm glad you got the job!" but by the end of this debacle it was like neither of us ever, ever mentioned that I worked for that piece of shit company because it was a blight on me as a person. I never even put that company on my resume because I thought the fact that I had worked there would have a negative effect on my hireability. The drama with the assholes at Trash Can Consortium got even worse. I basically got played by the sales guy. He instigated problems between me and the show tunes singer, and I fell for it. I got involved where I should have stayed aloof. The owner sided with this no-talent douchebag probably because he was a family friend (that's not a supposition—he was a family friend) or the show tunes singer might have been sucking Tiny Pauly Bunyan's dick—that was just as likely. Show tunes singer kneeling on the warehouse floor while Tiny Paul Bunyan sat on our third-world toilet taking a shit with the show tunes singer sucking Tiny Paul Bunyan's tiny Canadian peen, the smell of shit wafting up to further stimulate the head bobbing of the show tunes singer, Tiny Paul Bunyan cumming in the show tunes singer's face, and them having no paper towels to clean him up with. That's right, Tiny Paul Bunyan barely kept us in toilet paper, but didn't seem to grasp that buying paper towels for the bathroom of his small business so his employees could dry our hands after we washed them was *his* responsibility. He never bought them. So we all just wiped our hands on our pants. - - - - I kept going to this one bar (and not drinking) but having lunch there to get a break from Tiny Paul Bunyan's idiotic monologues about saving young women from pirates on the internet when he was really just telling us about porn sites he visited. And I kept seeing Darling Nikki, because she worked at this bar. And we kept having these mini-conversations about social networking sites and what we wished they would do better, and after a month of lunches these mini-conversations had turned into an idea for a web business. We were always flirtatious but it never got to sex. If I'm sober, I never initiate sex unless it's someone who I truly feel it with—I mean I have to feel some butterflies, man—it can't be robotic for me. I'll have sex with a wider set of women if they push for it (and aren't quite as slutty as Krystal), but for me to be in pursuit I have to feel the sparks..intensely. Justine—yeah, full, 100% sparks. To a lesser degree, Walsh—80% sparks. Women from my past..whatever, there have to be sparks. You know, it has to get me psychologically, too, I'm not some grunt who's into any pussy he can get. Maybe that's because sex has been relatively available to me and it isn't for some guys. Darling Nikki had a great business idea. It was just ahead of its time. I programmed and it and she helped direct it and we'd make our meetings kind of like dates, where we'd get sushi and talk about our business then flirt with each other, talking about sex and shit, but while I'm tempted, I never make a move. I wanted to fuck her, I was just too out of sorts, too weak within myself, to function on any kind of advanced level. Our project was an anonymous talk site, and even when we were testing the thing, she would be flirting with me through text and I would be flirting back. She was in good shape, I'd heard from her ex-husband that she was great in bed, she just wasn't for me—I would have rather had a second chance to fuck Walsh, and marry her, have babies and fuck her till we were eighty then shoot ourselves in the head on some grand anniversary. Or at least day drink until we died. Back in the sushi restaurant. Darling Nikki clearly offering it up. The old me would have said, "So, you wanna fuck?" And she would have said yes. She was giving all the signs: also sitting with her legs wide open (but not as slutty as Krystal), pushing the tip of her finger between wet lips, smiling deliciously at me. She would have nodded her head slowly and we would have gone to my apartment and fucked. But the new me was too jaded, too scared, and too depressed to make the first move—if you haven't noticed, I was having some severe psychological problems at this point in my life. It wasn't even worth it, I thought—and that's depression speaking. If you had seen this girl, you would know that thinking it was not worth it to fuck her..was depression. Honestly I couldn't even conceptualize the desire for sex that day. I didn't even remember what it felt like. I didn't even care. So Darling Nikki and I became estranged because I kept missing more meetings with her as my mind fell apart. I don't miss meetings. But I started missing meetings with her. I just wasn't aware of my calendar. I couldn't tell you what day it was. Our project failed. We never fucked. We never even stayed friends. It was a disaster. I remember walking Darling Nikki back to where both our bicycles were parked. Hers was like this three-thousand dollar racing thing. Darling Nikki did biathlons, triathlons, she was self-sufficient, she had made her way in Brattleboro a long time by creating positions for herself at companies that had no positions. She was so functional, and I was so not. Fucking, not fucking—who cares. What Darling Nikki represented to me was a mentality that if I was honest with myself I felt was a) slipping away and b) never there. Darling Nikki rode off on her bike, head down, ass up, knees turning and thighs pumping—a picture of health. - - - - Sometimes I would see Matt Mattson, working a spare construction day, clomping up the stairs to the drug apartment, slinking down to the lake, living in a tent. And I felt it, because I knew that I was going to end up that way. I had been homeless before, and as a person with bipolar disorder, the chances are decent that I'll end up homeless again and/or will die by my own hand. Then again, fifty percent of the people that US cops murder each year are mentally ill—that sudden death is the best that some of us can hope for. ### 39 Journal entry from: > **J****uly** **30, 2011** > > Just ate lunch at Flat Street (chili and pineapple juice). Now sitting in the Latchis before watching Cowboys and Aliens. Vision of myself as a solitary, non-drinking, rich man. Stay sober, stay clear, and take the next step into having tons and tons of resources. Sell your books. Make businesses that make money. Make businesses to sell. Don't over-extend: focus on one thing at a time, but move out of working for someone else as soon as I can. Before this winter if possible. Use the internet to create interest in my books, to draw traffic to my blog, etc. And become a celebrity, in the literary world. Write amazing things. And enjoy a quiet and serene life. Watch movies, live simply, carry an iPad and a keyboard everywhere, treat people well, treat myself well, and don't suffer again. Be good to myself. > > Just watched Cowboys and Aliens. It was fun to watch. Getting sushi now at Shin La. Lots of imagination right now, about what to do with inhesion..to start with science fiction and work toward reality from there. To start off the map, in the middle of the open spaces, to start with Neuromancer and make things from there, possible. Control systems, organic. And I think tonight and tomorrow I'll program on TalkAnonymous\.com, get that working with multiple identities, and make the interface simple and uncluttered..it should be the simplest possible, with no credits or explanations, just bulletproof, then later, I'll take xtools and move on and make inhesion, become Eldon Tyrell, make stuff that people never thought of. I love this computer. It's incredibly light in my backpack, and soon I'll have another bag, a bag just for it. Hopefully it fits the keyboard, too. I like the modularity of a bluetooth keyboard and a screen, that you carry around. This could definitely be the future: components that are loosely coupled, such that you can mix and match, use any one of them or none, computers that are small, cheap, and multi-purpose. I have some inkling of creating a lego-like programming environment, that could work well on small screens and touch screens, maybe in tandem with dot oh languaging. Simple keys, small set of symbols, hierarchical software development happening on small screens. DSD: distributed software development. Make tools for that. Post-source control. The next day: > **July 31, 2011** > > Sitting in Bagel Works. Been playing Mahjong. Moving today. Abby said she'll let me know when she's done cleaning and fixing up the apartment, and I can move in today. So excited. Like: butterflies in my stomach. One of my Mahjong fortunes was "Don't be afraid of competition." or "Don't avoid competition." or something like that. I think the former. This, at work, in my ideas of starting a business. What makes me think that anyone could do what I decide to do, better than me? I could create an AI business, inhesion, that no one else in the world can create. Like that thing of the book you want to read, that doesn't exist, is yours to write. I think maybe that's true with business, too. If I have a vision, that's more than half the battle. Don't be afraid of competition. I am not inferior. I need not feel superior in ego, but in some ways, I am superior. I am superior to everyone else at being me, and so my vision, my desires, my ideas are perfect..perfectly mine. My desires, my wants, are such me, such a critical part of what I am and who I am, I should live by my dreams, by my imaginations for what could be. And another fortune I got this morning at the end of one of my games, was: "Well done is better than well said." Indeed =) Be the former: be one who does well. Leave the politicking to politicians. Be an executioner. Do. > > Went to the Sunday AA meeting. Now waiting in the Backside Cafe for my lunch. Getting grilled Monterrey chicken, spending some more time out before I go back to the High Street house. Writing on the iPad 2 is excellent. With iA Writer (program) and an external keyboard (bluetooth) I could definitely write a book or long piece on this machine. I like the idea of being able to write anywhere (and have it be typing, and stored electronically). Didn't share at the meeting. Listened, though. It was about consideration and balance. I'd like to move toward more of that at work. Though, I think this week, it was progress for me to 1) not drink over stressful shit at work and 2) not take shit from my coworker who was being an asshole to me. He touched my personal computer (opened the case) while I was away for lunch, and admitted to this after I relayed to him my coworker's relayal of this to me. I told him: Don't ever touch my shit again. And I think on the whole that was progress for me. It needed to be said, in our office—and I needed to say it, for me. Ultimately I want my effect there, and anywhere, to be that I do my work, do my job, do my part, etc. (Not that I spend my time arguing or opposing people or calling bullshit people on their bullshit.) It's a hard balance, I think. Because, as Joanne suggested when I told her this don't touch my shit story, to absolutely say nothing, to bend to, to completely ignore, such a person's behavior is enabling. I don't want to battle monsters, though, lest (as Nietzsche says) I become one. But to allow the monster to roam freely not just through your town, but past your gate and into your yard, is not to do your town a favor. It is to enable the monster. Where and how the balance lies seems non-simple to me. It seems to me there may be wrong answers to that question of balance, but that deciding on one, single right answer, might not be correct, or complete. I saw a nice-looking girl on the way to this restaurant. She looked like she'd have a sweet pussy, one I'd like to fuck. Maybe with my new apartment I will invite women over, girls, females, and have some sex. But I like my peace, and even a sweet pussy isn't worth too much chaos or trouble. Perhaps at some point I'll have a real relationship again, on all levels, with the likes of a Libby or someone of her caliber. ### 40 I was going to the 7am AA meeting every day they had it. I got several months clean. I liked the group except I always had a bad feeling about the veracity of my sponsor. He would get confused about his clean date in the middle of a share. He would say things like: "It doesn't really matter how much time you have, as long as you're living the life," which may be true but it led me to wonder if he didn't really have 20 years..or 17..of 15..or any of the different numbers of years he claimed to have in various meetings. My sponsor and I would talk every morning on the phone or in person after the 7am meeting, sitting by the creek sometimes where I always sat by myself and ate breakfast before going to work at the Trash Can Carnival. I remember seeing a drifter girl put on deodorant in front of the grocery store and being really attracted to her, in her self-reliant nature. I would never want someone who needed me. I have always been attracted to women who seemed like they didn't need anyone. My sponsor was so fucking narrow minded and judgmental..he's flipping out at my eating a beautifully fresh, raw piece of tilapia. He goes: "Matthew, I'm worried about you. You can't *eat* that." "Sure I can. Look at it. That's about the most beautiful piece of fish I've ever seen. It's perfect." "You're gonna get sick if you eat that." "No I'm not. I eat raw fish all the time. What do you think sashimi is?" "But that's in a *restaurant*. They know what they're doing." "It's the same thing. I know when they buy their fish. I wouldn't be eating this if it had sat on the shelf in there for five days but they *just delivered* this fish yesterday or today and it's *totally fresh*. Look at that." "It looks disgusting to me. It makes me want to hurl." What a boring person. What a limited person. In my mind, if this guy can't accept me eating raw fish, how's he going to be a spiritual teacher for me, on the larger issues?—it's a farce that this man is my sponsor, and I'm only keeping him as my sponsor because the other men in the group I go to are much worse choices. Like the man who hijacks the meeting to talk about Jesus Christ and people walk out when he shares but my sponsor defends him: "He spent two years in a French prison." What the fuck do I care? He's a Jesus-beating freak that's fucking up my AA meeting—we say we're not aligned with any religion or sect and then the group and the group moderator let this French prison survivor talk about Jesus for 30 minutes of a 60-minute meeting. It's wrong, it's hypocritical, and it turns people off who are there to recover from addiction, not get a poorly-assembled sermon. By the creek, the whole time my sponsor is spouting AA tritisms at me, I'm just watching the drifter girl, maybe seeing something in her that I wish was more developed in me. We're supposed to be having some sort of useful spiritual interchange during these morning talks, but mostly it's just yet another sermon from someone who thinks they have their life together when, when I look at their life, I think not. - - - - One day some asshole vegans come up to me and my sponsor while we're pretending to recover. This crowd is all decked-out in their hemp everything and they're coming to us from having just gone shopping at the Food Coop. This one guy comes up with his bag and holds it in our faces: "Look at that, man—do you know what that is?" I look at him in the face like *why are you interrupting?* He's like: "Beans. Beans are gonna save the Earth, man. Do you eat a lot of beans? I've been through so many diets. Vegan. Vegetarian. Pescatarian. Raw foodist. Diets you never even *heard* of, man." "I doubt that." "What was that? Don't be a hater, man." "I'm not a hater, I'm an alcoholic, this is my sponsor and we're having a talk here about things I can do to help keep from drinking." "Oh, drinking..that's just a willpower thing, man." "No it isn't." "Anyway, *beans*," he says, and smiles like Jim Carrey doing Andy Kaufman, then launches into this minutes-long diatribe about the advantages of eating a bean-based diet and how when he *smells* beans something in the universe tells him to eat them, like the whole cosmos is conspiring to move the people of Earth to a bean-based diet. And this isn't just good for you physically. A bean-based diet will stop war, because it's eating red meat which causes some people to be warlike while if you wear hemp and eat only different kinds of beans, you'll automatically be a kind and loving person—and it'll help you with your addictions, too. This guy obviously doesn't know this, but: *I've encountered* millions *of people like you.* I've encountered so many people like you I have a special term to describe you: *diet-only revolutionaries*: people who think that diet alone will solve all the problems of the world, and that philosophies don't matter. Now, these people don't realize they're *almost* preaching to the choir—I happen to be one of those people who think diet is *one of the most important factors* for world change. But I think it's stupidly simplistic to think it's the *only* fact we need to change. This guy's whole identity, apparently, was wrapped up in eating nothing but beans—and he would not shut up about it. I was also talking to an older artist from AA in that same parking lot before we were accosted by the bean vegans—you know, don't make the mistake of thinking that just because I'm standing out front of an overpriced organic *bullshit hippie grocery store* that I'm a vegan or I want to hear about your fucking *bean farm*. You're an intellectually-stunted garden gnome, to me, so find someone else to *radiate* and *glow* to and *magically gesticulate* to when all you're talking about is motherfucking beans. *I eat beans, too, motherfucker*—I just don't go around telling everyone about it. It's like being an evangelical for *air—everybody already knows* how to breathe! But this older artist invited me to her place, she had sage advice, she seemed like was a known artist, had made a career of it, was maybe even rich. She invited me to her studio, but I never went. I don't know why. She might have been a better friend than Gretchen, for me. Maybe it was because she was older. Maybe it was because in AA men and women aren't supposed to mix—antiquated tradition. She gave me her number but I never called it so I'll never know. - - - - But when that Jesus freak dude goes on a 30-minute share about his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and how if you don't have Christ in your life this program will never work for you, I'm so desperate for help at this point that I don't say anything. I don't get up and leave the meeting like I should have. I do, later, tell my sponsor that AA claims not to be aligned with any sect or religion and what that guy is doing goes against AA tenets, and he should be stopped, and the fact that he spent two years in a French prison is irrelevant. We've all had hard lives. But I mean when I see the French prison guy on the street I give him a hug, you know, we're both sober—we're drunks who are sober and that's a miracle so I at least give the guy a hug. I happen to think Jesus Christ was one of the towering fucking geniuses of all time—I'm a huge fan of the wisdom. I just don't want to hear about it in my AA meeting. There was a drug house right across the street from the community center where we held our 7am meetings and the guys who occupied those houses would look at us and intimidate us as we went inside for our AA meetings—I mean they would yell at us an taunt us and offer to give us crack for free and they'd tell us we'd be back out using soon (they were fucking madmen, riding tricycles around the street with no shirts on at 6am)—and we would look out at them during our meetings and say we were glad we weren't there. ### 41 I went to a meeting every day, sometimes two..riding my bike miles in the *pouring* rain to get to an AA meeting just outside of town. Everybody can tell, since I am soaked to the bone, that I really wanted to get to this meeting, and even though I'm so muddy and gross I can't sit next to anybody, it earns me a little respect that I wanted to get here *that bad*. Lady tells me: "I used to walk 20 blocks in LA to make the coffee and set out the chairs in my early recovery, and back then each day was beautiful no matter how far I had to walk." I nod. I don't feel exactly like that but I know what she means. "Those were the days, when I just had to get to that meeting *every morning*. And I was homeless at the time." "Been there," I say. And now a whole platter of topics opens up for us to feed off, and it's just me and her, me and her, talking across this room full of people before this meeting. I wasn't exactly sure I could relate to her at first..but then maybe I did because something deep in my mind *had* to get to that meeting that night and I was going to do *anything* I had to to get there. Like if I just halfway wanted to go to that meeting I wouldn't have been willing to show up *soaked* from a dangerous nighttime bike ride. No, I did feel her. I did feel what she was saying. I *had* to get to that meeting for my mental survival, for my spiritual survival, because AA had gone from being something I knew I had to do to stop drinking, to something I knew I had to do to save my spirit. On the way home it rained even harder..so hard that I couldn't see the road for the rain on my glasses. I was driving in a dream world, blurry lights, cars spraying me with waves of water as they went by. I had to get off my bike and walk when I got near the highway entrance. I took off my glasses so I could see enough not to get killed. It was a pretty shitty meeting, too—no shares I could relate to, a lotta jail shit, no hot heroin chicks. I had gotten used to seeing this ultra-hot heroin chick at some of the NA meetings around town and she would always flirt with me. When I say hot, here, I mean the type of hot I couldn't take my eyes off. And when she sat next to me she shared her Skittles and held my hand in hers while she poured them into my palm—she would do this all throughout the meeting and I craved the feeling of the hot blood running through her hand. But it didn't matter that the meeting was shitty—it was more about the intention. It was like climbing to the top of the mountain just for the sake of climbing to the top of the mountain, even if you didn't get to see the view. There was this one meeting with this virgin teenage girl. She disrupted the whole meeting with teenage girl shenanigans—her and a couple of their friends. I wanted to fuck her at every meeting. She flirted with me, and not just with me. She flirted with guys in their fifties at every meeting and it created a real split focus at every one of those meetings I went to. She was sexy as hell and just at the age when she knew it, she used it as a tool, but she was *so* young I just had to think she had no idea what the consequences of doing that might be. Middle-aged men shared about it in the meeting, how they knew we wanted the meeting to be open to everyone and we were all of course glad these fifteen-year-olds were at an NA meeting and not off shooting heroin, it made it difficult to focus when the girls did chants along with every step and every tradition we read, and generally turned every meeting into a screening of Adrian Lyne's *Lolita*. I agreed, it was a problem. But maybe one with no solution. I saw her waiting outside the AA meeting one time when I had gone to the NA meeting down the street instead of her AA one, and I turned my bike around and said hi to her before riding off into the night. I spoke to her as a fellow addict. I didn't flirt back at her, even as she flirted with me. We must protect people, often children, from themselves. I walked into an AA years later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where grown men were doing the same thing..not the flirting but the sing-songy cutesy chants that go along with and make a joke out of the reading of the steps and the traditions. I immediately left that meeting and drove down the street, mad, sitting at a red light, and then instead of turning right to buy alcohol and throw away my clean time over some jackasses in an AA meeting, I made a u-turn, came back, and shared that I've been in many 12-step meetings throughout my life and that night I was going to collect a white chip but when I hear people making ridiculous noises during the readings it makes me feel like this group isn't serious about its primary purpose. "I'm not going to drink over this," I said. "And I sincerely wish you all the best in your sobriety." I walk out, some dude follows and says those guys are in the "no matter what" club and they have a lot of sobriety time between them and I say: "It doesn't matter. I understand laughing in your share, I understand being happy while sober..that's the whole point..but when you goof around during the reading of the literature, it sends the wrong message to the newcomer." I should have said to those old-timers that the last time I saw that kind of irreverence during the readings, it was from three fifteen-year-old girls with a year of sobriety between them, and you guys are displaying the exact same behavior. *No-matter-what club* my ass. ### 42 The next time I tried to go to a meeting I was on my bicycle circling this church where a meeting was scheduled, waiting for cars to start showing up. But none ever did. I kept riding circles around the block and about an hour later I remembered that the fellowship was having a camping retreat that weekend so there wouldn't be any meetings. Then I drove around a back street, fantasizing about owning one of the homes in this neighborhood, and I see a rainbow—an amazing, up-close rainbow that touched the ground on both ends and I stopped on my bike and took off my helmet and looked at it. > I got chills. > > This is why I came here tonight. > > It wasn't the NA meeting—it was this rainbow. - - - - I'm standing at the burger stand when my AA sponsor has called me and I've agreed to volunteer with him at the farm/theatre that he likes to volunteer at and see shows at every year. He picks me up on the side of the street. As soon as we're on the highway he turns on the music and it's some Christian stuff. He's all: "I'm really a Jesus freak and I'm going to try to convert you to Christianity. I mean, no bullshit, Christianity is what really saved me—that's what got me clean, not AA." If I had been smart I would have told him to turn the car around at the next exit, take me back to Elliot Street, and drop me off right where you picked me up. But I was not smart. I look at him like: *That was not cool.* He slaps my leg. "I'm just kidding, man! I'll leave the Christianity stuff out of it if you want me to." "Yeah, please." "Geez," he says. I have a monologue on the tip of my tongue but I hold it. I'm gonna give this guy a chance to recover from that bullshit he just said. He says, "Do you have a girlfriend?" "No." And I don't really want one, either. "Try online. You'll get a girlfriend right away," says this middle-aged dude. "I'm not an online dater." He doesn't say anything. "I don't try to force myself into situations where I'll meet women. I believe that if it's meant to happen, it'll happen." My sponsor says, "You know the ticket?" "What? What is the ticket?" "Yoga class!" he says. "You've got a yoga studio right in Brattleboro—did you see the Bikram Yoga right across the street from where I picked you up?" "Yeah, I know about the Bikram Yoga studio." "Well why don't you take some classes there?" "I don't really like yoga." My AA sponsor says: "I've been taking classes there and you wouldn't *believe* the women in that place! You don't have to *like yoga!* It's not about the yoga—you can do yoga at home. But these women, oh, Matthew, I'm telling you, you're standing behind one of these *beautiful* women—like *twenty* years old—and she's bending down in front of you and you can see her panty liner through those yoga pants. I was getting a hard-on right there in the class! I had to sit down and put a towel around me to hide it! You would fucking love it, buddy—I'm sorry, are you gay? We never really talked about it—" "I'm not gay. I like women. I just don't like to hear you talk about them like that. You're not really acting like a mature adult—you're acting like a thirteen-year-old boy and whether you think so or not, it *is* the case that your immaturity in this area erodes your credibility as a potential sponsor." "What do you mean, *potential sponsor*? I'm your sponsor, man." "No, we're rolling it back, based on your suggestion that I go to yoga class to pick up women. You're kind of a sex addict, don't you think? I don't know if you know that about yourself, but I thought maybe it would be kind of me to point it out." "I feel like you're insulting me while I'm trying to help you get sober." "I got sober without you, let's be clear on that." "You showed up later to vamp onto me to make yourself look like a successful sponsor. I think you should turn the car around right now, I'm not into this." "Matt—" "Matthew." "Matthew, I'm sorry, I promise, I won't talk about yoga any more today." "No, I think you better turn around and take me home." But somehow he convinces me to continue with him—or maybe I'm just kidnapped for the day since he has the keys. He continues to claims Jesus got him clean, not AA. He continues to womanize: every fucking skirt we see, he has to talk about. It's a horrible day for me but I put up with it because supposedly this guy is helping me stay sober. Supposedly this is "part of the program," "the AA community," or some bullshit. I tell him: "Yoga is breath—and breath is life. Your yoga is your breath—and your breath is your life. Where is the part about macking on women you heard in that? Pilates is about your core, your stomach, and your spine. Where is the part about macking on women you heard in that?" He didn't like that at all and I was very glad that he didn't. We were crossways for a few miles on the highway. Then we get to the farm. And I see why we're here. This is a program that has collected the most gorgeous and talented twenty-something men and women from around the globe to write and direct a play and build all the sets for it..so we are surrounded by the *crème de la crème* of these multitalented, international, nubile women. My sponsor spends all day flirting with them, trying to get their contact information, trying to get a date with them. And yes, I'll give you, these women were beautiful in every way..talented, monied, beautiful physically, and I wanted to fuck them too, but these girls were twenty-two and *I* was leaving them alone on the basis of being in my early thirties. My fifty-something sponsor—the fucking jackass—he shamelessly flirted with these women—he wanted to marry one of them (he told me that). We hadn't come here to volunteer, we were here to replace my sponsor's wife with a twenty-year-old Romanian girl named Ileana—who, by the way, was obviously the show's director's girlfriend, and *he* was the alpha male on *this* farm, not just the director but the *star* of whatever play they were putting on. My sponsor was leaning over Ileana like a gorilla. They could hardly carry on a conversation 'cause her English was so bad but my sponsor informed me that was a *turn on* for him—not a problem. He would turn around and whisper to me how fucking hot this girl was and I was like *this matters in which universe, exactly?* There's not *even* an alternate universe in which my AA sponsor fucks Ileana. You're wasting your time, dude. And this wasn't some cultural exchange: he was like a woodpecker, trying to get another piece of personal information out of her with each peck. Maybe I just don't like sexual aggression. We were totally out of place. All these people lived charmed lives..not like Mike and I: the recovering addict working his ass off as a masseuse with clients all the way from Vermont to New York City; and me, the recently sober recovering addict writer who when my sponsor went on my website and saw a few good reviews from readers, said: "Damn, man, you're like established and shit." And I was like *Not exactly*. (That was in my mind that I said that: *Not exactly.*) At a gas station on the way home, my sponsor positions his car so we could sit and stare at a woman's dress fly up in the wind. "Did you see under her dress? I don't think she had anything on!" She didn't have anything on. I watched in the rear-view mirror as her dress flipped up and showed me everything. And I'm not saying looking underneath a commando-going woman's dress isn't something I like to do. I love it. I think it's invasive, but that only half-bothers me. What bothers me all the way is doing this with my AA sponsor. He told me his marriage was on the rocks but it was clear from his actions that he didn't want to save it. He had fantasies about getting with some younger woman instead. And I began to see, as I became a regular at more and more AA meetings, how my sponsor would use meetings to flirt with younger women—in one case one I was interested in. He would act all interested in their sobriety but really he just wants to fuck twenty-somethings. I mean..who doesn't. I'm not the sex police. But I think it's wrong to use your power as an AA member who supposedly has decades of clean time to get close to 22 year olds who are struggling with a real problem in their life and are therefore vulnerable to unscrupulous guides. When he was with me in my High Street apartment he mentioned what I nice computer I had (my iMac desktop) and he said he really needed a computer. I was like: "Well I never use this one, I always use my laptop, so you can have that one." He's like, "Are you sure?" I'm like, "Yeah." And I box it up for him in the original box, keyboard, power cord, everything. Later on after I fired him as my sponsor he asked me if he had crossed the line by letting me give him my computer. I said no, even though he had. But I was like: "Don't worry about it, dude, I can only use one computer at a time, my laptop's newer, it's my preferred machine, and besides, without a computer, how are you going to send dick pics to all your sixteen-year-old girlfriends? It's much better this way, trust me." ### 43 While I was still in AA, I went to the Backside Cafe and had brunch. Mystery dude I had met doing coke sees me and sits across from me in my booth. "You don't mind if I sit here, do you? It's so busy, it's senseless for us both to take up a booth." "No, go ahead, I'm glad to have the company." "I've got the worst problem," he says. I'm thinking it's some sort of rash. "It's Juliet—remember that bitch?" "Your girlfriend Juliet?" "She ain't my girlfriend no more." "Why, what happened?" "What happened is I kicked that bitch out, is what happened. Now if you look out in the parking lot right in the middle you'll see that psycho bitch, fucking with her things, *which is all a bitch cares about! Her fucking possessions!!*" the mystery man shouts. I look out the windows. All the time, I'm eating my steak and jalapeño scrambler and this guy is telling me the full story of his and Juliet's break up and I'm watching this very same woman in the parking lot, in the middle of all these shops in the very center of Brattleboro. And it's a cold day and she's taking everything out of her car, rearranging it, scraping the windows, throwing shit out of her trunk onto the asphalt and I'm thinking: This is a pivot point in this woman's life..she's either going to have to re-ingratiate herself with this asshole DJ boyfriend sitting across from me by giving up some amazing and continuous sex, or she's going to have to suck his (or someone's) dick for gas money to get back home, Albany or Rochester or wherever that is..or..I could be watching someone's crucial moment in their life where they become homeless, and stopped being the hot high-class bitch with the drug dealer boyfriend, and becomes someone who first lives in their car and uses the bagel shop bathroom every morning to clean up..until her car eventually gets towed because she can't afford to park her car anywhere 'cause it all costs money. This could be me watching someone's descent into homelessness, which is something I've experienced for myself and I know just what it looks like—it looks like this, like standing in the parking lot taking everything out of your car and putting everything back in. That's everything you own. You're not even organizing it, physically, in the trunk..you're taking inventory, in your mind, of what little you have left of yourself—and the stuff is just a symbol, a reminder, that you haven't yet been completely erased from society, that there is still some weakling shred within you that thinks you can plug yourself back in to the normal world of people doing normal things: fuck, have kids, work, die. "You still a DJ?" "A DJ? When the fuck was I ever a DJ?" I squint my eyes at him. "*Oh!!* Right, a DJ, haha. I'm not a DJ, man, that was just a fake identity 'cause I didn't know you from jack and I wasn't about to tell you my real job." "Well you don't have to tell me now—I don't care." "I'm a mental health tech, dude—at the Refuge. I help take care of old crazy people." "Gotcha." "Say, I don't think my food's gonna get here anytime soon, you mind if I have a bite of your omelette." "It's a scrambler," I felt compelled to say. "Oh, a scrambler. No offense intended." "We both laugh. "Yeah, have a bite. Have all you want." "All she ever does is do all my coke and hang around the apartment. She doesn't even give it up anymore, which. I mean. When you're the bitch with no income shoveling all my coke up your nose, you have to give it up—you have to contribute to the household in some way." This guy is chewing my food. "Wouldn't you agree you have to contribute to the household in some way?" "Yeah in general I agree with that principle. But what happened? Did you fight or something? I mean, presumably, when she moved in, she was doing your coke then, too?" "She was doing *a little bit. A civilized amount.* An amount I could afford to support. But now she's doing approximately half the coke that's being done in Brattleboro—that's based on very good data my friend." "Why don't you send her to the Refuge—don't they have detox?" "Ahh, they do, but she won't go. She won't go. She doesn't think she has a problem. I'm like, bitch, when you yourself are snorting more coke than *the entire volume* I sell each day, *then you have a problem*. You want a mimosa? I gotta call this bitch—do you mind?" "No on the mimosa. Go ahead on the call." I watch mystery man dial some digits on his phone and then, seconds, later, I watch Juliet, in the parking lot, try to find her phone and ultimately it's tucked inside the elastic of her yoga pants. She picks up and I can see the silent silhouette of her movement combined with the 2-second delayed voice on my friend's phone: "What the fuck do you want?" "Juliet come upstairs and have brunch with me and Zha. We're at the Backside Cafe. We're having mimosas." "[unintelligible yelling from her end]" "Baby, you gonna eat. Then I promise I'll give you some more coke. But you gotta at least drink a mimosa first." "Fuck!" she says, and I see her put away her phone. "Fucking bitch won't even drink a little orange juice. If I told you how long she's been awake you wouldn't believe me." "I'm sure I would." "Oh. Been there yourself?" "Yeah. With meth, though, or a combination of meth and coke. But yeah, that sucks. The mimosa thing is a good trick, get her some OJ with the alcohol." " 'Cept she's hard to temp with alcohol. She prefers the hard drugs." "You know, for me, alcohol became a hard drug." But he doesn't hear me, he's ordering mimosas and another jalapeño scrambler and telling our waitress—who is slammed—to make it happen fast. I've seen her in here before and I think she and Big Katie are their only waitresses—I remembered this one because she has red hair. "You like Juliet?" "Seems fine." "I mean do you *like* her." "Yeah I guess so." "Well you can have the bitch, and believe me, I ain't doin' you no favors." About this time Juliet shows up. She sits in the booth next to mystery man. She's in her late twenties, he's in his late thirties, and I didn't just like her, I wanting to fuck her so bad. They're drinking mimosas and they're both eating off my plate 'cause the second scrambler hasn't arrived. "Juliette, what do you do?" She growls something and punches mystery man in the arm, one eye open, one eye closed. She's a mess but she's still beautiful. "What was that?" I say, like we're royalty in a high-class dining room. "I lost my job." " 'Cause you did too much fucking coke." "No." She looks at me with both eyes open. "I *was* a mental health tech at the Refuge, but they caught me doing coke in their bathroom so they had to let me go." She laughs, this eternal-seeming laugh that left no doubt that *she didn't care* and *the Refuge could go fuck itself* and so on. "For doing a little coke in the bathroom." "Yes, it's all very unfair," the mystery man says. "Nothing *you* could have prevented by *your* actions, right?" "Well you look over your your shoulder but shit happens," Juliet says, and I have trouble finding an argument to that point. But mystery man says, "That still leaves you sleeping in your car." "I *could* sleep in your bed," she says, all cooey. "Juliet, you'd have to suck so much cock just to get in the door." "You want me to suck your cock *outside* of your apartment?" "Don't be stupid." "I'm not." "Are you ready to suck some cock?" "I might be. It's fucking cold out there," she tells me. "I know." "He knows how cold it is, Juliet—you don't have to tell him." "I was just being polite." "Well be polite by not talking about sucking dick in front of our guest. You sure you don't want a mimosa?" "I'm good." I was so afraid he would ask me why and I'd be caught explaining that even though we met doing coke that I'm now in AA but he didn't ask why I didn't want a mimosa and I was lightened to remember that generally people don't give a fuck about each other and they don't ask why you're doing things or not doing things *because they don't give a fuck!!* Juliet totally flirts with me by putting her leg up on the seat between my legs. When the mystery man sees this he says: "Juliet, put your fucking foot down." She just laughs that infinite dry laugh again. She keeps her foot up there and she's looking at me with her head canted down like all intense and I'm about to be like *fuck this guy* and just get up with his ex-girlfriend and leave him with the bill and take her somewhere and fuck her. "Juliet, get the fuck out of here. Go the fuck back to your car." "Well," she says, "*you* don't want me, I'm on the free market again. The free market always comes to the right solution—right?—didn't you teach me that?" "Juliet, get out of the booth or—" "What? You're gonna withhold sex from *me*? *I'm* the one with the pussy. *I* call the shots on who gets pussy when and where." This is in the middle of a restaurant *packed* with people, by the way. "Juliet, I swear to *god* if you don't get up you'll be sleeping in your car again tonight." "You hear that? If one of his buddies needed to crash on his couch for a couple of nights, he'd say yes—of course he'd say yes. But no, you're gonna make me sleep in my car. I don't even think you *like* women. I think you resent them 'cause some girl in the seventh grade wouldn't give up her little seventh-grade pussy to your pathetic seventh-grade cock. And you're punishing the rest of us, just because of that bitch from back then. You prob'ly don't even remember her name. Was it Kristen? Or maybe Jennifer—" "Juliet. *Listen* to yourself. This is why I don't like you on coke. You're accusative, you're hyperactive—I just don't think it's a good drug for you." Juliet, based on looks alone, was too good for either the mystery man or me. I wanted to flirt with her the afternoon/night I was at their apartment (his apartment) and I wondered why she was with him at all. Obviously now I knew the answer was simple: coke. "I want you to come outside with me, we're gonna talk, then we're gonna get you horizontal where you can do some real good." The DJ/mental health tech/whoever he was holds up a finger as if to shush me. *Go ahead dude, far be it from me to stop you from fucking your fucked-up whore girlfriend. I was having a quiet brunch before this sexy girl put her foot between my legs to get* your *attention. Do what you have to do. Keep your bitch on a leash if you have to.* Then DJ dude pushes her out of the booth, drags her by one shoulder out of the crowded restaurant, a little time passes and I see them both outside, having a long talk in front of her car. Then they get in the car and presumably do coke, then both of them get out of the car and head in the direction of his apartment. On my walk home, up the hill on High Street, I called my sponsor and told him about my brunch. He said he thought it was a blessing, a gift to me from God to remind me where I didn't want to go. And I agreed. The next time I was at the 7am AA meeting, French Prison guy hijacked the morning meeting for the last time with a forty-five minute talk about Jesus. One guy stormed out of the room and there followed a verbal altercation like I've never seen in an AA meeting. It was scary. My idiot sponsor stood up for the Jesus guy, saying he spent six years in a French prison and he should be able to share whatever he wants and I finally had enough so I stood up and was like: "No, you're both religious idiots and you're not my sponsor anymore." And I left that meeting, too. - - - - I knew that my fortunes were going south with the Trash Can Consortium. Even though I was doing excellent work, according to my boss, and work that he said he was very happy with, I could tell that I was a short-timer there—I didn't fit in with the culture..when have I ever? So I decided to get a second job so that when they fired me or I quit—which I'm telling you I could just *feel* coming—I would be able to stay in Brattleboro. So I figured the Backside Cafe. I could be a server/bartender (not ideal for a sober person but that was part of the job). I floated this idea by Thomas. Of course he loved it—he saw us as twin servers/bartenders, each with a literary bent, fixtures of Brattleboro. I kind of liked the symmetry, too. My one and only day working at the Backside Cafe, the restaurant where I used to like to get burgers on my way home..the former waitress (the red-haired one) showing me the ropes..me feeling entirely foreign, feeling self-conscious about my fingernails when serving (bitten, picked nails). After close, the two owners talking shit about a former waitress, though they never said her name (that I heard)..they just said she stole and did this and did that and how they hated her the whole time and they were so glad they finally fired her..this is while I'm cleaning up their restaurant and I didn't snap on the meaning of this but it was like they were talking extra loud to make sure I heard what they said. I just cleaned up the restaurant to everyone's specifications, ignoring their conversation, and asked if I could go home. "You know who we're talking about?" they said. "I haven't really been listening..focusing on vacuuming the floors, you know?" "We're talking about Katie—big Katie—she's a friend of yours, right?" "I've seen her here and there." "Don't you two drink together at Whit's?" "I've drank with her at Whit's, why?" "Well I didn't know if it bothered you for us to be talking about her right in front of you." My face was burning. I wanted to tell them *fuck you* right then and I should have. Instead I said, "I need this job. I'm about to get fired from my other one and without this job I'm gonna sink beneath the cracks of this town so fast I won't have time to say bye to Big Kate or Thomas or anyone. So who you talk about is your business. I just want to help you at this one so I keep getting to live in the city I love to live in." Now at that point I didn't ask if I could go. I put away the vacuum cleaner and I walked out and didn't say another word to them or that redhead or listen to another word that any of them had to say. ### 44 Tiny Paul Bunyan is back in the office. He, show tunes singer, and I sit together to talk things over. "Yes, I yelled at show tunes singer for opening my iPad while I wasn't in the office. I really letting him have it. I told him—and I quote—"Don't. Ever. Touch. My shit. Again." Then this guy tells me I was being unprofessional in the way I was talking to him and I said *you* were unprofessional by touching my iPad and this is the way people get talked to when they mess with other people's stuff." "Well we're obviously going to have to make a decision about which one of you is going to continue working here," Tiny Paul Bunyan said. "Because it's obvious you two can't work together." "No let me make that clear," I said. "I can't work with *anyone* who doesn't have the sense going messing with my personal things that I may have brought to the office, like an iPad, a bag, an umbrella, or my MacBook which I'm doing all my work work on since you all never provided me a computer. That's my MacBook. Anyone who opens that and starts clicking around I've got the same problem with." "Ok, I think we understand." "But does show tunes singer understand?" Tiny Paul Bunyan says, "Show tunes singer, do you understand what Matthew is saying about personal property versus company property?" "Well what if I have Facebook up on my work computer, and someone is tapping around looking at my personal account?" "I think the point is you shouldn't have Facebook up on your work computer," Tiny Paul Bunyan says. "But let's take a break from that 'cause I can see that you two aren't going to see eye to eye anytime soon." So we break our meeting, the morning goes on, and around 11 o'clock I hear show tunes singer at Tiny Paul Bunyan's desk saying, "What about that thing we talked about?" "What thing?" "I need Photoshop to do my job." "What about that program Matthew recommended, Bring Out The Gimp or whatever." "The Gimp." "Right." "I can't really use that." "You can't use it like it doesn't do what you need it to do or you can't use it like you need to spend a few hours learning the controls?" "I need Photoshop." "Well have Matt get you a copy." "You mean get like *get* or like *get?*" Tiny Paul Bunyan laughs. "I ain't payin' six-hundred dollars for a piece of software." The show tunes singer goes back to his desk, checks Facebook, and a few minutes later he's standing behind me at me desk. "Matt." "It's Matthew." "Matthew." I turn around. "Yes?" "I need you to get me Photoshop." "Cool, just get me the credit card from Tiny Paul Bunyan and I'll buy you a copy of the latest and greatest." He doesn't go. "I need you to like *get* me a copy." "You mean you want me to pirate a copy of Photoshop for this company?" I say loud enough for the boss to hear. The show tunes singer doesn't say anything. "Boss," I say, "is this what we're doing here. You're asking me to steal commercial software for this company to use?" "Well actually the show tunes singer is asking you, but.." "I don't do that," I say, and I turn around and look at my screen. "I thought you were our computer guy," Tiny Paul Bunyan says, not looking at me, looking straight forward out the window into the parking lot." I stand up. "I'm going to lunch." The sales guy is hunching down in his seat making all kinds of reactive facial expressions, trying to involve himself in the scene. Outside, under a tree, I call my mom to tell her the situation and check my response which was going to be to say, *I will not participate in any meeting where you're discussing illegal activity but you have my cell phone so please call me when you're done discussing pirating Adobe software and I'll join you for the remainder of any such meeting*. Mom said that sounded reasonable. I go inside and everyone's sitting at the conference table—that's the boss, the show tunes singer, and the sales guy. "Matt," my boss says. "It's Matthew," I say. "We were just going to have a little discussion on this Photoshop situation." "Is the discussion going to involve your credit card plopping down the six-hundred or a thousand that our graphic designer needs to legally buy Photoshop or Creative Suite or whatever he needs?" "Ah..no. I don't believe in paying for things that I can get for free." "Well," I say, "I will not be present for that conversation. I'm going out. I won't be far away. You have my cell phone number and you can call me when the illegal portion of this meeting is over, and I will return." I head for the door. "You're not serious," Tiny Paul Bunyan says. I answer by continuing out of the warehouse office and closing the door behind me. *You bet your ass I'm serious.* - - - - The call me back in a few minutes, everyone smiling at sitting at their desks and working out the day. TPB makes a big show of going to the show tunes singer's desk, leaning over his shoulder, and saying, "So this is what you needed, huh? Our site's gonna look great from here on out?" "I just can't use that Gimp shit," the show tunes singer says. "Gimp can do everything Photoshop can do," I say, "for free. Just because you don't know how to use something doesn't mean it doesn't work." "Let's try to keep it peaceful between you two," Tiny Paul Bunyan says. I heard Tiny Paul Bunyan laughing as I left the warehouse that day. He thinks it's funny that I won't break the law with him? That night I went online and reporting TCC for pirating Adobe software. That night, I was so stressed I got a little treat for myself..a special secret..you want a peek? Look inside this brown brown paper bag: a bottle of wine! I had to split from that whole AA program—I was too stressed by the fact that taking a moral stand was going to make me end up jobless and probably homeless..and that predicament deserves a bottle of wine..does it not? I drank a bottle of wine. I drank two. I reported my job to Adobe for software piracy, knowing that would cost me my job, then I wrote a choice email to my boss (Dear Tiny Paul Bunyan of Trash Can Concern, etc—the actual email is below) telling him I'd reported him to Adobe and telling him if he fired me I would file a wrongful termination suit against him. Here's the actual email I sent to that wack factory: > **To:** the show tunes singer, Tiny Paul Bunyan, and the remote Co-owner of Trash Can Cocksuckers, LLC > > **Subject:** software piracy > > show tunes singer, > > This note is to inform you that I have reported your piracy of Photoshop and Illustrator products to Adobe, Inc. > > Tiny Paul Bunyan, Co-owner: if I am disciplined or unfairly terminated by you, in relation to this, I will take legal action against you. > > I don't like to be asked to participate in illegal actions as part of my job, as the show tunes singer has done by asking me to help him pirate Adobe software. > > Matthew ### 45 How about a little backstory. I've been part of corporate fraud—billing fraud, misrepresentation of the products a company I work for sells, lying about what our software does, lying about a company's capabilities so that we're advertising vaporware in order to entice clients—I've been part of that at just about every company I've worked for, and I just had enough. I had so say no or else I couldn't live with myself. I mean before I thought I *needed* the job, you know, so I just did what they did in Rome; but this time I was like thirty-three and I'd done enough fraud—for lots more money than this six-hundred dollar or two-thousand dollar set of programs and I was like *fuck it*, *fuck this shit*, *no*, I'm not going to steal another thousand dollars from Adobe! One of the principals at SXG—the options trading company I worked for—this VP actually says, and believes, that they have created technology and control the options markets so completely that, as he said, "An individual investor has no chance at making money in the stock and options markets." Hoping he's wrong would just be wishful thinking. *Of course* they've got it set up so the individual investor can't make money—that's the mission statement of their business. When I was twenty-three I just wanted a job. I put up with the dissonance between me and them—my value system wasn't as fully developed—but now, when I think of what that executive said, I think: *How can you live with yourself*, knowing that your business is based on you having access to stock prices and news a fraction of a second before the individual investor, and based on that advantage being able to take their money? I mean that's thievery, it's stealing, just like using Photoshop without a license. I think that sort of thing messed with my conscience all those years and is one of the sources of my anxiety. I'm not a fucking angel. I steal girls' panties and jerk off with them—I used to anyway. I drink and do drugs, smoke—I used to. So I'm not on some sort of moral high horse. But I think we need to make improvements, and when a software company says things on its website, describing capabilities that they don't have, that's a lie. I mean let's hold ourselves to a higher standard. That's what I'm trying to do. So I drink a little more and sent a second email: > **To:** Tiny Paul Bunyan and the remote Co-owner of Trash Can Cocksuckers, LLC > > **Subject:** software piracy > > I like working for you guys and would like nothing more than to never have been asked to participate in software piracy, but please know that if you terminate me wrongfully over my reporting the show tunes singer, I will sue you. I have no desire to do that, but I have a right to not be asked to do illegal things at my workplace, simply to keep my job. > > Sorry it's come to this, but I'm not about to take the fall for the show tunes singer's and/or Trash Can Cocksuckers' illegal action. > > Very sincerely, > > MT Then I drank quite a bit more and decided it would close things out nicely if I sent this third brief email: > **To:** Tiny Paul Bunyan and the remote Co-owner of Trash Can Cocksuckers, LLC > > **Subject:** software piracy > > And, actually, it might be best if when we meet next, we meet with lawyers present. Very friendly and businesslike, no? But I didn't stop there. No. Who do you think I am, Kermit the Frog? If I was a Muppet I'd be Animal—on my better days I'd be one of the Critics who sit in the balcony making fun of everything. - - - - The next day Tiny Paul Bunyan fired me over the phone. I was very pleasant with him over the telephone as I listened to him writhe and struggle through having to say those awful words ("We're gonna have to let you go.") that are the hardest words any manager ever has to say. You might think those people are total heartless slugs, but if you talk to them, you will learn that firing someone is extremely difficult for most managers. But Tiny Paul Bunyan mustered his tiny strength, hoisted his tiny axe, and cut my head off. When he was done I cheerfully said "bye" and hung up the phone on my iPad. It was a beautiful day, I didn't have to work, and I planned an afternoon of drinking at Whit's. I was glad they had internet, because I had one more email I wanted to write. Luckily—even—I was already seated on the bench right outside Whitman's! *Quel convenience!* I went into Whit's, ordered a gin and tonic, and strategized. Tiny Paul Bunyan was always bragging that he knew the owner of the biggest business in Brattleboro, and that this owner had nurtured Tiny Paul Bunyan on his way to becoming the booming CEO of a four-person company, Trash Can Cocksuckers, Inc. So I decided to write Tiny Paul Bunyan's mentor a little note: > **To:** Tiny Paul Bunyan's Mentor > > **Cc:** Tiny Paul Bunyan > > **Subject:** regarding your protégé/buddy, Brattleboro's Only: Mr Brattleboro Himself, The Infamous Tiny Paul Bunyan > > Owner of the Biggest Business in Brattleboro: > > During my recent employment at Trash Can Cocksuckers, in Brattleboro, I was asked by TCC to pirate Adobe Creative Suite. This was asked of me specifically, and discussed in meetings including Tiny Paul Bunyan, TCC CEO. I stated I was not willing to help pirate this software and that I did not want to be present in any meetings where such activities were being discussed. Piracy of this software continued anyway, involving a CD ROM sent to TCC by the remote Co-owner of TCC. I reported this piracy to Adobe, Inc., informed my bosses of this report, and was fired the next day, by Tiny Paul Bunyan, on the phone. > > My work at TCC was impeccable..I have proof of the website work I did while I was employed there. At termination, I was given the reason that it wasn't a "good fit". > > Clearly, being asked to do illegal things, as part of my employment, is a lose-lose choice. In this case, I chose to act within the law, and lost my job because of it. The general events, combined with the timing of my firing coinciding by a day with my report of TCC's illegal activity, combined with the impeccable work I did for them while in their employ, leaves little doubt that TCC terminated me wrongfully, and I am seeking damages, given that through no fault of my own, except for refusing to illegally pirate software for my employer, I have lost my livelihood, my ability to pay rent and buy food, and such meaningless and abrupt termination causes chaos in my life that simply doing my job and refusing to act illegally, does not justify. > > Trash Can Cocksuckers has added insult to injury by retroactively firing me..a notice posted August 31 claims to terminate my employment as of August 19. This is prior to my last day of work for them..they haven't paid me for the hours I worked. > > I don't know if you give a shit, but I want you to know that this has left a sour taste in my mouth about Trash Can Cocksuckers and Tiny Paul Bunyan. He's always talking about how you inspired him to start his business. I sincerely wish him increased prosperity—and I love playing the pinball game in your shop on Main Street, and am not going to stop doing so based on this! But Tiny Paul Bunyan was out of line in this way, in his recent employment of me. The fact that he and his co-owner came into the office smelling like pot, doesn't help me to feel I was being dealt with from a rational point of view. > > Smh, > > Matthew Temple I ordered another G&T. Then I forwarded *that* email to Tiny Paul Bunyan's *wife*. *Booyah!* You may be able to save face, but I'm gonna make you have to *lie* to do it. You might not think a drug addict and hardcore alcoholic would have scruples when it comes to stealing software..but if you get to know us addicts, we're actually very sensitive people and we have much, much thinner skin than the average American criminal CEO. One percent of the American population are psychopaths. Four percent of American CEOs are psychopaths. In fact, CEO is the profession in America that has more psychopaths than any other profession. These are actual statistics. Check TIME and Forbes if you don't believe me. I just think it's interesting that capitalism's most prized position is best done by those who don't care about other people's feelings. As someone who does care about other people's feelings, that makes it hard for me to fit into the working world, in which I have been privy to almost universal fraud, nepotism, failure to report dangerous conditions to a client purchasing a flawed product, theft, illegal discrimination in hiring and firing, wrongful termination, outright theft, and just more crimes than I can mention. I'm not perfect, obviously—but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying when I go to work, I do my best to make something that's efficient, modest, and true. But the people I've worked for, by and large, had different intentions: like: create the shittiest possible product that we can still sell and sell it for as much money as possible to someone who doesn't know how shitty it is. I'm just not down with that. This is what I thought as I got drunk on wine and felt hate for my boss for putting me in the position where I had to choose between my morals and my job. Pudgy-butt fuckhead. Paul Bunyan's midget cousin. I hope he gets trampled by a moose. *Mr.* Brattleboro: everything he said indicated he thought he was the Lord of the Land, that his business buying trash cans from one person at one price and selling them to another person at a higher price was so profound. It's classic American business—if you make a profit, you must be doing something worthwhile. Smh. *That's* your business, *that's* your legacy? You make nothing, you produce nothing, you innovate nothing, you just buy something cheap and sell it high—exactly like Wall Street. Doesn't anyone see that "making money" isn't *doing anything?* Period. It isn't productive, it isn't inventive, it doesn't make the world a better place. You can't "*make* money"—it isn't a thing, so you can't make it. It's just numbers inside a computer and when people look at them, nothing happens. A poem is just letters inside a computer, true, but have you ever read Walt Whitman? Maybe I'm the odd one out here, but I find reading poetry significantly more transformative than scrolling through my bank statement. I was not made for this world—clearly. Drinking at Whitman's, going over the call I had just been a part of. The trash can boss called me and I answered with the software on my iPad, going outside and sitting on the bench..his opinion was that since I threatened to sue him that he *had* to fire me so I was like *ok* and he was like *I guess that's it* and and I said, *yep! that's it!* and I hung up. - - - - Then I went to Fireworks pizza where I could get better drinks. The bartender asked me how my day was going. "Well, I just got fired from my job, so that means I have more time to hang out with you." "Why'd you get fired?" "I got drunk and told my boss in email that I reported him to Adobe for pirating their software..and I did make that report. Then I told him if he fired me over asking me to do something illegal I would file a wrongful termination suit against his dumb oakie ass." "So you've decided to come here and drink some more?" "That is correct." "I respect your decision, sir." Then he told me the drink specials. I re-entered Alice in Wonderland, where, drunk, I found myself randomly talking to an old couple—or lost myself talking to them. They were visiting the town as tourist and we made big friends and were going to keep in touch for the rest of our lives and I was going to visit their cabin in New Hampshire. We had it all worked out. Then I made friends with *everyone* and entertained *everybody*! I met a woman who biked a hundred miles to meet her ex and her kid at this very restaurant and I admired her independence. Unlike me, she stuck to one drink and moved to a table when her ex and her daughter arrived. "I have a new job," I told my bartender. "Already?" "Well yeah, I knew I was going to get fired." "If you knew you were going to get fired, couldn't you have prevented it?" "No without sacrificing my morals—were you listening to my story earlier?" "So what's this new job?" "It's at the Backside Cafe. I start at four." "Shouldn't you get going?" "No, I should have another glass of *wine*." I had two and with everything I'd had already was fairly drunk and my bartender said, "Are you going to be able to work?" And I said, "Ehhhh..I don't know if I'm going to be working that job." "Yeah?" "Yeah." "Want another drink?" "Nah, I better keep moving." ### 46 So I go up the street to Kips, it's crowded, Big Katie is there. I say, "I have this new job that I think you know about." She's all crazy and wild blonde hair and with this military boyfriend and Big Katie..she's like the ultimate host. If they put her on a gameshow the fuckin' world would explode and she's like: "How would I know about it?" And I say, "Because it's at the Backstabbing Cafe. It's the wait staff position replacing that redhead I can't remember what her name is." "Karen. That's my old job!" "I know. But do you want to know what you don't know?" She's holding a shot of Jameson looking all skeptical like, "Uhh..probably not. HEY THOMAS GET ME TWO MORE JAMIES AND COME PULL MY HAIR!!" She knocks back her shot, takes one of the new ones and hands the other one to me. "To whatever you're about to say," she says. And we drink. "THOMAS I TOLD YOUTO PULL MY HAIR!!" Thomas comes over, Katie leans down, and Thomas pulls her hair as hard as hair can be pulled by a sane human being or anyone who's not a baby. "Ooooh, I love it when you do that to me, baby." Katie likes to have her hair pulled—it's a thing. "So anyway these people—the owners—" Katie says their names. "Right. I'm vacuuming their fucking floor and they're talking about you—loud as can be—saying you got fired for stealing—" "I didn't steal nothin' from those motherfuckers." "I know. But here's my angle: they know we're friends. Why are they sitting there talking loud enough for me to hear..about you..on my first night of work there?" "That's fucked up." "I know it's fucked up." "They're fucked up people," Katie says. "You don't want to work for them." "I'm beginning to think the same thing." First, we do another shot of Jameson, because that's the most important thing in the world, then me and Big Kate and Kate's new military boyfriend go outside and I make a call on my iPad. I get their voicemail. I say, "I must politely decline the position we've so recently begun, because when I was there the other night you two trash-talked Big Katie in front of me, knowing she was my friend, and I just can't be a part of that soft of backstabbing, covert, behind-the-scenes kind of bullshit. So, good luck finding another server, but it can't be me." I touch the button on my iPad that ends the call. Then me and Kathy do shot after shot of Jameson (naturally). We get fuckin' wild at that bar =) Kathy says, "I can't believe you did that for me." "I did it for you, yes—but even deeper, Kath, I did it for me." Kathy hugs me. "I can't be part of that shit!" I say, and I slam down an empty shot glass. "THERE'S A MAN WITH INTEGRITY IN BRATTLEBORO," Katie shouts. "You're coming to dinner tonight." As we drank, Big Katie told me her side of the story of what had happened at the Backside Cafe and of course I'll never know what's true. Maybe Big Katie did steal from them. But you don't sit around talking about past employees in front of current employees. You know? It just lets me know that as soon as I'm gone, you're gonna be talking about me, whether what you're saying is true or not. But, really, it's a lot simpler than that: I won't work at a place that disrespected my friend. - - - - That Backside Cafe job is one of a handful of jobs I only worked for one day, and I believe quitting each of them was the right decision. That night I went to big Katie's for dinner. She cooked and she and I drank while her Marine boyfriend abstained. He had been to jail for things he did while drinking and never drank again. And it gave me a role model, even while I was drinking with Katie, of how it was possible for a grown man not to drink. I mean it probably helps if you went to jail for your part in a part fight where you broke an Absolut Peppar bottle over the eye of some kid in a wheelchair because the kid was talking shit about Marines and claiming to have once been an Army Ranger and you know they have all these little rivalries between the branches but judges don't take well to a Marine breaking an bottle of Absolut Peppar over *anybody's* head. The kid in the wheelchair couldn't see after that and he was never an Army Ranger, he was just a kid talking smack to a Marine with a short fuse but you know that Marine sat in jail long enough that he figured out the only crazy things he ever did were while he was drinking, and he made up his mind in that jail cell to stop. "That's nothing," Big Kathy says. "You've hear of the time a guy broke in my house and tried to rape me." "No." "You've *never* heard that story?" "I guess not!" "Well, it was this house. First of all. First of all, can I just tell you that this motherfucker eats such good pussy. Don't you, babe—don't be shy." The marine shrugs. "I like pussy." "See that?" Kathy says to me. "*See* that? A genuine *man* who *eats motherfuckin' pussy*. I need to get my shit *warmed up* before the main event, you know what I'm sayin'?" I nod. "*Anyway*, I wake up in the middle of the night." "When is this?" "This is like..two years ago. So I hear these sounds. And I'm like: that's my window opening! So I wait there in my bed and here comes this ex-boyfriend of mine and he's like gettin' in bed with me and shit and I'm all kicking the stuffed animals off the bed—" *[Katie is like 40 years old]* "—and I fucking dragged that fucking sex fiend out of my room, down this little hallway that's up there, and to the top of that set of stairs you see right there. Fucker was like, '*Ahhhhh!*' and I threw that rapist down the stairs. He yelled '*Ahhhhh!*' *before* I threw him down the stairs—I'll never forget that." "What did he say after you threw him down the stairs?" "He didn't say nuthin'. He was paralyzed from the neck down and he just made these gurgling sounds. I called 911 and they took his ass to the hospital." "What happened to him?" "He's still there, gettin' spoon-fed by nurses unable to move his body because *that's what happens when you try to rape Big Kate*. Motherfucker. I had half a mind when I went to the bottom of them stairs to put my foot on his neck and finish off that motherfucker." We're all cracking up. "Do you know how much this motherfucker likes to eat pussy?" The Marine puts his hand on Kathy's. "I mean, we didn't even *fuck* the first seven times we fucked." "Tell 'im, boo—tell him how you like to eat the bush." The Marine just blushes and smiles. "Don't get all shy on me. You eat pussy, don't you?" Kathy asks me. "Of course, Big Kate, I'll suck your tampon out of your while you're on your period." She pauses for a second, then cracks up, then says, "We'll have to try that!" We all exhale. "My man is so protective. He's not allowed in the Inferno anymore." "Why not?" "Oh, some guy was drinking with me—just a friend, like you—and he wasn't flirting with me or anything—nothing like that. But this guy leans over the bar to pick up our next round of shots and as he leans over that shitty pathetic bar of theirs, his arm grazes my arm, and my man here—he gets very angry—he reaches behind the bar before that fat Inferno bartender could do anything about it and he clocks the guy in the face with a bottle." "No," the Marine says, "that's not why. It's 'cause he kept bumming cigarettes and I thought it was disrespectful." "Like I'm bumming cigarettes from you right now, Katie?" The Marine says, "What kind of man doesn't have his own cigarettes?" And I say, "What kind of bottle was it? Did you hit him with an Absolut Peppar?" And we all start laughing. "That never happened," I say. Kathy and the Marine are falling off their chairs, looking at me, laughing. "Bitch," I say, "shut up and give me another cigarette." Kathy gives me one and we smoke, and drink, and even raise a glass for her ex-boyfriend who is eating blueberry cobbler through a tube down at Brattleboro Memorial as we fucking speak. - - - - Coda: A week later, at the restaurant she got fired from and that I quit on my second day, I saw Katie there, at the bar in the Backside Cafe, with her new new boyfriend—not the recovering alcoholic Marine, but a New Jersey fisherman. The redhead waitress who trained me (I think her name was Sarah) was back there working—she was like the only person in Vermont or New Hampshire who would work for such a shit wage and shit hours with such shit customers and such backstabbing cocksuckers for bosses. I mean except for Sunday brunch, the place was always empty. The only thing good about the place was the owner could make a mean hamburger. So this New Jersey fisherman—who did drink—was there with Katie and you could see in his eyes that he was trying to work out whether me and Big Katie had ever been sexual. I didn't care if he knew that or not. I paid all my attention to him and not to Katie to ease his worries that I was going to reel in his new girlfriend—which was *not* the case. He figured this out pretty quickly and me and Big Katie and the fisherman are all laughing about how fucking funny life is and I get to know the guy and then I really turn on the charm—I can really make people feel good when I decide to—I told him grandly that we would miss Big Kate but if she had to go, I didn't know a finer gentleman to take her away from us. Of course after that he *insisted* on buying me a drink. ### 47 I went out and got even more drunk for like a week. The first day of that week, which was the next day after my dinner at Big Katie's, Tiny Paul Bunyan calls me on the phone over and over and over. I finally pick up and say, "We've got nothing to do with each other stop calling me." Five minutes later he's knocking on the downstairs door of the house that I live in. I sneak down the stairs and see his pudgy butt standing there and I'm like *what is my criminal ex-boss doing at my house???* I make the mistake of opening the door and I discover that the only reason he came to my house was to yell at me..and even when I'm on your payroll you're not paying for the right to yell at me. If you're not paying me anymore *at all*, then you can get the fuck off my porch. He says: "That letter to my role model, that letter to my wife..that's out of bounds, man!" To which I precisely conveyed *these* words: "Fuck you, fuck your role model, fuck your wife..*you* asking me to pirate Adobe Creative Suite..*that's* out of bounds, so yeah, I let 'em know. Bet your wife made you sleep on the couch last night." He steps closer to me. "No sex for Tiny Paul Bunyan!" "You stay away from my wife!" "I've never been *near* your wife!" "Well don't email her!" "I'll do whatever the fuck I want. I'd email your fucking *kids* if they had an email address!" "You're fucking threatening my kids?!" "There was no threat there! There was no threat there. What you need to do is a) develop some critical listening skills, and b) Just fucking watch yourself when you're around town." "What is that supposed to mean? 'Cause it sounds a lot like a threat." "It's not a threat. See (a), above: develop critical listening skills." "So what *are* you saying?" "What I'm *saying* is this is a small town and if I happen to see you out and about with your friends or your lawyer or your stockbroker or your kids, I'm gonna tell 'em what Daddy does for work—fire people who refuse to steal software for his rinky-dink business." "You say a thing to my kids and you're gonna have an accident down by the railroad tracks." "Now *that's* a threat. You're gonna what? Kill me on the Amtrak railroad tracks?" I'm laughing. "Do you know how many people just heard you say that? You fucking faggot. All these neighbors around here..they're just sittin' inside waiting for this to escalate enough for them to call the cops. And when they get here you want me to have six, seven witnesses to you saying I'm gonna *have an accident* by the railroad tracks? Why don't you get the *fuck off my porch* before you say something else you might regret." Fucker is sweating. You can see Tiny Paul Bunyan's tiny heart pounding out of his chest. And I'm not proud to tell you that seeing him that way made me very happy. I yelled him off the porch and down the street (cussing the fuck out of his lingually remedial ass—cussing his pudgy butt back into his Subaru, continuing to cuss until he closed himself inside his little blue cocoon. Then I continued to cuss at that motherfucker because *I don't like it when ex-bosses show up at my door*. He starts his car and I figure I can get on with my day so I head back to the house in bare feet and then the next thing you know, trash can faggot is right behind me at my door. "Have you ever sued your employer before?" "*What??*" "Is this like what you do, move from job to job and file lawsuits? Is that how you make your money?" "*No!!*" "No wonder we had such a hard time getting a reference on you." "The reason you couldn't get a reference is my last boss can't set up his phones without help—he hasn't been getting voicemail for like six months! And let me remind you that *you* couldn't set up *your* phones without me, either! I gave you his fucking email address..did you ever try to *write* the guy? Of *course* you didn't. Because *you can't write*. You can't *write an email* that sounds like it was written by a grown-up. Go ahead: look back in your email. My old boss's email address is in there—I gave it to you when I gave you his phone number. Write him! Ask him if I ever sued him. You two have a lot in common, actually. Neither of you has the brainpower to write a coherent *sentence* in your native language. Yet you're both *big-deal* CEOs of five-person companies and you *can't even set up* your *own fucking voicemail*—*nor* retain employees who can! And please recall I worked *for free* for you *over the weekend* to get the new phone system working so that your piddly drop-ship company would be able to take orders on Monday. I worked, and worked, and worked until every aspect of that phone system was installed—voicemail, menu system, different ringer delays for different kinds of calls, forwarding to your goddamn cell phone—I did it all, and not even a thank you. Recall this: when you found out I had worked over the weekend you scowled at me and said, 'You know Trash Can Inc. doesn't pay overtime,' and I said, like a simple fucking human being, 'I just wanted to make sure we had phones today.' Because I wanted us to be able to *answer the phone* when customers called to we could *take orders* and *make money*. And you were all like, 'Ok, just so you know we don't pay overtime.' When I worked at Mead Research, I was sick one day, and I get a call from one of the VPs, Alan Huber, a guy who always had my back and I always had his—a concept you know nothing about. Alan called me at home one day and said a particular system wasn't working. I went into the office, coughing, in my pajamas, and sat at my desk for the five minutes it took to restart the system. I was sick *as a dog*. I didn't go in because I *had* to, I did it because I'm a team player—and you should know that corporate America rewards a team player like an mob enforcer rewards an errant gangster in *Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead*—by shooting a bullet up your ass. Are you with me 'cause you look a bit confused. *Hello!?* Tiny Paul Bunyan? Are you with me?" "Stop calling me Tiny Paul Bunyan!" "*Anyway*, TPB, there was bullshit that happened at Mead Research, sure, but never at any large company I worked for was there the level of bullshit present at Trash Can Inc. and the other small companies I helped. Alan Huber, highly paid Mead Research VP, treated me like a human being. You, Michael Asshole, aka Tiny Paul Bunyan, CEO of four-employee *loser company* Trash Can Inc., aren't even familiar with the words *please* and *thank you*." I clapped twice, like you would to a dog. "Good luck. Get off my porch. *Bon voyage*, motherfucker!" (That's what Al Pacino says to Robert De Niro in the movie *Heat* and ever since I saw it, I always wanted to say that to somebody.) Michael stood there looking like a camel with drool coming out its mouth. No response. What can he say? He has the lingual skills of a chimpanzee. And that's part of the absurdity of the fact that I'm still speaking: I'm like a cat playing with a mouse—I'm having a great time; unfortunately, you're dead. - - - - Tooler later told me she heard yelling on the porch and was afraid to come out of her room and all I could think about was how delicate Tooler's pussy must be, given her delicate face. She had cheeks that turned red when it was cold, or when she was embarrassed, and I imagined that same peach/pink skin on her inner lips and I wanted to run my fingers along it, lick it, kiss it, love it in every way. "I would lick your pussy for 30 minutes." "How about five?" And then I filed an order with the police saying TPB can't come on the property where I live, and the police hand delivered the order to him at work. You better believe I went to Whit's that day and drank all day. He rushed up to me like he was going to fight me when I answered "Are you really going to sue me?" in the affirmative..haha..that guy was really scared. I hope he gets hit by a bus. No wait, I'm channeling my Deepak Chopra: I hope he becomes a millionaire and feels more and more like a Lord of Brattleboro, served loyally by his minions, selling Trash Cans to Google while stealing Adobe software and feeling proud as fuck about it. I know why people don't like me—it's because I call them on their shit. And I had just started to live there, have my place there, meet people I like. But my job fell apart because I drank and reported my boss to Adobe for cheating, then my boss *came by my house* to have a yelling match? This is after the shooting at the grocery store..for all I know khaki-shorts-bunchy-butt Mr Brattleboro Himself is as crazy as those old fucks who shot each other in the head. "Drop ship"?—so, basically, that means you don't *make* anything (except phone calls). The police report was an order banning him coming within five-hundred feet of my apartment. My boss probably shit his Jordache jeans when the officer approached him *in front of his remaining two employees*, and I bet he threw something once the officer left. That's the kind of company I would never put on my résumé—I have a couple of those—they're such pieces of shit companies that if I were a hiring manager, it would look bad that a candidate ever worked for them. You'd only take a job there if you were really desperate. I wanted to kill that guy, and I told that to the admitting nurse at one of my Refuge stays, which were not that far in the future. She asked me if I had a plan and I said I would stalk him through the woods on one of his fabled hikes and shoot him. She asked me if I had a gun and I said no so they didn't worry about my plan too much. But I do think think this planet would be better off without certain people. My tenth grade math teacher. Some people I've encountered at work. But I would never actually kill anyone. I turn my anger inward, so the only person I'd ever get to kill is me. My general belief is that others deserve happiness but I do not—I deserve suffering. People who are CEOs of companies tend to believe the opposite. Anyway I'm glad I don't work in an office anymore—I can think of a handful of damaged, unmedicated people who have never been to therapy that I can easily imagine coming into the office with an assault rifle and doing that classic thing that we Americans do. Does anyone think of how our sicknesses are related? It seems obvious to me that sensitive, defensive, psychotic people like me exist because of lying, manipulative, borderline personality people like my father and many of my bosses. You know what I'm saying? I'm not crazy in isolation—my family, my workplace, my world is crazy too. And I'm as full of shit as Tiny Paul Bunyan. What about that night I went to the new Metropolis and got drunk, walking out with their bathroom poster rolled up down the back of my pants..just stealing it for the sake of stealing it and then throwing it away in a Refuge trash can. Or what about stealing that twenty dollars from the Professor's wallet? What about the many, many times I've driven drunk? I'm just as much a scumbag as TPB—maybe worse. - - - - That night I couldn't go to sleep because of abdominal/back/side pain. I knew what it was. The next day I calling Gretchen for help. "I have kidney stones. I'm passing one." "Oh, baby! I'm in Amherst. I'll call Tom to pick you up." So Tom, my weird crush Gretchen's husband, picked me up in their car (which was also a Subaru—everyone in Brattleboro drives the same Subaru!) and he took me to Brattleboro Memorial. Poor guy. He worked from home but still. He waited with me in the hospital until they took be back to the ER and was more than happy to wait even longer. I told the miniature saint: "No, thank you. I'll be alright." And Gretchen picked me up that night and took me to dinner at like a Peruvian restaurant or something. It was such a special occasion for her to be able to take care of me, and as codependent or whatever kind of sick we were, it was great to be taken care of—even by someone who truly scared me. Dinner was great, Gretchen was kind, she paid for dinner, and got me safely home. The things a friend does—maybe I just couldn't recognize it. The doctor, after he did an MRI or X-ray or whatever the fuck he did, said it was a small stone. It was not a small stone. I've had kidney stones before. A kidney stone is usually so small (the size of a grain of sand) that you don't even feel it coming out once it gets to your penis *but I felt this fucker* coming out of mine—it was a quick sharp feeling, something like throwing up a razor blade. Also, these "stones" are not smooth like a stone washed clean by eons of water bathing it in a Caribbean sea. No. They are rough like coral, their outsides covered with spiked protrusions that *don't feel so good* scraping along the insides of your urethra. So, no, it was not a small stone. And to the radiologist who said it was a small stone and to the urologist who didn't give me enough Vicodin to last until I passed it: *the next time* I pass a kidney stone, you two are getting on your knees and you are gonna *suck* that stone right out through my motherfucking cock. I hope I stated that in clear, unambiguous language. That night and the next night I took Vicodin to sleep and it worked—I slept all day. Vicodin is such a great feeling, almost like the beginning of cumming, but as you nap..that's probably what cats feel like all the time. Then days later I was barely able to walk to the Hotel Pharmacy to refill my prescription, the pain was so intense. And when I got my refill, I bought a bunch of cheap DVDs at the pharmacy counter, some entertainment mag, and I bought a bottle of water and sat in a chair at the end of one of the aisles, facing the pharmacy counter cash registers and workers, and they knew I had a kidney stone, and I took my pill as directed, and they gave me knowing looks, and I just sat there for a while hurting like hell, putting off standing up as long as possible. Gretchen drove me to the urologist for my followup appointment. The nurse has me piss in a bag and says: "You have A LOT of blood in your urine." And I was like, "Well, most of what you're seeing is beet juice." They don't give me enough Vicodin to finish the cycle of the stone and I know I'll start drinking again to quell the pain. Gretchen and I were standing side by side at the desk when they gave me the urine strainer and the cute little receptionist hopefully encouraged me to "Have fun!" using it! Gretchen and I both laughed. And of course everyone assumed we were together. Gretchen and I talked about this, and it bugged me that she was enjoying it too much. If you looked at the picture above, you know that no strainer was necessary to catch this stone. In fact it was months later when it finally came out and I had stopped straining by then but as you might imagine I had no difficulty in locating it. - - - - One day I was crossing Elliot Street and Alyssa (co-owner of the new Metropolis where I became a shithead for drunkenly stealing their poster)..anyway Alyssa stops her car and she looks like someone's died and she says: "I messed up, Matthew—I really messed up." "What happened, Alyssa?" "Oh," she breathes. She looks mortified. She's actually about to cry. "I was composing this text and I accidentally sent it to Gretchen. And it was about—and I hope you don't take this personally—but it was about how I think Gretchen like hangs on you..like too much..like..kind of stalks you. And I was going to send it to my friend but I didn't realize I was already in a conversation with Gretchen and I feel *terrible* and—" she puts her hand on her chest "—I don't want to be the cause of any problems between you two and I like you as customers *and friends* and you're *two of our most regular customers* and I just feel..I'm so sorry Matthew." "Alyssa," I say. "You're worrying way too much about this. One, it's not going to hurt me and Gretchen. That text is going to have zero effect on me and Gretchen's relationship." "Are you sure?" "I'm *absolutely* sure. Two, Gretchen and I are not going to stop being customers at your bar, ok—that's not going to happen. Because I'll be there—which means Gretchen will be there. So don't worry about that. And three—this isn't going to hurt your friendship with me, certainly—I happen to agree with everything you said." I laugh. "And Gretchen *is* stalking me, so that's good feedback for her to get." "But you don't think she'll stop being friends with me and Alan because of it?" "*No!* I tell Gretchen she's stalking me all the time. I yell at her to leave me alone. I tell her awful things like she behaves like a dog and she *doesn't give a fuck*! She's not going to change her relationship with you because of this because—and don't tell her I said this, but—she's clueless. In her life. She's still living like she's 16, or 24, or somewhere in there, and she's not even going to be consciously *aware* of that text message like you or I would be so I'm telling you, Alyssa, put your car in gear and forget this ever happened because you will never feel *any effects* from this except the ones you make yourself." "Ok, I just feel so bad." "Seriously, don't. You didn't break anything." "Are you sure, 'cause that's what I'm worried about." "I know. And I am sure. Everything is exactly as it was before. Trust me." "Are you going to the bar?" "Yeah." "Ok," Alyssa says. "I'm parking then I'll be right there." "Good, we'll have a drink together." "I'd like that," Alyssa says. "I'm glad I ran into you." "Me too. Don't worry!" I yell as she drives off. I am good for a thing or two once in a while. - - - - In therapy Eve Fox says: "I admire your integrity but I wish you had done what was best for *you*." "And you think that is?" "Keep your job so you can live." "Well," I say. "At the end of the day..at the end of my life..how am I going to feel if I steal *one more copy* of Adobe Photoshop. Who will that make me? And if I'm unhappy with who I am, then how is that what's best for me?" - - - - Drinking at Metro with my G&T and my bottle of Vicodin on the bar. Gretchen asks me if I'm taking those as prescribed. "Yes, of course." I pop another Vicodin. Swallow it with gin. Gretchen reaches for the prescription bottle and I slap her hand. Alyssa is tending bar. She gives me a look, then looks at Gretchen, then back at me. I give her a look that says: *See?* Gretchen brings her bag around the front of her chair and unpacks a whole special cheese and cracker plate she has brought to the Metro to please me. I'm like: "Alyssa, is this ok with you?" Alyssa's all: "Oh, yes, she cleared it with me." I hate when Gretchen controls the situation by serving me my favorite food, but I eat it anyway because cheese, crackers, Kalamata olives, and wine is basically my favorite meal. And Gretchen's taste is impeccable: she brings three cheeses and they're all amazing. I'm talking to a woman on the other side of me and she asks what I do. I say: "Oh, I lost my job, so basically..you're lookin' at it!" Gretchen gets worried. But mostly she gets *offended*—you know? She's concerned but more than that she's *mad* and *hurt* because I didn't tell her first, and we're supposed to be friends. I told a stranger before I told her—that's the problem. There were signs of passing of the rare creature known to you and me only as Stripes—text on the chalkboard outside that said *Coming Soon New York Chef Stripes Whoever New Menu By* and then Stripes is there behind the bar for a few minutes and I get to see what a Stripes looks like and it turns out that—in every movement, in every choice of words, in every efficiency of her dealings with Alan and Alyssa, in her body and in her face and in her expressions and in her voice and in everything she does with it—Stripes is the most wonderful thing I've seen in a year. ### 48 I kept thinking about applying at the City Tavern, this shitty bar at the end of Elliot Street—the bar where I had met Aaron, the quantum physicist *cum* organic farmer *cum* bong constructor—but every time I went to the City Tavern to apply for a job, they were closed..not a good sign for a potential employer. When I finally did catch them when they were open, I ordered a gin and tonic and bantered with the bartender until I got up the courage to ask her if they were hiring. She looked around. There were three people in the bar: her, me, and a guy on the wall behind me drilling holes and setting up tables and unwrapping new chairs like as if, suddenly, out of Nowhere, Goddamn Fucking *Vermont*, huge crowds of college-aged drinkers were doing to descend from the slopes of White Mountain and fill the City Tavern. "Who's that?" I ask the bartender. "That's Fozzie Bear. He's the owner." "Fozzie *Bear*? Like the Muppet?" The guy answers me: "Yes. Like the Muppet. As you can see, Candace—" Candace waves, with a bar rag in her hand. "—Candice makes the wraps, she wipes down the fridges, she pours the drinks, she operates the speed rail in a manner that Dagny Taggart would be proud of—" "Oh, you've read *Atlas Shrugged?*" I say. "Yes I've read *Atlas Shrugged*." He says it like I'm a pure fucking idiot asking an idiot pure fucking question. "Are you a fan?" I ask. The man stops drilling. "No, I am *not* a fucking fan. But I get your pun. Speed rail. Railroad. Atlas Shrugged. Dagny Taggart. So you've obviously read the book—are *you* a fan?" "No," I say. And it was his pun, but I keep that to myself. "You don't think it should be kept on the classics shelf?" Fozzie Bear asks. "No." "Good," he says. "Because if you had come in here asking for a job as a fan of that piece of shit book, I would have taken your fat ass out back and—see this drill?—I would have drilled a hole right there in the side of you fat stomach to remind you that Ayn Rand is a know-nothing piece of *shit* who basically wrote a thousand-page romance novel masquerading as the thinnest piece of propaganda ever to be called 'literature.' " I laugh. "I fully agree, actually." "Well it doesn't matter if you agree or not because I can't offer you a job. The day Candy leaves, you can make the wraps and run the speed rail and haul kegs up and down that stairway there. Candice, give him another G&T on me and get his information." "Thank you," I say, and Fozzie Bear goes back to his construction project. Candice puts a napkin beside my drink and then holds an index finger in the air, laughs at herself, and brings me back a pen. I write my information on the napkin, drink my drink, and leave, supposing that that was a Brattleboro job interview. That was the last day I saw the City Tavern open my whole year in Brattleboro. I heard Candace moved to Eugene, Oregon to study to become a shaman, so theoretically I could have made the wraps and run the speed rail, but the only problem was that the City Tavern just didn't have any customers. Also, if I had thought ahead, I would have known that bartender wasn't the best job for an alcoholic..but I didn't know myself that well at the time. I was still playing the game, the game where I pretend I'm in control of it, that I could work in a bar and not drink. It's sort of an insane optimism. 'Cause you need the job, and if you're in a town where half the jobs a guy can get are working inside a bar, you *have* to believe that somehow it's going to work—when the farthest place you need to be is a bar. When I applied to work at the hipster grocery store, the Co-op (the place where the wine manager shot the general manager in the head on behalf of everyone who ever worked for that GM on account of him being a complete asshole to everyone he ever came in contact with)..right, anyway, when I applied to work there, at the organic/hippie/peacenik grocery store, they had a question on their application. It said: "Can you commit, at the time of your hiring, to work at least two of these three: weekends, holidays, late nights?" Their form suggested I respond with a yes or no answer but I was not just some idiot who had never worked a day in my life. (I was a different type of idiot.) I wrote in the margin: > I will commit, at the time of my hiring, to work any hours you give me, including weekends, holidays, late nights, and any other hours you require, if you will commit to me, at the time of my hiring, that you will give me full time (40+) hours every week so that I will meet the requirement of being a full-time employee and be eligible for the benefits your company offers. Naturally they never wrote me back. They want some high school student who thinks (rightly, given the economic world they grew up in) that all they can ever hope to get, even from what claims to be an upstanding company, is twenty hours a week as a cashier-slash-janitor, with no benefits, in a work environment where the senior-citizen management shoot each other in the head, inside the store, over a personality conflict. It's so important to the middle-class patrons of every hipster grocery store in Brattleboro, Eugene, Portland, Tucson, New Orleans, etc. that they have *fair trade* coffee—buying it makes them feel like responsible consumers. How about refusing to shop there when the most they'll ever give *any* employee is thirty-five hours a week so they can say they offer health insurance for their employees. And they do. Their full-time employees get health insurance. It's just that full-time starts at forty hours a week. And no one *gets* forty hours a week. It's the same thing from the top politicians. Like your President will say, "No more boots on the ground in Syria." Then they do an air attack on Syria. O-*k*..uh-*huh*.. (*Wink wink, nod nod.*) Why not just say, "We're starting a war in Syria." Or: "We don't offer health insurance, punk, unless you're the CEO." Just say it. Just say what's true. Don't give me all this *yes, we offer xyz when certain unfulfillable conditions are met*. You don't offer it. You just don't offer it. And for a company to state their expectations of *you*?—perfectly societally acceptable. But for an employee—a person—to expect something from a *company*?—it's almost universally considered rude, irrational, an obvious mistake. *Of course* the hippy-esque-branded Brattleboro Food Co-op didn't call me for an interview. Because in the same context they were asking me to work weekends, holidays, and late nights, I asked them for full-time hours so I could make enough money to pay my rent. That type of action is unacceptable from an employee of an American corporation. I've worked at incredibly rich hedge funds on the east coast, I've worked at tiny diners in the Arizona desert. Corporations don't give a fuck about their employees—it's just one guy at the top trying to get rich off everybody else's backs. ### 49 Gretchen called, and instead of hanging up and running out of my third-floor apartment and hunting down Stripes like a dog, declaring to her that I could tell from one two-line interchange with her that she was the most interesting person in Brattleboro (besides me) and telling her we should fuck and become inseparable, be the best-matched couple in this odd town of eleven thousand. Instead I took Gretchen's invitation, because I am an idiot. I spent hours hanging out with Gretchen by the river in hidden areas by defunct restaurants (Gretchen mentioning the rocky area below the bridge saying she used to hang out there with her friends and take black and white photos). Then we sat on a bench in an open area where two roads joined together to make Main Street and there was tons of traffic and Gretchen remarked that someone she knows will see us, and it will be a scandal. I didn't give a fuck, and I thought: why do *you* give a fuck? If you don't want scandal, then don't invite scandal by sitting here with me. And if you do want scandal, then don't complain about it when it comes about from your very actions. I sobered up for a week or so. I went to see a lawyer about a filing a wrongful termination suit and I was riding my bicycle past crack houses with people sitting on the porches. They scared me, black and white, and I wondered if I had lost my edge—maybe my days of hiking up to Harlem to smoke crack with black guys were over. But I've spent enough time around drugs and drug dealers and drug users to know that a friendly encounter can turn into *you getting shot* over a minor misunderstanding—and minor misunderstandings are constant among people on drugs. Something in me wanted at least physical safety now. I knew that walking into a crack house was dangerous for anyone who had cash in their pocket—those motherfuckers didn't care, they'd rather rob you than sell you drugs, it was so much less tedious for all of us. I talked with the lawyer. He said unless another employee quit or got fired and was willing to testify with me, that we could never win the case. My Vicodin ran out and the urologist wouldn't prescribe me more (he just never returned my messages—I got his messaging service, she asked if it was an emergency and I was like *have you ever heard of kidney stones*—she was like well I'll see but he doesn't take calls on weekends—*How fucking* convenient *for him!* I say, and hang up) even though that kidney stone was in me for like two and a half months. It was the biggest stone I'd ever passed and I couldn't get appropriate pain medication—and if you think I'm just a drug addict seeking Vicodin then *you've* never had a kidney stone..It's mad pain, bro..I've read message boards where women who've had kids and kidney stones *overwhelmingly* say that kidney stone pain is worse. That's hard for me to believe, but that's the report from at least some women. And if you go back to Libby's theory of pain, it makes sense: childbirth pain normally isn't telling your brain *there's something wrong* where kidney stone pain *is*. The stress of joblessness and just every stress that I could conjure overcame me, and my side still hurt from the kidney stone, so I drank a glass of wine at Frankie's (voted best late-night food in B-boro!..no doubt..it's the *only* late-night food in B-boro). Jane is there drinking wine and I move over to her booth and we share a glass together. I talk about my writing. I say: "I'm going to publish a book." And Jane nods, half-aware, and we have another glass of wine and another and another just to kill the pain. See, yes, addicts are more likely to misuse pain medicine, but when we need it, like when we have a kidney stone, if you under-prescribe the medicine, or if we overuse it, we're going to manage that pain somehow, just as anyone would—and in my case, with kidney stone pain, that meant relapsing on alcohol, which for me is much worse than if I had been able to get more Vicodin from my urologist to get me through the passing of the stone. I don't drive on Vicodin, I don't write crazy emails to my boss on Vicodin, I don't buy Vicodin on the street when I run out of it. You know? You don't want to fuck with Vicodin if you're an addict, but for me, at least, it's much better to manage kidney stone pain with painkillers than alcohol. I left Frankie's and went to the upscale pizza place (Fireworks). There I had a glass of wine, and a glass of wine, and a glass of wine, reading *Jurassic Park* all the while—it's one of my long-time favorites, a comfort book for me. - - - - That night Gretchen came over and I was drunk. I was listening to Cat Stevens, *The Wind*, on repeat and crying. I was so drunk that I didn't want to tell her I was drunk and I didn't tell her and she either didn't know or pretended not to know. I got really friendly and physical with her, pulling her onto my lap and kissing her face and smelling her breasts and touching her body everywhere my hands could reach. She was trying to relate to me on the level of all the Cat Stevens music she had grown up with, when she got this certain album, etc, but all it did was remind me how much older than me she was. Later, she always referred back to this evening and how happy she was that I was so physical with her. I never told her the truth which is that if I wasn't drunk I would have never been that physical with her. I mean I wouldn't have had a married woman sitting on my lap and kissing her neck and shit. That was the alcohol. One night, holding hands and legs with Gretchen at the Central American restaurant while her husband was at the table. He was at the head, Gretchen and I were along one side. Gretchen was the drunk one that night. I tried to split up from them and go to a bar while they were supposed to go home but Tom must have let her go because next thing I know Gretchen's turning up at the bar without her husband. And me trying to hide my drinking from one of the cooks at the Central American restaurant—Gretchen's friend Castro. You don't owe your sobriety to those people, but there is an accountability that's broken when you start drinking again. I remember coming back from the grocery store with wine in a bag and seeing an AA person on the way (someone from the 7am meeting I used to go to all the time). We stood in the street talking and I hoped she didn't see the wine in my bag—I held it high against my chest to hide the bag's contents. Finally she went on her way and I got down to my new profession: drinking wine and eating cheese and smoking cigarettes by the front window of my apartment. I discovered one bottle of wine wasn't going to be enough for me, but when I got downtown I saw that there was no way to get to the Food Co-Op anymore. The whole street, the creek, the bridge, and multiple parking lots were now Noah's flood—full-sized tree trunks were flowing down a creek that was normally six inches deep. CNN was there. Brattleboro got its 15 minutes. And for all the wrong reasons. People died. Houses floated away. Businesses flooded. First the fire then this—it was a bad year for Brattleboro. That morning I walked to the Co-op at 11am for wine and cheese and when Gretchen called me back downtown, the way I walked earlier was flooded like a lake. I hung out with Gretchen, both of us in rain hear, and watched the flooding with the rest of Brattleboro from the top level of the municipal parking lot. We waded across an intersection and waved at her dad—who was her next-door neighbor—Gretchen's friends and neighbors seeing us and us both wondering if that would get back to her husband. The water was brown with mud—you couldn't tell how deep it was. It was hard to understand, since I hadn't been here watching it, how the path I had taken two hours earlier to the grocery store was now completely a river. The trickling creek where I used to meditate was now a Biblical-style river with cars and trucks and huge boulders and pieces of earth rushing down it. Now here's a sad story. An AA woman—an amazing speaker, a strong person—lost her son during that flood. He was around before the flood, and then, after the flood, he was just never around. Ever. Again. The theory is that he went into the woods and took hallucinogenic mushrooms, then couldn't get back home after the flood rose so quickly. He was never found. His mother worked at the Refuge and she was like a pristine spiritual master through it all. She's a person I'd like to be more like. I can't say I'm *in awe* of too many people, but I am in awe of the way that woman handled the loss of her son, at least the public side that I saw. When I want back to my apartment from seeing the flood, wineless, I saw a guy carrying an assault rifle and it took me a minute to remember that you can do that in Vermont. I took another way home because it scared me. I had specific fears that he was after me, and I didn't question the illogic of these fears until much later. One day, hiking to the top of Wantastiquet and looking over the view, looking at the tiny town, I thought: I can do this, I can be homeless here, I can eat meals and sleep at churches, climb this mountain daily, lose weight, and get to this mountaintop. That's all I need for my spirituality, to stand here and look over the peaks of southern Vermont, making a whistle with my hands, calling to a bird that's circling, circling, and it flies right over me to see where the whistle comes from. And it was like a premonition. Before I was ever admitted to the Refuge, I used to ride my bike around the grounds, just watching kids play and seeing people swim in the pool. The only reason I even knew the Refuge existed was that I'd applied for a security guard job there when I first arrived in Brattleboro. Now it was late summer turning into autumn and I was drawn to that place like a magnet—on the most subconscious level, I knew that was where I was headed. ## 222 ### 50 Let me tell you something. Let me tell you about culture. Culture is one truth embattled by a thousand lies. The lies fight to keep the truth hidden. They are effective for a long time. Then one day in an epoch, that one truth takes hold and almost instantly transforms the culture, smoking out all the lies, clearing the room, then filling it with that one truth. Then that truth becomes the thousand lies. And another truth is born, and buried, within the thousand lies. Here's an example: One of the cultures in the United States is the culture of continual war. The truth is that we are at continual war. The thousand lies are the lack of acknowledgement of the true number of casualties *on both "sides,"* the policy of not showing photographs of the gore and carnage of war in mass media, the absence of declarations of war by congress, the outright lies justifying war in the first place—specifically, that some other country is an actual threat to our well-being. And pervasively, insidiously, the championing of *freedom* and *justice* to subtly program citizens to accept that *we are right* and *they are wrong* (because *they* want to take away our freedom and justice!). And the most unbelievable lie of all: that there is such a thing as *us* and *them* in the first place. If you speak the lie, you are absorbed and loved and encouraged by the culture. You are paid and given food and a house and a uniform to wear. If you speak the truth, you are fought by the bearers of the thousand lies. You are marginalized. People who love you will literally tell you to stop speaking—because if you continue speaking, they will listen, they will see the truth, and the whole floor of their existence will fall from beneath them. If you speak the truth, you will be systematically excluded by family, country, church, and state. The thousand lies are quite literally trying to *kill* the one truth..because the revelation of that truth will kill the lies. That is one example of one culture in one place. And in general, that is what culture is. - - - - I kept seeing my substance abuse counselor, even while I was using—I knew I had a problem and was reaching out for help. It was, though, as they say, too little too late. Before therapy with that woman, each time, I considering jumping out the third story window to kill myself while in the waiting room. The therapist gave me a logic toy to play with one day and that made me very happy and relaxed. There was a point where I was completely out of food except penne and mayonnaise—I ate my penne pasta with Tooler's mayo and cumin for a week straight. I learned to love the taste of this meal (you'll learn to love the taste of anything when you're as hungry I was—the day I got my unemployment check I went hog wild at the bars until there was nothing left to buy food, pay rent, utilities, do all those normal things that people do with money.) I was so lonely I sat at the bar with the professor one night, and that loneliness compounded with hours of listening to the hate speech from that man, subtly directed at every group that he and I were not a part of, was part of why I sought out a very different kind of company that night. All I wanted was some coke—some powder—and if I had found this *might* have turned into quite a different story—*might*. But I found crack instead, wandering outside the new Metropolis to seek action and company. There was a double door there, and one side let up to the drug apartment I had been to before. There was a random black guy who was sitting on the stoop, and I looked at him and I *knew*. I *knew* this guy could get me drugs. Drug people can recognize each other, remember? I sat down next to him and I said, "So, what's going on?" And he said, "What do you mean, 'what's going on?' " And I said, "I mean *what is going on*." And he said, "Can you get money?" And I said, "Yes." Boom. Deal. Done. Double doors. One goes into the Metropolis—high-class people. One goes up to the drug apartment—low-class people. And I was both, an artist, one of those dangerous people who mix with all classes. And in that moment, I switched tracks, walking out on the Professor and all that is high class and walking in with my new friend, who would take me on a journey I will never forget. I was already drunk, though at this point in my story that probably goes without saying. Black dude introduces himself. Let's just say his name was: "Kevin." "Matthew." Kevin makes a call. I hit an ATM that's right down the street. We get into a car. We drive to a hotel. I stay in the car Kevin's friend is driving while Kevin goes upstairs to a certain room and buys crack with the money I gave him. Naturally he divides it into two packs and holds back half in a certain pocket in his jeans, then he comes out, slaps me on the shoulder, and grins. "It's on." I smile. On our way to the next destination, Kevin and I have a discussion that reveals to me he didn't buy powder, he bought rocks, he didn't know I wanted powder and rocks are all they had anyway. "It's good," I say. Whatever. At this point I don't care what we do as long as we do *something*. Fuck it. - - - - The car drops me and Kevin off at yet another apartment and we walk up a zillion stairs to like a fourth or fifth floor apartment, some maze, then back to this door which Kevin knocks on. They let us in. It's two people in the house: a man who looks like Victor from *Se7en* lying face down under a thin quilt, sweating. As soon as he hears Kevin's voice he's like: "Whoah man, who is this." "This is Matthew. He's cool. Can we use your house?" Of course we can use their house—'cause all four of us are getting high off the crack I bought. This is just part of how it works. They get something for providing a safe house for us to do it in. The skinny guy—it's the skinny guy and his wife or girlfriend—he opens a box on the coffee table and he's got needles inside. He shoots up something—I'm not sure what—and he sees me eyeing his needles a little too fondly. Then we smoke crack. The four of us smoke crack all night. And Kevin pumps me for my money. He has way more crack on him than the retail value of what I supposedly bought earlier, so every hour or so we send someone out on a bicycle with my ATM card to get another two-hundred dollars. Then! Magically! Kevin has more crack! "So, Matt, what do you do?" "I write. Like novels and stuff." "Give me the address. Give me the address! I know you have it on the internet!" I give her the address to *Things Said in Dreams*. She prints out the entire thing. "It's easier for me to read things on paper," she says. "I'm the same way." Giving your ATM card and PIN to a complete stranger isn't something you'd do normally. It is something that you'd do on crack. Then later when it was me going out on this decrepit bike around 4am to empty my bank account, leaving my bag with my iPad with a bunch of drug people *who are on crack right this minute*..is not something I would normally do. I rode that bike in crazy circles thinking *what have I done* and being scared the cops would see me and question me..be sitting in their car somewhere waiting silently for someone like me to come along. I was hardly able to ride the bike I was so sore from clenching from the crack. And if you want to know what crack feels like..let's say you had a thermostat that instead of controlling the air, controlled your stress. The first hit off that glass pipe is like turning down the thermostat on your stress. Everything gets low..cool..quiet..all your problems have just gone away. That doesn't last. You get paranoid. Like skinny dude got paranoid about *me* in the early early morning and I had to leave because this motherfucker thinks I'm a cop. The genuine heart in these three felt bad I had emptied my bank account for us all to get high (and I'm sure they still had more for the three of them once I left) so they hatched a scheme where I would become a drug dealer with them so I could win all my money back. In their presence I was like: *Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Thanks for you consideration!* In my own mind I was like: *What the fuck?! That's never going to happen. I might be stupid enough to use drugs but I'm not stupid enough to become a drug dealer!!* I finally left when the sun came up and everyone is so sketched out about me because I'm a stranger that I figure I'm about to get shot. I walked back in the early dawn, sobering up. Oh yeah, sobering up off crack is not a pleasant thing. In fact it's almost impossible to do by yourself, that's why people start one day and then smoke continuously until they have no money, no car, no job, no house. I've smoked crack three times in my life, and every time it was followed by a breakdown—complete destruction of my job, apartment, city I live in. Crack is a very bad drug for me. And I hate crack. I'd much rather feel the effects of powdered cocaine, which by the way doesn't destroy my life after one night of using. Not saying it's good for me—but crack is worse. My normal paranoia was on red alert: when I left my bag at the crack apartment to get cash, I thought that they might look inside and see the iPad and—not steal it, but—think I'm recording them like I'm an undercover cop or some shit. They prob'ly never thought to look in my bag. They didn't steal my iPad. They didn't kill me for thinking I was an undercover cop. When I was at their house—at the beginning—it was like we were all friends. I felt like I was with people who understood me, who weren't concerned with silly rules like *crack is illegal* or *drugs are bad for you* or any of that bullshit. These were real people: they cared about my book, they liked art, and they understood that *every once in a while you've just gotta smoke some crack*. By the end of the night I felt significantly differently. Instead of six-hundred dollars in the bank I had zero. Zero dollars and zero cents. I had been here before. No money. No job. I called my ex-sponsor from the attic apartment, physically cramping, feeling like the inside of a skeleton, like not even sleep could cure this, and asked his voicemail if I should try to get into a detox program at the Refuge. He called back later and said yes, but I was already on my way down to the Refuge. My sponsor said, "You can get crack in *Brattleboro*?" "Yes." "I didn't know you could get it this far north." "Well, you can." "Was it good?" "If it wasn't *good* do you think I would have spent *my entire bank account* on it in one night? I fucking *hate* crack, but yeah, I guess, as crack goes, it was good crack!" Motherfucker. *Want me to call you next time I find some???!* I called the Refuge and their detox center barely wanting anything to do with me because I had only used crack one night and my alcohol relapse was like a week or two old. They didn't want to admit me because cocaine has no physical withdrawal—basically I could have slept it off with a short nap—and in their eyes, my recent alcohol usage was *nothing*. But I told them this was part of a much larger problem and there had been periods where I had drank or used cocaine for much longer. "I'm just not sure you meet the GAF for admission." "Listen to me. I need your help. I feel like I'm gonna die." So they admitted me, and I walked there that morning, sore at every step from the crack. ### 51 I was physically uncomfortable during the admitting process. A physician's assistant tirelessly asked me his million questions he had to ask me before the let me in the detox unit. "What day is it?" he asked me." "Wednesday?" "It's Sunday." I laugh. "Well, I'm recently unemployed, I have the luxury of not knowing what day it is." He didn't find that funny. "So you did crack last night and you've been drinking alcohol." "Yes." "We're gonna need a piss test." "The nurse already gave me one." "Ok..excellent." He checks it off his list. We go through a million other things that I'm not gonna go into. The actual detox process consisted of being on a 20-bed unit where they took your vital signs it seemed like once an hour. They measure your detoxification symptoms for whatever drugs you're detoxing from. They give you drugs to help you detox safely—in the case of alcohol, Librium. I only got one or two Librium because I did't display alcohol detox symptoms—I wasn't shaking, wasn't experiencing delirium tremens, and there is no physical detox protocol for cocaine, so..according to them I was well the moment I walked in the door. But I didn't *feel* well, and that's how I convinced them to admit me. They get all kinds of detoxers there—alcohol, heroin, opiate pills, but the most dangerous drug to detox from is alcohol—it's the only common street drug where stopping it suddenly can kill you. I learned that in one of my classes at the Refuge. We had art class, meals, but mostly we slept and went to drug abuse education classes, where we were taught how addiction works and what an uphill battle we were going to have to fight to overcome it. One doctor calculated, roughly, the number of times we had successfully taught our brains that using a drug would make us feel better. Then he said we were going to teach our brains roughly the same number of times some other ways to feel better—we each had a hell of a lot of unlearning to do. There was about one staff member per person. The staff were incredibly organized and efficient—one of the most well-functioning teams I have ever seen in any context. They were cohesive as hell—I was jealous I never worked on a team that functioned so well *as a team*. They were truly a crew, like a crew of sailor Everyone had everyone's back. Their paperwork moved from location to location like the cogs in a machine. Tyler 1 for me was classes, discussion, making friends..that's basically all you do in detox. Tyler was the name of the building. One was the floor we were on. Other floors were used for different categories of psych problems (and the Refuge considers addiction a psych problem). - - - - When I first got there I was put in a room with two other guys. One was this crazy kid (he was in his mid-teens so he was a kid to me). He was in detox yet had brought a bunch of drug culture books with him to read all day (he skipped the classes) and he was like reading aloud from them to me and the other roommate and he was so excited to read about celebrity drug use and celebrity overdoses. This detox was just a perennial trip for him, insisted on and paid for by his parents. After a day, the nurses asking me if I wanted my own room. I said, "No I'm ok for now." My roomie was like, "I'm getting high the minute I get out of here." He had pills *in his car* in the Refuge parking lot, he claimed—this fucker was going to drive home from detox high. On my multiple stays at the Refuge, I learned that for some families, this was just a high-cost way for the parents to feel like they were doing something about their children's drug problems. They didn't actually talk with them or check with them or spend time with their kids, they just paid shitloads of money to send their kid to the Refuge for a week—throw money at the problem. - - - - About the time I thought they were going to kick me out for not being toxified enough, they had me talk to a psychiatrist. Her name was Dr. Joseph. She took me to a small room with two chairs and a desk. We sat on the same side of the desk. Dr. Joseph asked me if I'd ever been in a psych hospital before. I said, "Yes." "You look startled." "I just..I forgot that I had been to one before. I haven't thought about that in a long time." "Did you receive any diagnosis there?" "Bipolar disorder." It was the oddest feeling. I received my diagnosis back then and then years passed and the idea that I had bipolar disorder faded away, until now. While meeting with Dr. Joseph, I recalled that I had been hospitalized in LA after calling a suicide hotline, and that I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. "Oh yeah, it's all coming back to me. I never thought about it all these years. I remember how I got there..I was manic programming..just left work and programmed on my own projects at home for about a week. I was drinking potato vodka with orange juice and watching *The Truman Show* on repeat for the whole week. Then I was in an overcrowded holding room with so many patients..so many..we were sleeping on the floor—they kept us sedated. I saw my friend Ashley through hurricane glass talking with a doctor." "What's hurricane glass?" "It's that glass that has crisscross wires in it so if it breaks the fragments don't fly all over the place." "Oh. Sorry. Please continue." "Then my friend Ashley leaves—we wave through the glass. The doctor comes to me and says you're all detoxed from the alcohol and you didn't even show any withdrawal symptoms (I never do) and—he says—we were going to let you go and basically you had us convinced you weren't really suicidal without the alcohol but your friend—Ashley?—told us that you're very smart and very good at manipulating what other people think of you..and she said you'd tell us whatever we needed to hear in order to feel like letting you go was the right thing..so..we're going to keep you here for some more observation. I was a little miffed to have Ashley in my business but even then I knew she had done the right thing, and that it was a true act of love. I was never mad at her. That was my first serious mania that I know of—probably just the first one I was hospitalized for. Horrible detox (even though I showed no signs). Diagnosis. Prescription—Lamictal. Calm period. Medicine runout. And spiral down. I played Yahtzee! in that hospital with a homeless woman and a young guy who was there voluntarily, waiting to get into a residential rehab. The homeless woman said she'd stayed in Valley Village—which is where I lived!—and we exchange info and I told her she could shower or stay with me or get food or water anytime. And we talk about getting drinks even though we're both supposed to be sober as part of our programs. She tells me a secret: she's not hearing voices even though that's what she tells the doctor..she just wants to stay off the street as long as possible, so she pretends she's schizophrenic. How fucked up is that? And I came out of there a week later with a diagnosis of Bipolar II—fucking *panel* of psychiatrists gave it to me. I didn't really understand how having bipolar disorder would affect my life until..actually I don't even think I understand it now." In fact it would take scores of psychiatrists, ten or so trips to the ER, seven admissions to the Brattleboro Refuge, three other inpatient psychiatric stays, one cry-for-help suicide attempt, many days crying in bed all day long, a lot of reading about bipolar disorder, and a detailed review of my past through the bipolar lens—all this over a period of about ten years—to start to admit that the diagnosis applied to me. I still don't believe it all the time. "Do you have problems with gambling?" "I know you're using that question to try to eliminate a diagnosis of bipolar disorder." (They say gambling is one of the signs of bipolar mania.) "I used to go to my meth dealer's house and play internet poker for three or four days in a row. We both had good incomes so it didn't matter if we lost ten or twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes we made money, high fived, and bought ourselves more meth (from ourselves). Does that count as gambling?" "I think so." "I thought so, too." "What else has been going on this year?" "Maybe," I say, "there's no place in this world for the words 'gay' and 'straight' anymore. Nor 'lesbian.' Nor 'bi.' Isn't everybody bi?" I remembered my meth experience with my neighbor in Hollywood, experience with the Professor, and waking up in Dayton one night, drugged, with Jimmy sucking my dick and forever taunting me that, "You had no trouble getting hard." "There was that scientist guy," I said, "from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who was gay and I let him rub lotion on my back. Manipulation by older gay guys." "What do you mean, manipulation?" "Like Jimmy saying of me that anyone who shaves their head wants to be fucked by a man. Don't you find that an idiotic statement? I do. Then there's the Professor fingering my asshole and sucking my dick after getting me drunk and maybe drugged. "Who's the Professor?" "I drank A LOT at that time and I was never as cloudy as that night once the Professor filled me a new drink while he was in the kitchen and I couldn't see what he was doing..the point is I'll never know..and he asked me to hide in the bedroom while he had a rug delivered the next morning. He said if he needed help with the delivery man moving the carpet that he would come get me and I should just say I was his nephew." "Matthew, slow down!" "He was *very concerned* that someone would see me at his house. He was already pissing off his neighbors by bringing over young men every night. He fucked monks, college students, homeless kids—everyone. His pretense was that we were all his drivers—which technically we were." "Do you want a cup of water?" "I'll take a coffee if you're going out there." "I don't think coffee is a good idea for you right now." "No, I guess not." "Water then?" "No thank you." The doctor flipped a page in her notebook. "Do you have any family history?" "Family history?" "Yeah, any family members with mental illness?" "*Mental* illness? Yeah. All of them. I have two cousins, twins, and there's hush hush talk about them both having drug problems, maybe bipolar, but I can't get any information about it because it's a taboo topic in the family. A cousin, maybe. You can't get any straight answers. Plus my dad cut me off emotionally so I'm pretty much in the dark about that whole side of the family." "I understand. Let's start with with your immediate family." "Let's *start* with my immediate family! Let's do. Let's start with my dad, he's a key figure. Absent father, workaholic—absent emotionally. Diagnosis-by-proxy from my sister's therapist is conjecture of course but says he probably has borderline personality. That anything he ever got *right* with us was *by accident*. Um. Sent me to a shitty college and when I dropped out and came home my parents were divorced and it was just me and my dad, eating hot dogs for dinner and watching soft core porn shit like *Consenting Adults*—have you seen it?" "No." "Well don't bother, it's a shitty picture." "Anything more about your dad?" "Sure. He made us shower with him until we were..too old to be showering with your dad." "This is with you and your sisters?" "Individually, with at least me, and also with my oldest sister." "Any sexual abuse?" "Not that I recall, unless you count staring at your dad's cock while you're forced to take a shower with him sexual abuse." "Did he make you touch his penis?" "Not that I remember." "Did he touch you inappropriately?" "I don't think so. But he would do stuff like this: one time me and my sister—this is much later—we're driving in the snow on some highway outside of Dayton, Ohio, and the van breaks down. We can't restart it—we don't know shit about cars. So we huff it up the road in the snow, find some lawyer's office full of a bunch of really unhelpful assholes who we had to practically *con* into letting us use their phone. This is two high-school kids. Before cell phones. We finally get ahold of my mom on her pager number. They're at lunch with a bunch of church people. They eventually show up in the other car. My dad's like, 'Where's the van?' and I'm like, 'It's just back that way a little bit,' so we drive back the way we came and Joanne and I must have walked longer than we thought because the van is *not there*." "Maybe it got towed," I say. My dad's hands tighten on the steering wheel. His foot grinds the accelerator into the floor. We speed down this snowy highway, twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, but the broken-down van doesn't show. "Could you have walked *this* far?" my dad says. "I don't think so." Thirty seconds later: "Could you have walked *this* far??" "I don't think so." "Well *where* is this lawyer's office you're talking about?" "I don't know but if you let me drive, I can get us there." No response from dad. My mom, seated next to him, says: "Why don't you let him drive." My dad hits the brakes, the steering wheel, and his window at the same time. The Honda fishtails and comes to a stop alongside the highway. Everyone is quiet. My dad is in the driver's seat with his head leaned back, eyes shut, radiating stress like we just lost the Challenger. Mom is in the passenger seat, relaxed except that her chin is resting on the palm of her hand. She's staring out the window looking the opposite direction as my dad. Joanne and I are in the back seat. We look at each other and she makes a tiny shrug and an even tinier smile—it's so tiny it only involves the subtlest crack in one corner of her mouth. I know what it means. It means: *Well, bro, we could be here a while.* Now the argument takes place between my dad and mom, instead of with Dad and me. They decide to go home and call impound lots. Dad calls every lot in town and no one has towed a blue van. Leona—my littlest sister—gets home from a sleepover and sits on the second floor with her face pressed against the stair railing. She has gotten home just in time for the best part of the argument, in which my dad says to me: "Matt. Were you the one driving?" "Yes." "So you were responsible for the vehicle." "If you just give me the keys, I can take us back to where it is." "So you know where it is." "Of course." He hands me a scrap of paper. It's actually exactly one-fourth of a piece of paper, scrap paper with advertising printed on the other side, that my dad has rescued from the recycle bin..god forbid we *recycle* when we could have *re-used!!* "Write down how to get there." He hands me a pencil. "I can't write with this." My dad's face turns a shade redder. "Matthew, I want you to *write down* how to get to the van. Then I'm going to take you in the Honda and I'm going to fix the engine—" "I'm not getting in a car with you." "Why not?" "Because you're angry. I'm not getting in a car with you behind the wheel while you're this angry. It's not safe. I won't do it." My dad looks like he's going to shit a fucking *dinosaur*. My mom is in the kitchen, making something. I don't know. She's doing something to keep herself from getting involved, because she knows that if she, her husband, *and* their first kid ever got into a fight all at the same time, it would be very much like assembling a critical mass of plutonium. Joanne is upstairs with Leona. Joanne is doing insane ballet stretches where her legs form a straight line against the stair railing, one going this way, one going that way, and the whole of her is lying on the floor. "Matthew, get in the car." You can tell he wanted to say "fucking" but he censored himself. If he had said "fucking" to his son right there, Mom would have gotten involved. "Get. In. The. Car." "I already told you I'm not getting in the car while you're angry so if you want to cool down we can re-discuss this in half an hour or you can let me drive. Those are your options but I am not going to risk my life while you're driving angry." Dad starts to speak again, but instead he goes out the front door and *slams* it—which is difficult to do with a very heavy, 1920s wooden door in a tight-fitting door frame. I sit down on the stairs and do controlled breathing as I've noticed my heart rate's gone up. Dad comes back in not five minutes later. "Is it on highway seventy-five?" "I don't know." "Is it on highway seventy?" "I really have no idea." "Well is it on highway six-seventy-five." "Dad, I don't know." "How can you not know where it is if *you* were driving?" "I don't look at the signs." "What do you mean *you don't look at the signs?* How can you know where you're going if you don't look at the signs??!!" "I just know what things look like." "Well was it west of the lawyer's office?" "The van?" "*Yes!* Is the van *west* of the lawyer's office?" "I have no idea, Dad, I don't think in directions." "WAS IT SOUTH OF THE LAWYER'S OFFICE??!!" "Van." That's my mom from the other room. My dad's name is Van. "What?" my dad says to her. "Please don't raise your voice when talking to our son." "I'm just trying to figure out where—" "Just don't yell at our son." My mom said this very quietly, but even Joanne and Leona heard it in their perch, upstairs. My dad might have the loudest bark, but my mom has the sharpest bite. You really don't want to wake that sleeping dog. And I didn't know it at the time, but they were both forming me, in this argument and many like it, to be something of a dog myself—one with the looks of a chihuahua, the smarts of a border collie, and the bite of a pit bull terrier with rabies and AIDS. At this point I'm trying to unlearn all that dog knowledge I learned from my family and become a proper human being. But it's hard, you know, the earlier you learn something, to unlearn it. Dad decided to lower his voice to keep my mom in the kitchen. There are knives in the kitchen. But he does point his finger in my face when he speaks. "I want you to give me directions to the van so that I can go and get it." I speak to his finger, not his face, since he thinks it's so critical to point it at me. "I don't think we're speaking the same language about directions. I don't think of directions in terms of east, west, south, north—" "Weren't you ever taught to use a compass?" "I can use a compass. Ok? We've done plenty of compass exercises at camps. A compass is not going to get us to the van." "Well can't you at least tell me the name of the *highway*?" He sounds desperate, like a starving child asking for a single pea to salve his hunger. "I don't know what highway it's on." "Well Matthew, I just don't *understand* how you can be driving, and lose a vehicle, and not even know *what road you're on*." "Dad, I am trying to help you. But something you're going to have to accept, if we're going to make progress in this conversation, is that you think in east, south, north, and west and in names of highways and I think differently. I think about how it looks: I can drive you to the van—if you would just let me drive—or I might be able to give you directions like: go here, look for this, turn left, go, look for that, turn right. You know what I'm saying? We think differently." He whines again: "But *how is it* that a grown man doesn't know if the van is *north* of six-seventy-five or *south* of six-seventy-five?? How can you even *drive* if you don't know that? How do you reliably get to your destination?" "Because I just think about it differently than you, Dad." "But *north or south* is a basic fact!" "No! It's not!! It's a paradigm!" "Matthew, are you telling me *you don't know directions!?*" "It has nothing to do with directions!" I yell. Dad gets real close to me. "WHY CAN'T YOU TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW??" Now my mom is in the room. "Van." Dad turns to her. "He's right," she says. "It's not a matter of directions. He can get places—he knows *directions*. He drives all the time and he gets from here to there and back again. He doesn't get lost. I think if you just let him drive you to the van then you can call a tow truck and you can describe to *them* the location of the van however you like." "Alright, Matt, go get in the car." "Give me the keys." "What?" "I'm not getting in that car with you behind the wheel." "Matthew, *get* in the FUCKING *car*!!" "I don't think so." "Then go to your room. "I'm not going to my room." "I TOLD YOU TO GO TO YOUR GODDAMN ROOM." "You know what, fuck you." "Fuck me?? Fuck me?? Do you still want to go to the Christmas dance?" "The Christmas dance is not on the table just because you won't let me lead you to the van—" "Oh yes it is on the table." "Mom, is the Christmas dance on the table?" Mom answers. It sounds like she had her mouth full: "No. Not on the table." My dad looks like a slug that just had salt poured on it: he's trying not to be fatally turned inside out, but it's inevitable. He fucked himself in this argument. He wants to yell. He wants to hit. But we don't hit in this family, we use our words. They may not be nice words, but he knows if he hits me, I won't bother with hitting him back, I'll call the police and he'll spend the night in jail. I don't believe in half measures. It's either full patience..or the nuclear option. "Ok, fine," my dad says. He hands me the keys. "You drive." "Not while you're angry." "I said YOU DRIVE!!" He hits the keys out of my hand and they fall on the floor between us. "I'm not getting in a car with you while you're angry whether you're driving or not." "MATTHEW!!!!!!!" "It's not safe. I'm not going to participate in an activity that might get one or more of us hurt just to find the van. We locked it. It's fine. If you take an hour or so to cool down and I determine that you're in a decent state to ride as my passenger in the Honda, then that's what we'll do. Your other option is you can let me and Joanne take the car, we'll find the van, we'll either write down directions that are acceptable to you or we can call the tow truck from the lawyer's office. If they're still open. They might not still be open. What time is it now?" "Three-thirty," Joanne yells from upstairs. "Yeah," I say. "They prob'ly won't be open much longer." "Matt, if you're not outside in that car in thirty seconds then—" "Then *what*? What are you gonna do? You have no leverage in this situation and you fail to see that *I'm trying to help you*. Let's go back to zero. The van is stuck in the snow, broke down, engine busted—whatever. We all want the van back. Do you think I *want* the van to be stuck in the snow unavailable to us to go do fun things as a family?? No, I am standing here giving you *options* that will get the van back, and you are *refusing* those options because *you want to be angry*. I think you just like being angry. But you are accomplishing *nothing* by acting out your anger toward me—are you getting the van back? Are you forcing me to ride in a car with you while you drive angry? Are you preventing me from taking Nadja to the Christmas dance in that van? No. That van will be found and fixed and *I'll be driving it* to the Christmas dance and I'll be dancing with my girlfriend no matter *what you do*." I laugh. I kick the keys toward the front door and laugh some more. "So go ahead. Fuck you. You wanna hit me? Go ahead *and do it*. You wanna yell? Let's yell. Let's get good and mad and make *zero progress* at getting the van back. You know what I think about sometimes, Dad?" "What, Matthew?" "I think about the fact that you have a bachelor's degree in psychology and I wonder if you are applying anything you learned from your studies to this conversation—because it doesn't seem like it." Dad rubs his face. There's a vein in his forehead that's thick as a pencil. I wonder if he'll have an aneurysm. "You and your mother, you talk so much. Sometimes I can't take it. You talk and talk and talk and you can't give me *simple directions*! I just want to get the van and make sure it's ok! I don't want it sitting there on the side of the highway. It could get hit. People could steal it. Are you sure you locked it?" "Yes, absolutely—the van is locked." "Is it in the lane or did you pull off onto the shoulder?" "It's fully in the shoulder." "Was it smoking?" "No. There was no smell of anything burning. The engine temperature was fine—right down the middle. It's like a belt or a battery or something." "It wouldn't be the battery if you were already going." "Dad, I'm not a fucking mechanic." "I'm just *tired*," my dad says. "I'm tired of arguing with you. I'm tired of arguing with your mother. I don't have the capacity to go around and around just to learn that my son doesn't know basic directions." See? That's the thing about my dad. He doesn't want to solve the problem. He wants to make you feel bad. And at that point, I'm a senior in high school, I didn't have decades of experience dealing with self-serving assholes that need about fifty years of therapy before they can have a respectful conversation with their offspring. And, unfortunately, that person, my dad, was one half of my major role models, so my ability to deal with him was mostly *learned from him*, with what little intelligent twists I could put on it—which is to say, I didn't have the tools to be an adult in this situation. My dad didn't. I didn't. His insistence that my directional methodology was inferior to his really hurt my feelings. Of course I wanted his approval. I still do. I just finally figured out, sometime in my thirties, that I was never gonna get it. But back then, disapproval from my dad hurt a lot. Intentional, wheedling, proactive, hurtful disapproval of how I think about directions—what an arbitrary facade under which to attack your son. "Are you aware that women and men think about directions differently?" My dad leans against the bannister. "Typically men think in cardinal directions and women think in what you might call street sign directions. But that dichotomy is not completely accurate. Some people *feel* directions in a way that might seem paranormal to you but they're actually using one of the senses that isn't listed in the classic list of five senses. There are all kinds of ways to think about directions. I do it visually. I've never been lost in the woods. If I go to a place, I can always get back. I know what things look like. I remember specific trees. I remember *rocks*—a tiny little rock in a stream, I see it, I know I've been here before. I've never been lost in the city, either—I remember what everything looks like and *I never read the street signs*..they have *nothing* to do with my directional thinking, they help me *in no way*, they add *no information* to my directional knowledge and yet I never get lost. Joanne and I wandered around Philadelphia *all the time* when we lived there and we *never* got lost. Not one time. We took twenty-block detours to the main library, rode different trains than we were used to..one time I took the spur train by accident and ended up in Chinatown instead of Masterman, the Spring Garden stop. I came up the subway stairs into a part of the city *I had never seen* before. I was in the *fifth grade*. I just looked around and I *knew* which way to go. I was late to school, but I was never lost. I've never *been* lost. So you characterizing me as someone with bad directional skills is ignorant." "Wha'd you say?" "It's ignorant. It's ignorant of the facts!" "I just can't win with you, Matt—you or your mother." "That is because *you are in the wrong* and you are trying to defend *an indefensible position*." "Why do I feel like I'm always in a courtroom when I talk to you." "Well, I'll give you a hint." "What's that?" "I don't talk like this to everyone. I only talk like this to people who need to be disciplined, corrected, and punished for their wrongs." At this point my dad is a grenade with no pin. "Discipline! That's what we did wrong!! MY DAD BEAT US WITH A STRAP!!" "WELL YOU SPANKED US!" "MAYBE WE SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE!!" My dad rushes me like we're about to have a physical fight. I don't do physical fights. His hands look like they're going to my neck. He brushes my shoulder with his arm. "Don't the fuck you touch me!!! Do not fucking touch me. If you fucking touch me again.." "What?" My mom comes in from the kitchen. "What is going on in here?" "Dad, I am asking you to step back from me. You touched my shoulder in an attempt to grab my neck and you should know that physical violence is where I draw the line. Mom, I'm serious, if he touches me I will call the cops and it will be a long time before anybody sees that van again." My mom says, "Van, come over here." "And I'm going to tell you both something, while I have you here. Mom, this applies to you as fully as it applies to him. I'm tired of all the church hypocrisy that goes on around here and I am *instructing* you to stop the hypocrisy right now." Mom says, "What hypocrisy are you talking about?" I say, "When we managed to get ahold of you from the lawyer's office, and you returned the page, and I told you that Joanne and I were stranded in the snow, did you come right away or did you finish your lunch at J. Alexander's?" "We—" "It's ok I already know. 'Cause we waited at that lawyer's office for close to two hours. So I know you didn't come right away. You waited. You had your food. You answer, with your actions, what's more important: your kids or your church." "That's not fair—" "I'm not done. *We* should be your highest priority, not those hypocritical assholes who Jesus would *never* have lunch with. Do you think Jesus would have said, *Hold on, kids, we're going to order a ribeye and* then *we'll come rescue you from being* stuck in the snow *in the middle of Buttfuck, Ohio with a bunch of lawyers..those fucking assholes wouldn't even let us use their* bathroom*!!* Guess they thought we were gonna steal some toilet paper. If I had kids lost in the snow I'd be *right there*. You can eat at fucking J. Alexander's *any* day. It's not every day your kids have a car break down on them when one of them is a *new driver* and the other doesn't even *have* a driver's license! *Did it ever occur to you that we might be* scared*??!! Walking along the side of the highway in knee-deep snow without jackets 'cause we thought we were just picking up a pair of dance shoes, not going on a five-mile survival trek!! That we're doing the best we can to get the fucking* van *back!!!??* So *fuck you*." (That was for my dad.) "And fuck *you* for valuing your stupid church people over your own children. *We needed help.* *You weren't there for us.* That's a problem. It's a problem with your parenting and it's a problem with your value system and it erodes the credibility of your religion, when a pastor of a church has such a low estimation of her kids!!" "That's not right—" "I'M NOT FINISHED. Ok? So you two listen to *me* right now. One: I will not be going to church with you ever again. That means Sunday worship, youth group events, Thanksgiving dinners, small group Bible study *bull*shit..I don't care what it is, I'm not going. There should be no argument about this since Joanne already skips church events to go to dance practice, so you have no logical reason to try to force me to go, given the precedent of Joanne not going." "I'm not going, either," says my littlest sister Leona, from the balcony. Mom fumes at me. "Leona, can we talk about you separately." "Fine," she says. "But I'm not going." Mom tilts her head at me—not happy. I just shake my head..very slowly. "This is bullshit, what's been going on in this house. And you.." (I point to Dad.) "..are not in control anymore. You have shown yourself to be incompetent at controlling a household and being a father and at showing love so guess what, *I* am taking over control of this family and *you* will follow *my* rules from now on." "It doesn't work that way," my mom says. "Oh yeah?" I say. And I walk up the stairs yelling about hypocrisy and idiocy and paradigms of thinking about directions and how *fucking stupid* it is that lawyers are working on a Sunday—it shows what scum suckers they are. By the landing halfway up the stairs I smeared rhetorical shit all over the institutions of both church and law and by the time I reach the second floor where Joanne lies zen-like on the carpet doing her stretches, I have informed my parents that The New Rule of Law is here and anything they do, I will counter with even more drastic measures, and that there is nothing they can do which I cannot and will not outdo at the drop of a hat. "FROM NOW ON," I yell, "THE NUCLEAR OPTION IS ALWAYS ON THE TABLE." "Matthew, what is that supposed to mean?" "I'll show you." ### 52 So I go into my room, shut the door, and proceed to..well..show them the nuclear option. I break everything in the room, I break glass photo frames, I rip my precious black and white photos into unrecognizable shreds—photos I developed and printed myself, a painstaking process—I tore all my paperback books in half, even *The Once and Future King*, which is the thickest book I own. I destroy the metal mini blinds on my two windows, ripping them down, using the whole structure as some kind of accordion sword, beating the wooden frame of my bed, ripping my sheets to shreds, smashing the light fixture on the ceiling until it was shattered pieces on the floor, then broke the lightbulbs with what remained of the mini blind sword. Then I pushed everything off my dresser, a long, white, low dresser that had my boombox on it, my CDs, boxes of trinkets and necklaces, a can that contained Tuesday Walker's bra, a present from her. Boxes of letters from Anna Kiss. I beat it all to death with my sword and everyone downstairs was afraid to come upstairs. I imagined my parents huddled together at this common enemy but I doubt that was the case. My sisters went inside their rooms and closed their doors. I stopped hitting things with the sword and used my hands. I beat the door, the walls, pulled the metal cover off the heating/cooling vent. It was screwed into the wall but I ripped it out like it was held on with bubble gum. I broke my windows. And it was at that point that someone knocked on the door. "WHAT?!" Mom opened the door. I saw the look on her face—basically Ellen Burstyn's face from *The Exorcist*. She started crying. "What did we do?" She's sniffling. "Where did we go wrong?" "You two have no personal integrity." "Listen to yourself," my mom says. "You're yelling about hypocrisy but there's no hypocrisy. We left as soon as we got your page and I called you back. That's why I got this pager. It's not for work—it's for *you*. Your father and I *love* you. We want what's best for you." "Maybe you do but Dad doesn't." "Your dad.." She struggles. "..is doing the best he can." She take a step inside my room. "Did you do this?" She's holding my copy of *The Once and Future King* in her hands. "I guess so." I'm crying. "How do you rip a book in half?" "If you get mad enough it's easy." "What are you so mad about?" "The hypocrisy." "There isn't any hypocrisy." "You just can't see it, Mom—you're too close to it." "Well give me an example. Because I'm staring at a room that in the space of three minutes you've made unusable. And you're scaring everyone. Your sisters are in their rooms crying. Your *dad* is downstairs crying, asking him what he's done wrong as a parent." "He's done *everything* wrong! It's so obvious. Why can't you *get it*?" "What I do know is that you just destroyed all of your favorite things." "Things are nothing. You're too attached to things." "Me? *I'm* too attached to things? Who are you talking to?" "*Everyone.* Everyone. The whole world." "But we're not talking about *the whole world*, we're talking about *my son*, who seems angrier in this moment than anyone I've ever seen—except perhaps my father when he was drinking." "I don't drink." "I know. I know that about you. Are you on drugs? Is there something I should know about?" "I'm not on *drugs*, Mom." "Ok well I thought it was fair to ask." "Look I don't know. I don't know why I did what I just did. I am sad about it—yes—those are my pictures that I love of people that I love that took me *a long time* to set up and develop and print but I just felt I *had* to destroy them." "Are you angry at the people in the pictures?" "No. I'm JUST FUCKING ANGRY. I DON'T KNOW WHY, Mom. I have no idea." I'm bawling. My mom hugs me. "Just *breathe..ok? Just breathe.*" I'm crying so much I'm almost choking. I'm shaking all over my body. "It's ok," my mom says. "It's ok." Then she left. Closed my door behind her. I sat on the floor and wondered what the fuck was wrong with everyone. I thought that my response was appropriate—not too much..in fact not enough. I had to stop all the hypocrisy and punish my dad psychologically and I was the one to do it because *I had nothing to lose*. All these other people—people at school, people at church, my mom, my dad—they had things to lose: jobs, money, houses, children, husbands, wives. But I had nothing, and someone who has nothing can do anything..or so my wisdom ran at that time. *I* was on top, of at least Dad. I had his number. He could never fuck with me again. There's this line from *Casino* that I like: > *No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And if you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead.* For a while that was a pretty good summary of my relationship with my father. And my bosses I met along my twelve-year trip through the software engineering world. Basically people fucked with me and I fucked them harder. I had nothing to lose. These people who fucked with me at work—they wanted to keep their jobs. I didn't give a fuck about losing my job. I wanted to lose my job. The nuclear option was *always* on the table. If someone revealed a secret I had confided in them to the boss, I'd reveal a bigger secret that they had confided in me to the boss. If my boss fucked with me, I'd go directly over his head, make friends with a vice president, and pretty soon my boss was doing anything I told him to, because I was telling his boss what to tell him to do. I scared people. I negotiated the biggest raises anyone had ever negotiated by making myself indispensable, then showing that to the hiring manager in the form of two lists, side by side: a list of the things they hired me to do (short list) and a list of all the things I was actually doing for them since they hired me (long list). Then I let them know that I didn't give a fuck about having a "career" at their company, that to me, even Mead Research or Anthem health care was a dead-end job, that I wasn't learning anything new by working there and I was only there because I personally liked them and I was doing them a favor. They gave me the raises I asked for. I did the same thing in relationships, too. One girlfriend said I always put the break-up option on the table when we had fights. I said I didn't want to have constant fights with my girlfriend, and that's why the break-up option was on the table. I don't need you. You wake me up straddling me, screaming at me about some shit your friend told you about me that isn't even true..I'll cut you off like a five-dollar fishing lure stuck in the weeds. Friend is disloyal? Let 'em know this is the last time we'll ever speak. And make it so. That's the nuclear option. ### 53 "Do you have a lot of friends?" says Dr. Joseph. I smile. "No, but the ones I do have are awesome." "I bet." "Did your parents take you to see a psychiatrist?" "No." "Why not?" "I don't think they knew that was necessary. If it was nowadays, they probably would have taken me to the hospital, I probably would have ended up in a psych ward, been diagnosed as having bipolar, and the next ten years might have gone a lot differently for me." "Why do you say ten years?" "I was seventeen then, I was twenty-seven when I was first diagnosed with bipolar. I just didn't know. I lived most of my professional life trying to make something work that was never going to work. The technical work was easy—too easy, I was bored. But my personality and especially my personality as affected by my mental illness..was never going to fit into work teams at any software corporation." "Because..?" "Because people who succeed in those corporations are tools." "I don't think I understand the the sense in which you're using that word." "A *tool*? Is a person whose most-developed skill is software engineering..who remains an *idiot* at software engineering. And he's proud of the level at which he operates. Companies don't mind hiring and retaining people like this because *it's not really important that the entire team is functional*. A few people do the work for the whole. That's how it's worked everywhere I've worked. Software gets made *despite* the fact that eighty percent of the developers couldn't find their pee hole with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. These are people who think that reading geek magazines like *Slashdot* every morning will make them smarter—which it will not. They geek out over new computer programming languages that had no business being *invented* in the first place! Basically like a horse with blinders on—you know, an asshole who walks around with his hands in his pockets and his head watching the carpet directly in front of his feet for lost paperclips and shit—a tool." "A tool." "Yeah, like a useless person." "Who thinks they're useful." "Exactly." "Were there other incidents where your dad abused you?" "Yes there were." I say it tensely. "Will you tell me about them?" "Yes. Do you want the Reader's Digest version or the Leo Tolstoy version." "Leo Tolstoy, if you don't mind." "Sure, but I'm gonna take you up on that cup of coffee, if you'll allow it." "I'll get it for you." Dr. Joseph leaves me in the tiny interview room. I think of how long if I've had this disease, and how I *forgot about it* after I got out of a *psychiatric hospital* in LA. I mean I just took my Lamictal and went back to work. My emergency insurance from the hospital ran out, I stopped taking my medicine because I could no longer get it with the way health care was back then, I saw a psychiatrist who was supposed to brilliant (and seemed pretty brilliant to me) who told me I was on the cusp of having bipolar disorder and that the "geniuses" (said sarcastically) at the psych hospital I had just come from were people he went to school with and they didn't know shit *about* shit and he gave me some Lexapro samples and told me I sounded perfectly fine and that "true bipolar" was the guy running naked down the Santa Monica pier shouting obscenities. In retrospect, that psychiatrist probably wasn't as brilliant as I thought. He presented well, though, and I was hungry for insight. Anyway how could I forget? How could I then go through five or six more years of life before I ended up in another psych ward (always a surprise to me!) and Dr. Joseph re-diagnosed me with bipolar disorder? And even *then* I didn't take it seriously! No, *worse* things were going to have to happen to me before I entered my current period where I know that I have to be aware of that disease, and others, every single day. Dr. Joseph came back with two coffees and closed the door. She placed both coffees in front of me. "Aren't you having one?" She shook her head. "I want to go back to the showers with your dad, him dancing around in his underwear in front of your mother's sisters, stuff like that. I want you to close your eyes and remember anything sex related that might have happened." "Between me and him?" "Between you and anyone. Between him and anyone. Between him and your sisters, maybe?" I cringed when she said this last. Made an open-mouthed expression like I was in a beauty pageant and had the Vaseline on my teeth but the only shape I could make was the shape a wolf makes before it eats you. I closed my eyes. And I did remember something. It was the end-hall closet in our house in Dallas. Either something had happened in there, or something was kept in there, and I was blocking out whatever it was. I had been going deeper and deeper into this closet all my life, but I could never get to the back. It was like the wardrobe in *The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe* except in this closet was no Narnia—only darkness, shoe polish, and the smell of leather. And as I went on about the secrets and fears and hidden things in the end-hall closet, I felt more *myself* than I had in year over year over year, since my first hospitalization, and it was because I was talking to a psychiatrist. I have complex things in my brain—a complex psychology. I need a psychiatrist like an addict needs a dealer—it's like I can't fully be myself without actively being the patient in a doctor-patient relationship. The psychiatrist helps define my identity the same way a dealer defines an addict's. There's a sense in which I can't *be* without a doctor, or a hospital—just like a novelist has readers, I have neurologists, psychiatrists, counsellors. "You know what I do remember?" "What?" "Bipolar isn't just high and low, it's fast and slow, it's clear and foggy, it's sharp and dull. They call it a mood disorder but it's not exactly just moods—it's all these other qualities, too." "I know." She touches my knee. "We're gonna get you some help, ok?" ### 54 Pretty quick I requested a room of my own because the dude in my three-person room was annoying the shit out of me with his 15-year-old self constantly talking about drugs and getting high and I guess I realized on day one or day two that I was there to recover. I didn't want to smoke crack again. I wanted to understand the conditions that occurred together to make me susceptible to smoking crack. I decided that was a level of crazy I didn't want to be. In one of our academic lectures on addiction, the teacher said something I'd heard before in NA: that breaking out of addiction is harder for smart people. Because smart people think they can solve their addiction by thinking. Why wouldn't we? We solved every other damn problem that way. But you can't think up a solution to the problem *how can I use drugs successfully?* because for some of us, there is no answer to that problem. We can't. We're addicts. That's what it means. We can't use successfully. There is no brilliant solution, no way to think your way through it. You just can't use. Which to a non-addict sounds *so* easy. To them they can't understand why you'd ever smoke crack in the first place. They don't understand that where they've learned ways to deal with universal problems like stress, the addict *uses* drugs to address those problems. Unsuccessfully, but hey, it's the best we've got. We didn't learn, growing up, how to handle stress in healthy ways. Or we did, but then we came across drugs and we learned a new way, a seductive, destructive way—but a way nonetheless. So I got out of that room with the insincere 15-year-old and I got my own room and I went to every group and met every person in there and I discovered that the ones who went to group were all sincere about their recovery. And I heard some of the saddest stories of my life in there—saw some of the saddest stories—people destroying their lives with alcohol and every other kind of drug. The worst was the old people. They didn't have much longer to turn around the ship, you know? And they had done what I had been doing—drinking and drugging—their whole lives. Except their whole life was 80 years. That was the thing: meeting those old people who were addicted to drugs their whole life, I mean if you have half a brain you have the same realization as everybody else in there..which is..if I don't make a change *now* I'm gonna end up like that guy. Eighty years old sneaks up pretty fast. And every one of those 80-year-olds was once a 33-year-old who could have stopped then. And didn't, and didn't, and didn't for another 50 years. - - - - I saw someone from my AA group at the Refuge. She worked there in the cafeteria and when she saw me, she said she was glad to see me and that I was in the right place. She even broke the rules and came out from behind the back of the serving area and gave me a hug—this old, frail, recovering alcoholic who would eventually fall and break her hip and lose that job at the Refuge, which job she always said she was so thankful for in our meetings. And that felt like home, like the small world, for this woman I knew and had struggled with in AA, both to stay clean—for her to give me a hug was meaningful—her hug was special. It wasn't all doom and gloom. I got to know each one of the staff by name, and they were so goddamn helpful it makes me cry thinking of it now. Here were are, a bunch of people with serious substance-abuse problems, people who had made all the *bad, anti-society* decisions in our fucked-up lived, and the Tyler 1 staff treated us with respect, with care..I mean they treated us like human beings, which was pretty amazing because, as substance abusers, we didn't even treat ourselves that well. And my fellow recovering addicts, I loved. I loved them for the same reason soldiers love each other. We were in a deadly situation and we were trying to help each other survive. Do you get that? A conversation you have with a fellow addict might contain the one thing you needed to hear to stop sticking a needle in your vein. People think of addicts as worthless, as losers—but we're real people with value just like everybody else, just gripped by an enemy that will take you to places, psychologically, that most people don't return from. It's a battle, alright. There's that Nietzsche quote I love so much: "Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster." Well, that's the problem with drugs. Trying to do drugs successfully is like battling with this type of monster. Not only can't you beat it, but in the process of battling it, it turns *you* into a monster. It turns you from a civilized person into someone who would steal or kill for drugs. That's turning you into a monster. It's turning you into someone who would lie to your family and friends about how much you're using. That's turning you into a monster. *That's* why drugs are fucked up. You don't fight them and win. You don't even get to fight them and *lose* with your dignity intact. No, battle with that monster and it'll do something far worse than let you win or lose: *it will turn you into a monster*. That's some tricky shit. - - - - After four days one of the nurses, Jack, came to me. He said: "Matthew." "Yes?" "This is sad news and a little bit of hard news but your insurance company won't pay for any more days of detox for you. We used hardly any Librium with you on the first day, and you've never shown any symptoms of alcohol withdrawal..which is good because it means you're healthy..but it's bad because it means we're going to have to plan on sending you back into the bad old world..like..tomorrow morning." "Ok." "Do you feel ok with this?" "Well, I have mixed feelings about it." "Do you feel like you can leave without using?" "Yes. I just wish I could have gotten some more of the classes here." "Do you want, we can do somewhere and talk about it." "No, Jack, thank you—but I'm ok. I'll be ok." "Ok, you know where to find me. I'm sorry. We're at the insurance companies' mercy more than we'd like to be." "I understand." "But be glad. You're fully detoxed! You are a clean man!" I smiled. That was a good thing. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (1)** > > Patient Admitted August 30, 2011—Discharged September 03, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is a 33-year-old single male who was working as a computer software engineer but recently lost his job *[was fired for refusing to perform job duties which included stealing Adobe software]*. He is living in Brattleboro, Vermont alone. He recently moved to Vermont from California in January of 2011 *[I omitted the move to Tucson and my stay at my mom's house for simplicity—you don't want these admission interviews to last too long]*. He also works as a freelance writer *[Heh. An unpublished novelist isn't exactly the same thing as a freelance writer, but whatever, admissions nurse, whatever]*. > > **Chief Complaint** > > "I'm here now because after seven weeks of being sober I started drinking again 10 days ago. Then a couple of nights ago I used crack cocaine." *[No,]* last night *I used crack cocaine. It's 8am now. Two hours ago I was smoking crack out of a glass pipe in some strangers' apartment and if I wasn't high on crack* right now *I wouldn't be in this hospital, seeking your help.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > This is the patient's first Brattleboro Refuge and second lifetime admission. He was last admitted in the city of Los Angeles in 2008 for his depression *[No, for suicidal ideation with a plan—I called a suicide hotline, they told me to call 911, police showed up at my motherfucking house]*. He states at that time they diagnosed him with bipolar affective disorder though he does not give strong symptoms of mania *[doesn't mean I don't have bipolar, bitch!]*. He has had trials of Depakote which he stated gave him a headache *[No, it gave me splitting headaches that made me inoperable]* and he also had a trial of Lamictal which he was on for two months and feels like this was helpful for him. It was unclear as to why this was discontinued *[It was discontinued because the emergency health insurance they gave me at the hospital expired, my employer did not provide health insurance, and Kaiser Permanente, the local hospital, wouldn't allow me to purchase coverage due to my now having the pre-existing condition of bipolar disorder—hence the Lamictal was discontinued]*. He states he has a history of suicidal ideation although only when he is drinking. He denies having any plan. He has an AA sponsor currently *[who is a pervert Christian douchebag]* and has used AA as a resource for his sobriety. Patient has recently started seeing Eve Fox at Pastoral Counseling in Brattleboro. > > **Substance Abuse History** > > He has a history of IV drug use. He has a history of crack cocaine "a lot" *[No, not a lot, like three times bitch! This is very important to get right—a lawyer who I later asked to represent me for a disability claim declined to take my case because of this sentence in my medical records. "With this much drug use," she said, "a judge will never approve you." We still don't understand, as a culture, that drug abuse is a symptom of bipolar disorder—denying help to a bipolar person due to their drug use is dangerous and costly. They think: Oh, this person doesn't have a mental disability, they're just a drug addict. It's not that simple—anyway]*. Recently he has binged but is not using it regularly. He has a history of opiate use only recreationally and says he has never been dependent on this substance. He started drinking alcohol at the age of 23 and that for the last 10 days he has had a couple of bottles of wine and hard liquor daily. He was sober for seven weeks prior to this recent relapse though he does have a history of 11 months of sobriety. > > **Medical History** > > Recurrent kidney infections *[actually, kidney stones—quite different from a kidney infection]*. > > **Family Psychiatric History** > > A paternal cousin with alcoholism and a sister with alcoholism. A distant cousin on the maternal side suicided. > > **Laboratory of Admission** > > Urine drug screen was positive for amphetamines and cocaine *[When Dr. Joseph mentioned this to me in our first interview I was like: "Uh..yeah..oh yeah!..while we were smoking crack I snorted an Adderall." (No big deal.) "I wasn't trying to hide that from you all by not mentioning to the admitting nurse, I just didn't even think about it..I mean, it's Adderall, pshftt"]*. > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > Patient was admitted to Tyler 1 the dual diagnosis substance abuse treatment unit for alcohol dependence, cocaine abuse and mood disorder NOS *[Not Otherwise Specified—means they have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you]*. He was placed on the alcohol detoxification protocol and used minimal Librium during the first day of his stay *[You can die from alcohol withdrawal—Librium reduces those chances]*. No further withdrawal symptoms were noted warranting use of medications *[I felt like Lindsay Lohan—her doctors declared her not an addict because she didn't have any withdrawal symptoms—by that logic I'm not an addict, either]*. Patient was started on Lamictal at 25 mg daily while an inpatient and increased to 50 mg at discharge to address mood disorder. He denied suicidal ideation throughout his stay. Resources in the community were established with an outpatient psychiatrist *[The appointment was a month away—I never made it to that appointment or ever met that psychiatrist as my situation was to worsen before then. That appointment was intended for someone who could survive for a month on his own to keep a date with an outpatient psychiatrist—I heard she was excellent, by the way—but I wasn't that patient]*. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Alcohol Dependence. Alcohol Withdrawal. Cocaine Abuse. Mood Disorder NOS. Recent Kidney Stones. > > **GAF on Admission:** 28. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 50. GAF is the Global Assessment of Functioning of a patient. It's a range from 1 to 100. It reflects a doctor's opinion of how well a patient is able to meet the challenges of life—how adaptive the patient is to this world. My 28 on admission means, by the book, that my "Behavior is considerably influenced by delusions or hallucinations or serious impairment, in communication or judgment (eg, sometimes incoherent, acts grossly inappropriately, suicidal preoccupation) or inability to function in almost all areas (eg, stays in bed all day, no job, home, or friends)." My 50 on discharge means, by the book, that I have "Serious symptoms (eg, suicidal ideation, severe obsessional rituals, frequent shoplifting) or any serious impairment in social, occupational, or school functioning (eg, no friends, unable to keep a job, cannot work)." I suspect there is a relationship between the GAF on Discharge, the hospital's insurance coverage, and the hospital's willingness to release a patient whose GAF is below a certain number—but I'm just guessing. > **Condition on Discharge:** Fair. > > **Prognosis:** Fair. They set me up with an outpatient group therapy program called Starting Now. It was houses in one of the Refuge buildings. A nurse does my final paperwork, unlocks the locked door which has been keeping me here for the last four days. I am no longer in detox. I am no longer in rehab. I am free to drink, or eat, or do whatever I want. ### 55 I walked out of Tyler 1, checked my bank account, which had one dollar in it, then I went to the church I used to volunteer at and begged their secretary for food. "Um, yes, hi, I just got out of the Refuge and I don't have any food or money until I get my next unemployment check, which could be two weeks or more, and.." I start crying at this point. "..I just need some food to make it to the next time I get paid, so is there anything you can do for me, some cans or anything?" This secretary led me around the kitchen—which used to be where I went to get extra food on the sly to give to extra-hungry homeless people when I worked at the shelter—and she gave me plastic bags and loaded me up with about four of them full of food, so heavy I could hardly carry them back to the house. "Do you know where the free meals are around town?" "I used to have a list, but I forgot," I say. She writes them down for me, one free meal per day, at various locations around Brattleboro—what an organized town. "Do you know about the Drop In Center?" "Oh yes, I've been there before—I forgot. I should have gone there instead." "It's ok, but they have food, too. If you run out before you get your check, go there, ok?" "Ok," I said, sobbing. I cried the whole time she was handing me stuff. That's the first time I ever straight-up *begged* someone for food. I left and asked her name again—which of course I forgot—and in my fantasy world I was going to become a millionaire and buy back their Tiffany window and volunteer at the church every day and do something special for the actual woman who gave me food when I was hungry. In reality, I never did shit for them. I carried the heavy bags of food up the hill. There was a guy sitting with a suitcase on the stoop of a building and when I passed him he said: "Don't worry about me. I'm just waiting for the homeless shelter to open up so I can stay there—my aunt couldn't keep me anymore." "Good luck," I said, and he repeated what he'd said about the homeless shelter. (He was fine, sitting on a suitcase with all his things, on a street corner—just needed the homeless shelter to open up.) He's totally fine. Don't worry. - - - - I snuck into the house on High Street, went upstairs quietly so no one would ask me where I'd been. But Krystal, the ho, came upstairs and knocked on my door. I was in the kitchen putting away my free food but I went to the door. "There you are!" she says all cheerful. "Hey." "We haven't seen you around in a while!" "Krystal, I'm kind of putting away the groceries right now." "Oh. Can I come in? I'll help you if you want!" I knew if Krystal came in we would end up fucking. "Thank you, but no, I'm fine." "Ok, well me and Tooler and Issa were just worried about you. What happened with your job?" "What do you mean?" "Well, you obviously haven't been going." "I got fired." "You got fired? For what?" "It's a long story." "I have time," she says. She's so sweet and I'm such an asshole. "That's very nice, thank you, Krystal, but..I'm a little overdone right now..with life..in general..so." Then I just close the door in her face. Slowly, firmly, close the door in this human being's face. I can still hear her voice through the wood. "We're having cow heart tonight!" Krystal shouts. "Tooler said you're invited. She said she wants to see you." "I doubt that," I say, and I don't think Krystal can hear me. But Krystal, saddened, says, "No, she really does." I go through a mini-recap in my own mind of "what my life is"..fucking drug addict loser who can't keep a job. Failed writer. Useless human being—hater of and pariah to society. To me, my life isn't a life where I can get invited to dinner to eat cow heart with some friends and sit alongside them as an equal and deserve to have fun just like they're having fun. I don't deserve happiness. I can't imagine myself as anything but an energy suck, a stumbling block and a burden and a monster who is always, ever, just about to ruin the moment. You're about to have a simple dinner of cow heart and enjoy an odd set of company totally blissfully—I'm getting out of detox after my crack smoking and having no money cause I spent it all on crack and going to a church to beg for food and crying the whole time while they were giving it to me—*that's* my life. Something about *a kingdom of isolation*, some future lyric to a musical that hasn't been written yet..the Ice Queen from *The Player*—archetypes of banishment and isolation, the person who feels most alone in a room full of fools. I wish I had company tonight, and it's right downstairs, three women of various qualities, including the unparalleled Tooler whose feelings I hurt by saying the apartment smelled like cat shit and beating her to the punch on moving to the third floor (and not telling her about it). I do this all the time—not just to Tooler. I'm with someone (friend, girlfriend, employer, brother, son, whatever), and they think we're doing something together, they think we have some kind of connection, and then they find out by *nasty surprise!* that I am not with them—not because *I don't want to be*, because I *can't*, I just *can't feel that way* about another person anymore. I'm closed, off, I'm not open. But if I ever eat cow heart again, Tooler, it will be with you. - - - - I hear Krystal descend the stairs and I grab my laptop. I write my family this email: > **From:** Matthew > > **To:** Joanne, Leona, Sharon, Van > > **Subject:** I need support > > Family, > > Last week I checked myself into a hospital to get help with alcohol and drug abuse, and bipolar disorder. I'm out now; I didn't have any phone numbers on me or I would have called you. > > I need your support. I don't need you to learn as much as I have been, recently, about the diseases of substance abuse and bipolar disorder; I don't need prayers, gossip, judgment, or advice. > > What I do need is contact. Since our family is not in one place that I can go to, I need you, I am asking you, all, to call me, sometimes, maybe once a week, and just talk to me. This will make a huge difference in my ability to feel ok in life, to not feel alone, and to feel like I'm connected to some sort of family or community. > > Thank you, > > Matthew My mom writes back: > My dear son, > > No judgment at all here, just so thankful that you did what you needed to do for yourself. > > I love you, > > MOM Mom's email, her calls, were precious to me. She is the only one who called me or emailed me or ever mentioned this hospitalization in future conversations. No one else even responded to my email. And maybe it was because they were scared. And maybe it was because they didn't know what to say. But Jesus *Christ*, have the *strength* to help someone out who has fallen to the ground and is reaching up for your hand. - - - - And sometime that day, getting out of detox, I find this journal entry in my computer: > Driving around Brattleboro, I feel blessed. Being on the mountain, the same. I feel fortunate to be here, to be alive, to be able to be alive here. I can't predict the future and I can't control anything in the world but me, but I am opting for hope, now, that things will be wonderful for me. That I will not be my own downfall, but that I will live healthy and happy and published and rich, and that I will get healthcare and a car and maybe even love someone again. I would love for life to go amazing for me, for me to be someone who gets to be truly happy, fully happy, deeply happy..who gets to live large. > > And part of what I hope is that writing books can be my way of being rich..that I do continue to write things that people love, and that they love more and more, such that I have a bounty. That is motivation to write, alongside the idea of creation and exploration of human nature..the idea that when I write, I am writing something that will bring me further bounty because of the love it inspires in someone else..in many many many someone elses. > > With alcohol, it just has to fall away. I'm not going to do clean dates, I'm not going back to NA/AA. I'm just going to be oblivious to it as an option, given that it doesn't tend to improve my state..and so, based on that same criteria for choosing relationships (the criteria that you only spend time with people whose company you enjoy as much as or more than your own)..based on that criteria, alcohol is less useful to me now than it ever has been before. > > Write books that people love to read. Make them happy. Make myself rich. Hike. Eat. Love. Meditate. Create new things: books, movies, and then my game/world. Maybe a restaurant or two for fun, if/when I'm able to do that comfortably. > > Believe that what I have written, and what I write next, will be the ways that I get to live in Brattleboro..that that creativity and the effort of love that I give to my writing, to my stories, will give me bounty to enjoy this place, and the places that I love, in this world. Oh god, oh universe, oh everything, how far I fall, and fall, and fall, and continue to fall. ### 56 There was a woman Laura, who I saw at almost every AA or NA meeting I went to, was in a wheelchair and wore wheelchair gloves. I was always friendly with her and she was a good person to talk to. Then one day I saw her while I was sitting outside the Metro on the steps and I had come out to smoke and enjoy and sun and I felt guilty that she was seeing me outside a bar, and normally I would never explain myself to someone, but I thought with all the 12-step meetings we'd been to, she deserved an explanation. "I'm just drinking water," I said. It was true, I was hanging out at the new Metro just drinking water—but even then, I knew I was going to drink again, even after detox I would relapse again on alcohol, maybe even that day at Metro. Things like that kept happening. I saw the Refuge meditation guru, Drew, at a show at Metro again I felt like I had to explain to him that I was only drinking water, even though I was sitting at the bar, just so he wouldn't think I relapsed. We both enjoyed the music and he took my seat at the bar after I left not long after talking with Drew because I didn't want to drink and I knew the longer I sat at that bar the greater chance I would order a drink. For me, part of AA and the Refuge outpatient programs wasn't just not drinking, it was feeling I had to prove to all these sober people and program administrators that I wan't drinking, which was a burden to me, not completely placed upon myself—I mean they were piss testing us. So I'm sober, I'm over my crack excursion, I'm doing Starting Now at the Refuge every evening and my bartenders know I'm sober and then I'm crossing Elliot Street and Walsh, headed into Whit's, shouts at me across the street saying: "YO! TEMPLE!! My birthday gathering..you know, as in I'm going to be a year older?" "Right, I'm with you so far." "We'll be at kips *to*morrow and DAY DRINKERS ARE REQUIRED TO ATTEND." Meaning she expected me and Mike to be there. She goes into Kip's with a boyfriend. I never went to her party because of my not drinking at the time and I knew if I was around Walsh I would drink—I would do anything she wanted me to. Then, some days after her birthday, I saw her and her same boyfriend and she was like: "Why weren't you there?" I looked at the guy she was with. Short, short hair, looked like a church boy. "Why I wasn't there," I said. "I'm not drinking right now, Walsh." She made an open-mouthed, what the fuck-type expression, she didn't know how to process this information. She was so confused she didn't even ask why. "Alright. I guess I'll see you around then." "Yeah, I'll see you around." The two of them turn and go in the direction of her apartment. - - - - Ok. Let me tell you about this outpatient substance abuse program goofily named Starting Now. It was at the Refuge in the evenings. This is late summer. Sometimes when I ride my bike down there it's warm, sometimes it's becoming the cold of winter, sometimes it's raining so hard I just walk my bike back in the dark, after the program ends, up the hill, through town, then up the High Street hill back to the house. The program is from six to ten, four nights a week, with no food or drink allowed, which really sucks if you're somebody like me who needs to each and drink little bits throughout the day to maintain my sugars. I mean it's part of my mood management that I *have* figured out, and my mental health program is interfering with my mental health. I explained this to Drew and the other program letters and they were like: Refer to rule a) NO FOOD OR DRINK. Ok, whatever. I thought we were all adults but I guess not. They gave me tons of personal history forms to fill out and some of my answers qualified me for a joint Princeton-Refuge study on PTSD. Having carried around almost unbearable guilt for all these years about doing ecstasy with my girlfriend Rebecca and her dying and me living, I guess they thought that I was still feeling PTSD effects from that. The PTSD study was done by the perfectly professional, sympathetic, sexy/cute but always right and proper Cleo. I wanted to fuck Cleo, for her to be my mate: the perfectly sane with the perfectly crazy. I would just get up from my chair where the two of us sat in a closed-door room, say, "I know this will disqualify me from the program but," and then touch her tit in the naughtiest, freakiest way, thumbing her nipple and pulling her onto the floor all in one motion. She wore this perfectly pressed white blouse that I wanted so bad to see wrinkled on the floor. But I didn't do that. I answered a million questions about PTSD experiences and took sixty dollars from her while I fucking smelled her like a serial killer. One night instead of all strangers I saw Matt Mattson's mom at Starting Now! It took us both a while to figure out who the other one was, then we realized we had done drugs together at her house..when we realized this we looked at each other and laughed. I guess she wanted to quit, too. After the program she drove me downtown where I had last locked my bike, and that was the last time she went to Starting Now. Maybe it just wasn't for her. Maybe seeing me there was fucking with her anonymity. Either way she split and decided to get clean on her own..or went back to using. I had a week between when I got out of detox and when I was due at Starting Now, so I had time to drink and still leave three days for the alcohol to leave my body before I went to the outpatient program that did piss tests. I was always doing this. Piss tests during the outpatient program were always known, so for a while I drank during the days where I knew I had at least three days before a piss test. I was trying to get sober. Sometimes I made it a whole week. Sometimes I drank on Thursday night, knowing that all the alcohol would leave my body in 72 hours—I knew this, of course, because they taught me this at Starting Now. The classes at Starting Now were completely useless. If I had to pick an actual class that I liked more than all the rest, I would say, strangely, the diet class. The teacher's name was Paula. She was wacky like an 80s dance teacher. Or maybe like an 80s pop star, like Tiffany, with crimped hair and pink leg warmers. Tiffany always makes me want to drink cognac. Anyway. This is the woman who in the first class I took with her said, "Does anyone want to hear my five-second poop talk?" We all looked around the room at each other and no one said anything. Paula goes: "Ok, here it is: Munchkins bad, crawlers good." She smiles. "That was it," she says, and moves on to the rest of her material. I talked for at least twenty minutes with the nutritionist after class. There are two things I remember from her class: This thing about calories versus calories from fat and the acceptable ratio between the two. And her poop talk. She has us all captive in this Starting Now classroom and she says, "Do you want to hear my ten-second poop talk? Yeah? Yeah? Anyone?" I mean what could we say? We *had* to listen to her poop talk. It was more like a two-second poop talk, but like any good wisdom, it's packaged in a way that's impossible to forget! - - - - I hated small group. I hated listening to other people share. I thought it was pointless for me to share..and I'm a small group kind of guy. I used to love camp and church study groups when I was a teen. I even worked as a peer leader at a national Christian youth conference. I *led* fucking small groups. But in this group I just wanted to jump across the circle and choke whoever was speaking. That's not a metaphor or some kind of literary device. *I wanted to jump across the circle and choke whoever was speaking.* It did occur to me that, unlike some people there, I wasn't being required by a court to attend these meetings, and many, many times I almost walked out. *I'm 33 years old, I'm paying to be here, just like film school, I can walk out any time I want. Nothing is holding me here but me.* That's how my thoughts ran much of the time. I try to think of the very first small group I was ever in, and I think I get it. When I was in the seventh grade, my homeroom teacher got to pick five students from the class to attend a once-weekly stress-relief group. It was like stress management techniques. The teacher picked me, Joseph Pollard, Lindsay Krey, and two other people I don't remember. On Friday morning we got to skip homeroom and part of our first class to go to a little room off the side of the library. It was full of old, broken overhead projectors and film projectors and the librarian had cleared out a space and set up six chairs with no desk part to them—just regular chairs for sitting. The person who ran the group was college aged and I don't know if her knowledge and kindness or her brown hair and symmetrical face were what attracted me most, but I liked her in a multidimensional way. She started by acknowledging that Masterman was a difficult school (it was a school for smart kids) and how pressure from our parents or our teachers or even pressure from within ourselves could cause us stress, and she said she was there to teach us methods we could use anywhere—on the bus, in our classrooms, in our beds at night—to relieve stress. And that is what she did. She taught us progressive clenching/releasing relaxation, where you start with your feet and clench every part of your body as hard as you can, then relax it as much as you can. She taught us thought exercises kind of like a precursor to Anthony Robbins, where we could use funny symbols in our brain to represent something scary, how we could learn to be more realistic about the impact of negative situations—basically asking ourselves *What's the worst that could happen if I fail this test? If my father hits me. If I don't live up to my own expectations.* The class was very helpful, it didn't last for more than about ten weeks, and I liked it because of the stress exercises which were new to me and also I liked it because, when we didn't have our eyes closed, I got to stare at Lindsay Krey (who I had a crush on) and I got to look at this teacher of ours who I had a much deeper kind of crush on. I liked being in a small group of five and I felt special for having been picked to be in that small group of five. My thinking about *why* we were picked didn't go very deep. I just had a vague idea that we were the five most special kids in the class and by being special and smart we had earned the right to be in this special program. But that didn't make sense. Joseph Pollard, though he was one of my closest friends, was not exceptionally smart and he was extremely undisciplined—the next year he wasn't even in Masterman, he was in a military academy at his parents' orders. I must have been an adult looking back on that experience before I realized why Mrs Tedesco chose that particular set of five children for a stress management class—it was likely because we were the most high strung, stressed out, neurotic people she could identify. When I first went to the Refuge, I was thirty-three. I didn't know what the word *anxiety* meant. The first day I was in Tyler 2, head nurse Michelle handed me a book called *The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook*. I was like: *I don't have anxiety. I'm suicidal.* Michelle said: *Talk to your doctor.* But apparently I had anxiety by the seventh grade. And I probably had it a lot earlier than that. In my thirties, I told my mom I had realized that I had a lot of anger and that I thought I might have had it for a long time. She said: "You've been angry your whole life." Not that anger is the only emotion I've been feeling my whole life, but that since her earliest memories of me, even as an infant, I've been mad. Mad at my father. Mad at her, because she didn't understand what I was saying. Even the story of my first word: I was lying on the floor pointing under my crib saying, "Ball! Ball!" and for a long time my mom said, "What are you saying? There's no ball under there." She didn't even think I knew what a ball was, so she assumed I was just making some random sound that just happened to sound exactly like *ball*. I got angry and she finally looked under the crib, and "Lo and behold, your favorite ball that you loved to play with, had rolled under your crib, and you were asking me to get it for you, and I was standing there getting frustrated with you because I thought that what you said wasn't making any sense. But it made perfect sense! You were saying 'ball!!' " And, my mother says, "I learned something that day. I learned two things. And that is that when someone is saying something that you think is nonsense—even though *it may be* nonsense—you can *never, ever* assume that it is. I took a huge step as a mother that day." "What step?" "Humility," my mother says, with wet eyes but she's laughing. "That's a good general lesson. But the other thing I learned, and this is true about your sisters but it may be especially true of you..is that..and this is a hard lesson to learn as a parent, but..I learned about you something that I don't think your father ever has, and that is that *your kid may be smarter than you*. Even with twenty years of life experience on you, that ball situation, as silly as it may seem, has been one of the defining moments of my life. I can't assume, even of a one-year-old, that I know more than someone. Age is tricky like that, and it hurts. When you're a sixty-something-year-old pastor with multiple degrees, *many* varied life experiences, and I would like to think I've picked up a thing or two along the way, but I don't know when a twenty-year-old who is *editing my article* for publication on the web, is going to *offer me advice* on what I have written..and that *I won't disagree* with what she said!" "I know, Mom. I know. I've felt that in AA and NA. I was in this meditation meeting in Tucson and I was thirty, thirty-one, and this woman shared, who got clean when she was seventeen, and now she's twenty-two or twenty-four or something—she couldn't have been older than twenty-five—and she says one of the wisest things I've ever heard, and I'm just sitting there, with this *humility*—like you mentioned—at the *golden* drops of wisdom coming out of this young mother's mouth. I had to re-evaluate my whole world the night that woman spoke, just like you said..I mean wisdom could come from a motherfucking *rock* if you listen hard enough." "What was the piece of wisdom she shared?" "That whatever you're feeling right now, you're feeling *because that is what you chose to feel*." "Wow." "Yeah. Yeah. Aside from some technical difficulties related to people with mental illness, that's one of the most profound things I've heard. I think it's a *very* hard thing to realize, because admitting that that statement is true involves *taking responsibility* for our own emotions and our own minds, admitting we are not always *reactive* but sometimes *proactive* and that the wiser we are, the more proactive we are likely to be about our own mental state..which is something I think generally people aren't all that in touch with." This is the kind of conversation me and my mother have. I love her. - - - - (As I write this, Mom just said, "What are we gonna do tomorrow?" and I said "Blow up the house?" It's some kind of serendipity but this is a good example of the nihilistic, depressed, gave-up things that I was saying in the Starting Now group meeting that caused the meditation master, Drew, to ask me to see his teaching partner, Lisa, the counsellor who suggested that the things I was saying in group were what they called "suicidal ideation" and asked me how I might feel about spending some time inpatient.) So yeah, not only was I hating small group and wanting to kill the other people in group with my bare hands, but this one trip to the Refuge for group, the Starting Now workers finally fucking caught on to this—they thought I was saying suicidal things in small group. Which I think is a little extreme..I have no idea what I said in those groups..all I know is I didn't say anything mean to anyone else but I really didn't give a shit about anything and I felt nothing satisfying, especially that group, and I'm sure I raised questions about the usefulness of me being there. I mean the guy sitting next to me..what's wrong with him? He had six drinks, he got a DUI—but look at him, he's perfectly happy, he's willing to do his classes so he can get his license back, get back to his girlfriend and his drinking and his pointless fucking life. When asked for a few words to describe how he felt, over a period of weeks being in class with this mentally resilient construction worker, he only ever answered one word to describe his feelings: "strong." The last night I went to that meeting, the night the facilitators pulled me aside to suggest I might be suicidal and inpatient care might be appropriate for me, I might have responded to this construction worker. I might have said said something like: "Strong isn't a feeling." "Matthew, it's Chris's turn and he can answer however he wants." "Ok, well, I'm just saying, we're talking about issues of the mind and Chris—no offense, you know I like you and you and I agree on lots of things and I support you in your recovery and all that, but you don't seem to be answering the question that's being asked of you. You feel 'strong.' Like what? Your biceps feel strong?" "Yeah," he said, and he rolled up one sleeve and flexed a bicep." "You got a pair of guns there, no doubt, my brotha, but I don't even think you need to be in this class. Based on what you've shared, you're not an alcoholic or drug addict, you're not mentally ill according to the DSM..I don't even think you should be here." "I agree," Chris says. "Wanna wrestle?" I say. "Sure," Chris says. "Just be sure you break my neck at the end," I say. Chris and I hugged and wished each other the best at the end of the meeting—it was his last, he had graduated to return to being a chronic drunk-driving citizen again—but I guess what I said about him breaking my neck is why the leader of the meeting, Drew, the meditation guru of Brattleboro, said he wanted to me to talk to Lisa, the other teacher, in her office when the meeting as over. It could have been that. Maybe. It could have been other remarks. Like when Ronald, this 60-year-old with an alcohol monitoring bracelet was droning on, taking up 20 minutes of an hour-long sub-session with his incessant talking about *nothing*, I might have said something like, "I hope I die before you finish this story." "Matthew, let Ronald talk." "He's talking, he's talking—no one can shut him up." "Ronald deserves his time." "Ronald deserves *his* time. Which is about five minutes. So now he's eating into Chris's time and my time and Ellen's time—" "Why don't you focus on you—" "I was! That's why I said: I HOPE I DIE BEFORE THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE FINISHES HIS STORY. That's an *I* statement. I was talking about *my* feelings." This whole time, Ronald keeps talking. He has no conception of this interaction going on around him. "If he hits the thirty minute mark, I'm going to end that motherfucker." "Right on." Chris bumps my fist. "This guy is disrespecting the group. Ellen deserves her share." "I will fucking end you," I said, in a real nice way. Ronald never heard a thing. But Drew did. ### 57 And that's how I found myself Talking with Lisa after a Starting Now night was over. Drew was very nice about it. He said, "How would you feel about talking with Lisa for a while?" "I'd feel good about it," I said. "I don't think I'm getting much out of small group." "That's what we'd like to talk to you about," Drew said. So I was in Lisa's office. She started out with basics. "Are you still going to AA?" "Yes, sometimes." "What do you think of the people in your 7am AA meeting—I know you go to that one pretty regularly, right?" "I'm kind of hit or miss on that group right now because they don't know how to separate religion from AA which demonstrates that they don't even understand their own text." "How do you feel about the people in the meeting?" "How I *feel* about the AA people in meeting? I have a very bad attitude toward them. I feel like I would hate picking up a one-year chip someday, that somehow it would be a failure on my part. I always felt that about jobs." "Really?" "Yes. I thought they were such a repugnant waste of time that doing well at them, even working with certain companies, was an embarrassment to me, a defilement of me as a human being. Some companies I worked for, I don't even put on my resume because I'm too embarrassed to have worked there—I feel that my association with them is a blight on the quality of my life." I cried when Lisa asked me if I wanted to go inpatient and I said, "That feels like a good idea." She said, "What you might be feeling isn't sadness, but relief—a friend of mine who has lifelong depression says she feels relief when she gets so suicidal she needs to go to the hospital." Lisa calls reception and tries to get a bed for me that night in Tyler 2, but they're full. She gets a bed for me for Friday. She says, "Can we make a safety contract that you won't hurt yourself before then?" "Yes but I'm not guaranteeing that I'm going inpatient on Friday?" "Why not?" "I'm just not ready to make that commitment." "If there was a bed ready tonight would you be more willing to make that commitment?" She was good. She kept me talking. She sat there and long time and listened to my mixed-up bullshit. That woman—Lisa Whatever Her Last Name is—is one of the key people who've helped me in my life. "You were in detox before Starting Now, weren't you?" "Yes. I was released from detox after four days because I had no withdrawal symptoms and my insurance would no longer pay for it. I stayed clean and sober at times, went to meetings at time, and now of course this outpatient treatment, but when I stop drinking my problems get worse. I know that sounds like a cop-out—" She touched my knee. "No. It does not. It sounds like you have another mental illness, besides addiction. Ok? That's what it sounds like." "Well I do! I had forgotten I had been diagnosed bipolar years before." "When was this?" "About six years ago LA. I recognize that you and Drew have pulled me aside and I realize that I was irate defiant suicidal or something—" "And homicidal." "Oh really?" Lisa nods. "Gosh. I didn't even realize the suicidal part until you pointed it out to me in your office." "I think you'll feel that sense of relief I was talking about earlier when you go in, because you'll know you're safe because somebody else will be looking after you. I think you have stress around *what you might do*." "To myself??" I was choking up big time on that one. "To yourself or others." "I do feel a kind of relief." I was crying my eyes out. "How did you know?" "We just thought some of your remarks in group were alarming." "What remarks were alarming?" "When you said..that everyone—" "That everyone should just blow their fucking heads off? That remark?" "That one and others. It falls into the category of what we call suicidal and also homicidal ideation." "Maybe it's not suicidal. Maybe it's just boredom." "Boredom with what? With your life?" "How about with that motherfucking *group?* Bunch of fucking *dotards*. No reasonable person can be expected to sit through that group four times a week. It's bullshit. I'm not going back to that group, by the way, just so you know, that group is bullshit." "You said that." "Well, it's true. Sometimes I like to emphasize things by repetition. Like Mr Snakeskin Boots back there. He's here for drunk driving. He's legally required not to drink for a year since his conviction, which is parole, and going to this group. You know what he told me? He said the *minute* that year is over, he's gonna drink again. I just can't be in a group like that, with fake-ass motherfuckers. I think if he blew his head off it'd be better than the lie he's living. I know you can't tell someone else they're an alcoholic, but do you know how many DUIs this motherfucker has?" "Matthew, I'm not concerned about Chris—" "Mr. Snakeskin." "Chris, Mr Snakeskin, whatever. Chris isn't making death threats during group." "I didn't make a *death threat*." "Technically, you did, when you said you were gonna blow everyone's fucking heads off." "No, I didn't say *I'm going to blow your fucking heads off*. I said *Everyone should just blow their motherfucking heads off*. That's just friendly advice. To end their suffering." "Are you suffering, too?" "To end *our* suffering." "I have a responsibility—legal as well as a conscientious one—to make sure you're safe before you leave this building. Drew was concerned by some of the things you said in group, not just tonight, but other nights as well. Drew is a good friend of mine. We care about you." This woman turns her chair so she's facing me, eye to eye. "I want you to commit to spending some inpatient time here. Friday or tonight if I can get them to let you in *tonight*." "Why?" "Because I'm concerned you're suicidal." "Suicidal. Hm. Suicidal. Well, I've been suicidal in the past." "When?" "Since the tenth grade. I bought a book on suicide and my parents paid for it and my mom was the only one who showed any concern, and I told her not to worry, it was just an academic interest and she didn't bug me any further." "You think she should have been more proactive?" "I think when a tenth grader buys a book on suicide, his grades go from A's to F's, he's skipping school when he never did before, he shows up at his girlfriend's house—not fucking her in the basement—but because she's the only one who can comfort his deep soul cryings, emotional breakdowns, whatever. I just needed a friend!" "How often have you felt suicidal since then?" "Constantly!! Constantly. I mean what is the point of this life? If you *think*, then you *must* be suicidal. Only people like Mr Cowboy Boots who shoot for the lowest rung on the ladder are *happy*. He's not thinking of *the meaning of life*—he's just gettin' while the gettin's good." "But we're talking about you. And I think you're in danger." "Danger?" "I think you may be a danger to yourself." I laugh. "Yeah, I am. I'm the most dangerous person I know." "Do you have a gun?" "No." "Do you live with someone?" "No." "So you're going home tonight to an empty apartment?" "I guess so, *yes*." "Right now, how are you feeling about spending some inpatient time here? You said you were comfortable with it earlier." "I just got out of Tyler 1." "Have you drank since you got out?" "Yeah like once or twice. But mostly I've been sober AND IT IS NOT WORKING." "Tyler 1 is detox. Tyler 2 is a psychiatric unit. Tyler 2 is where I'd like you to go." "In Tyler 1 they taught us that addiction is a psychiatric problem." "Everyone has their ideas on that. I view addiction as a disease, like the flu. Anyone who's exposed has a chance of being infected. You know what the difference between a drug addict and a non-drug addict is?" "What." "The drug addict has tried drugs." "You don't believe in the whole 'addict mind' thing?" "Uh..no. Not exactly. If you want I can call down to admissions again and see if Tyler 2 can take you even without an empty bed. They may be releasing someone in the morning. Would you like me to call again and see if I can get you in there tonight? That way you don't go home to an empty apartment." - - - - Let me point out something here. Lisa is being extremely lenient with me here. She is catering to my will to a degree that shows how deep her humanity runs. We are in a psychiatric hospital. At any time she wants, Lisa can call for the guys in the white coats to come to her office, give me a shot of Benadryl, and take me *somewhere*—they've got places they could stash me. In fact, as Lisa referred to earlier, she has a legal obligation not to let me leave the hospital if she thinks I'm suicidal. So she is being extremely respectful with me and giving me a truckload of patience and leeway. - - - - "What is Tyler 2 again?" "It's mostly a psychiatric ward. A good portion of people who go there are suicidal. You'd be safe there. They check on you every fifteen minutes to make sure you're ok." Something about this mechanical fact starts me crying. Lisa offers me her tissue box but I won't take it. She sets it on the table next to me. "I just— I just—" I'm saying. I shake my head and sob. "I've been keeping myself going *so long* on *nothing*. In college it was vapid. It was vapid before that. *Everyone* is vapid, have you noticed?" "Yes." "I don't know why I'm crying." "You started crying when I mentioned that you'd be safe in the hospital." "I did?" She nods. "Tell me the story again. About your friend." "You wanna hear that story again?" "Please." I am broke down, eyes flooding, shaking with release. The counsellor leans in to me. "I have a friend. I've known her since we were little girls. And she's had to go into the hospital..during various periods..throughout her life. You might imagine..that she feels dread..she feels shame..because she can't trust herself..she can't be safe around herself. But you know what she tells me?" I'm sniffling, saying, "What?" "She says what she feels is *relief*." I nod. "Wow," I say. She is describing exactly what I'm feeling: *relief*. Relief that I wouldn't have to be the only one taking care of me, looking after me. Relief that someone else believed not just that *I had a problem* but that *Life had been difficult for me*. Not just regular difficult—like good days and bad days—but difficult like "*I have to constantly control myself to not do things that scare other people* and *I have to convince myself to stay alive even when I have absolutely no reason to do so, even when I feel useless no matter what a good job I do, when I am unmotivated by things that motivate anyone: money, sex, love, reputation. I don't care about any of those things. I'm like a chess player who will sacrifice his queen—but not because I'm Bobby Fischer and have some seven-move combo that's gonna kick your ass with superior intelligence combined with superior creativity. No. I'll sacrifice my queen because I don't give a fuck about losing—losing everything. If I had a grenade I would have no hesitation punishing myself and everyone else in that remedial therapy group by blowing all of our heads off at the first utterance of a phrase from Mr Snake Boots. I'd kill us all just because* I don't fucking care. I've been pushed to the limit so many times that I don't believe in anything—sex, love, money, security—I don't believe in any of it. To me, a job interview isn't an opportunity to get a great job and make money and contribute my creative and technical skills to an exciting company. I'm thirty-three. I've been around that block way too many times to get excited about a job interview. A job interview isn't an opportunity—it's a waste of my fucking time. Fuck the paycheck. Fuck the apartment. Fuck the car. I don't even care about your sex: women, you can take your pussy elsewhere. Play your games with some twenty-three year old who still has the energy, who's still willing to put up with the drama and the games and the bullshit just to cum inside you, just to hold you on his arm, just to mentally get off on possessing you momentarily. Those are things I don't care about anymore. I don't care about anything anymore. In fact my whole life has been a process of stripping myself down of everything that's unnecessary. And now I've stripped myself down to nothing." "We're gonna get you some relief." "That's what I feel," I say. "Just talking about the hospital. Relief." And I go into a major cry, and Lisa gets on the phone and sees if she can get me a bed in Tyler 2 tonight. ### 58 Lisa couldn't get me a bed. We talked a lot more and she believed my safety contract with her—which was genuine—and we agreed on a Friday admit date to Tyler 2. This was Thursday. Friday was tomorrow. On Friday, Gretchen stalked my bicycle. I don't know how else to put it! The crazy girl put flowers on my bicycle when I wasn't around and my bike was locked to a street pole. I came back to my bike and first thought, *Wow, some stranger put flowers on a stranger's bike, how nice*. Then I realized it was Gretchen and she was straight-up stalking my fucking bicycle!! I unlocked my bike, placed the flowers on top of a trash can for someone else to enjoy, and rode to the Refuge. - - - - First trip to Tyler 2. I ate lunch standing in the Refuge lawn with my bike propped against a tree just to have someplace to eat my Subway sandwich before I went inside, where I was sure they would take my food away. I walked all around the square between the buildings, hugging the trees and seeing as much nature as I could, knowing I'd be inside a locked ward for as long as they wanted to keep me. I videoed these pinwheels the children patients had made..they were in two circles in front of the main entrance to the hospital. They spun in the wind and had messages written on them. I took a long ride around the Refuge on my bike, knowing I was going to be admitted, knowing I might not see outside for a long time, parking next to my favorite tree and hugging and kissing it, then locking up my bike and going inside to be admitted. I cried uncontrollably in the lobby and the meditation guru came up to comfort me. He knew what was going on because he talked to the woman who pulled me out of my birches class to check on me and me just saying, "I'm sad," and bawling. The meditation guru sits with me. When he sits I cry even more—I am destroyed. He puts a hand on my knee and just sits. "Are you going inpatient for a while?" I cryingly nod yes. And we just sit. Why? Because that's what fucking meditation gurus do. - - - - The intake process is just you, bleeding your soul out, while you do a bunch of insurance paperwork..piss test..interview with the physician's assistant where he tries to determine what the fuck is wrong with you..stripping your clothes off..body search..they note all your tattoos..you put on Refuge sweatpants and they put all your real clothes and your stuff in a paper bag for the Tyler 2 health techs to sort out..being led upstairs by the physician's assistant, turned over to the Tyler 2 desk..getting a toothbrush and shampoo..skip skip skip..etcetera..etcetera..skip..etcetera..skip skip..then it's late at night and you're in the snack room, tricking out the vent on the microwave to melt the icing on your Pop-Tart and some sly girl with a baseball cap comes in, hiding her face, and then she's standing in your face, saying: "Do you remember me? Do you remember me?" And I do. It's Stripes, the most interesting thing in Brattleboro (besides me). "What are you doing here?" she asks. "I'm here because they said I had suicidal and homicidal ideation." "Oh!" she says, and she lays a hand on my chest. "*I thought you worked here!!*" "No!" "And I was like, fuck, this might mess up my customer relationship." I'm quiet. "Do you remember the time you came in and drank all night and you left me a twenty-dollar tip? Or were you too drunk to remember?" "I..yes..of course..I was drunk but it's coming back to me. I remember we had a conversation and I thought I had found the only person worth talking to in Brattleboro." "Well the worst part—no ego, but—you probably had," she whispers. "I'm sure of it." "Fuck, so you're here as a *patient*?!" "There's one more thing. I wanted to make love to you, that night, because you were the most beautiful thing in Brattleboro. Did I say that before?" "Yep, you said the same exact thing when you came in that night. I'm surprised you remember." "I don't. I thought I just made that up just now." "No you told me before." "What did you say?" "You'll have to find out," she says. "I wasn't sure if you really liked me or if you were just drunk." "Well if I left you a twenty-dollar tip then I was trying to get your attention, so that means I really liked you." "Uh huh." "I was probably trying to make sure you didn't forget me." "I already would have never forgotten you after the conversation we had..which I'm guessing you don't remember either." "Hah. Not really. I just remember you were brilliant and a spark and I wanted to fuck you." "What's a spark?" "You know..someone who hasn't lost the light in their eyes..someone who's still alive while situated in the wasteland." "And you..you still have the light in your eyes?" she asks me. I say, "You tell me." She says, "You have a bonfire." And she turns and goes, leaving me in the Tyler 2 snack room, by myself, with a melted Pop-Tart and my loneliness. - - - - Ok so Stripes' name wasn't really Stripes. It was some other name that we'll leave aside. See, Stripes and I had art class together, and one day I drew this funky, punky-looking zebra with mohawk hair and these broad, stylized, unrealistic black and white stripes and when [this exceptional specimen of a human being I call Stripes] saw it, she loved it, and I gave it to her, and she hung it in her room, and from then on I called her Stripes. She gave me something in return: her personal copy of *Girl, Interrupted* which I read at the Refuge. Watching *Girl, Interrupted* the movie on my computer between visits to the Refuge became tradition for me. I don't just do something. I do every aspect of it, I study it, I master it, I go deeply into to—and I found it comforting, while making this series of visits to the Refuge, to immerse myself in psych ward culture. And I'm so pretentious. Like I'm somehow proud that I read *Girl, Interrupted* while *in* a psych ward. I think that's cool—I do. I do *research* on my disorders. I'm all *meta* about it. So I don't just have this straight idea of being in a psych ward—to me this is like *a literary experience*. I make up my own worlds. When I was getting my MRI, I wasn't getting an MRI. I had a whole *other* experience going on there that's a secret so I'm not going to explain it. But I'm not just living life—I'm *playing a game*. So *what you think we're doing*, from your perspective, is not *what I think we're doing*, from mine. To me this interaction is completely different from how anyone else would describe it, but I map my reality onto *the shared reality* with metaphors, so I can still participate in *your* world, when really my experience is that I'm in mine. *Isn't everyone doing that?* *Are they? How would I know?* Those are just parts of my imagination I'm conversing with. Don't try to keep up. Just keep reading. - - - - Just keep reading about eating steak with your hands at the Refuge. It's easier than trying to use a plastic fork with no knife. Because there's no silverware in a psych ward—lol—there's not even a plastic *knife* on a psych ward. So you have your two basic choices: 1) use the edge of your plastic spoon as a knife, which works pretty well, or 2) just pick the motherfucker up and eat it with your hands. The more times you've been in a psych ward, the more comfortable you become with choice #2..because after enough time spent in psych wards you start to realize there's a much larger problem to be solved (YOU'RE IN A PSYCH WARD) and that eating steak with your hands is *completely minor* compared to this larger problem. But it's a transition, yes, the first time you give up with the plastic utensils and pick up a steak and eat it with your hands—you start thinking of yourself in a different way. And you stop giving a fuck what other people think about you in a way that may never go away once you leave the ward. It's kind of like soldiers who have trouble transitioning back to civilian culture after they've lived war. Once you've been to a psych ward, do you ever, really, truly give a fuck about normal culture ever again? I'm not sure I ever gave a fuck about it in the first place. After you get out of the psych ward, you'll be in a restaurant. The person sitting next to you screams: "There is a *hair* in my corn!" And you look at them sideways like: *I've eaten steak with my fingers.* Hey, newbie—deal with it. I don't see what's so gross about a hair in your food anyway. Don't you taste your lover's hair, don't you take her in your mouth? But you know, hair isn't for everyone. Some use the edge of the spoon for a knife. Some eat steak with their hands. You meet all kinds of people in the psych ward. ### 59 Like The 17 year old I met in Tyler 2—suicidal chick they were sending home. Her name was Olivia. She had been in hospitals for the last two or three years, starting with a suicide attempt. She couldn't get into the outpatient program she wanted because she had a suicide attempt within the past 30 days. Believe it or not outpatient and even inpatient programs for suicidal people have limits on the number of past suicide attempts and how recent they were. This girl, poor Olivia, she was too suicidal to go to any psychiatric program in America—she just wanted to kill herself too damn much and when people actually kill themselves in mental hospitals, it's very traumatic for everyone who works there and all the patients and also it's a big problem for the hospitals' insurance coverage. Yeah. So Olivia had to stop going to hospitals and go back home to live with her parents, which she was obviously nervous about. She was just waiting around at the Refuge to go home when her family was ready for her. Do you believe that shit? No mental hospitals would take her since she had too many recent suicide attempts!! This is the person who needs help the most and no one will take her because she's an insurance risk. Taking her as a patient is basically saying: you will kill yourself in our facility and it will fuck up our insurance so—sorry!—go kill yourself elsewhere. Notebook entry: > seventeen-year-old girl with a skin condition..she was—if you can believe this—too suicidal for a psych ward Or the young guy—Ross—who used to walk the halls of Tyler 2 imitating the catatonic body positioning of that young woman who had seizures and came in with police, handcuffed to a wheelchair. When she came in we were all asked to move into the TV room and they closed us in there to give her some privacy—you know, so we wouldn't make fun of her for being brought in by the cops. And we all wondered from the next room what kind of monster was being admitted that she was *brought in* handcuffed to a wheelchair. We didn't know if she was a boy or girl at the time and I think we were all pretty much thinking Hannibal Lecter was being admitted to the ward—which wasn't a scary thought, we would have been delighted to have Lecter with us. Turned out it wasn't Hannibal Lecter but this cute, smart, totally nonviolent girl named Liliana. Anyway Ross—who was there because his parents caught him eating mushrooms—he would walk around with his neck crooked and his hand held up like Liliana, even talking with mental health workers and claiming he had the same conditions and had taken the same seizure medicines as Liliana. Classic Munchausen—GTFO MF. - - - - A more sympathetic character was Chad, who was one of the patients who was present in Tyler 2 every time I went that fall and winter—Chad will be a permanent resident in some psychiatric facility for the rest of his life. I don't know what was wrong with him, in terms of an illness, but he was one of my friends on the ward. I always took time to talk to Chad and be of use to him when I could. Mostly he needed the company. Any he got it. He was often on one-to-ones, which means one staff member to one patient—there was one staff member whose constant, 100% job was to pay attention to Chad and make sure he didn't hurt himself or anyone else. With Chad, either was possible. He didn't want to hurt anyone, he was just easily triggered—if something stressed him, he could go from laughing and jovial to repeatedly stabbing himself in the wrist (deeply) with a pen that somehow made its way onto the unit and that Chad had somehow stole. He was constantly masturbating in his room even though he was on one-to-ones—he didn't care who was watching. Poor guy..his doctor probably never explained to him that he wouldn't be able to cum on his antidepressant. And his one-to-one had to sit by Chad's open door watching him masturbate. I recall this one woman saying, "Maybe it's not gonna happen, Chad. Maybe you should give it a rest for now and try again later." But Chad was a determined sort of dude. A favorite activity for Chad was rapping in the middle of the residential hallway. He would stand there and do rapper hand movements and do his best to make up raps: "I'm Chad and I'm bad. I'm even so bad I'm totally rad. You never heard a rapper who had my badness. In fact I'm known for my antics. Yo, Matt, he's a crazy cat. He might seem like a normal Jack. But underneath his skin he'll never let you win. Behind your back he'll prob'ly cut you with a razor blade." "Hey!" says his one-to-one. "That's not cool!" "It doesn't rhyme, either, I say. Chad, Chad, he's so bad, he'll take a patient and make 'em smile when they sad." "Yeah!" Chad would say. "Tyler 2, I don't mean to be rude, but we gotta do something about this food." "Yeah! You're a rapper!" "I heard back in the day the food was fun to eat. But that's before it got taken over by a consulting company. The staff, they do the best they can, but their hands are tied..by the man." "That's it, Matthew let's be rappers together." "We *are* rappers together, Chad, we're the dopest rappers in Tyler 2. They used to have Marshal..but now all they got is me and you!!!" I slap Chad's hand. "Hey! No touching!" says the one-to-one. "Alright, Chad, keep rapping, I got to go talk—" "To your bitches!" he yells. "No, that's extremely rude. Don't say bitches." "Ok, you gonna go get with your *females*," Chad says. "That's still rude. They're *young women*. That is the preferred term." "Oh, is that the preferred term?" Chad asks. "Because for me the preferred term is bitches." I leave him there, standing in the middle of the hallway, and he goes back to rapping. His one-to-one works a Sudoku. - - - - Then there was Arlo, who tried to kill himself by jumping off a highway overpass. But all the cars slowed down and he ended up just breaking his legs. Arlo ate five ice cream sandwiches every day when the unofficial quota for the ward was like two per delivery. - - - - On the way down the hallway I come across Rainbow, the pink-haired med nurse who I fell in love with. "Come here. I owe you meds." "If it means I get to talk to you, Rainbow, I'll take cyanide." "Don't say that—I'm gonna have to report that!" "It's ok, Rainbow, we'll do it like Romeo and Juliet. You won't have to report shit." She was safely cordoned from me by a half-height door. I had fantasies of hooking up with her and her being the stable side while I was the wild side of our relationship. A med nurse living with and supporting a psych patient..and me making her so happy. Rainbow once said she hoped to see me around town sometime and this was fuel enough for my imagination to see us hooking up and living together, a med nurse and a graduate of the ward she worked on. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing. I would lick her pussy every day and fuck her until she came 12 times and her pussy would be throbbing for me each time she handed out a med cup to a psychiatric inpatient and she'd be running to get home to me and I'd be lying in her bed like Prince with a half-unbuttoned shirt and like furs everywhere and a real tiger. (That's what I was thinking anyway.) She did, though, she did flirt with me my first day every time I came back to Tyler 2 after being out in the world a while. She said she knew I lived in Brattleboro and she kept hoping that she might run into me at In the Moment (record shop) or the Food Co-op or something. Me too, pink-haired med nurse, me too. I was like, "Oh yeah, I shop there..In the Moment..uh huh..Food Co-op..yeah, yeah." She says, "If you weren't my patient, we could do something together, like.." "Oh yeah, I'd love to get together and do something with you. I think I know what you mean. I think I know what you mean. We could *get* together." "Exactly," she says, "*Get together.*" *"*It's fun," I say, "when two adults find a private place where they can get together and *enjoy each other's company*." "Alright. You're gonna get me in trouble." Rainbow leans out of the med station window and looks both ways. She hands me my medicine. "Now take this, before you get me fired." I take my medicine, swallow it with a plastic cup of water, and throw away the tiny paper thimble the med nurse hands you your pills in. "If you got fired, that would make you a bad, bad girl," I say. "And what would you do about it." "I'd pull down your pants and spank you till your butt was as pink as your hair." "Seriously, you've got to get out of here. I'll see you for your ten o'clock meds." I lean in and whisper, "Is your pussy wet?" And Nurse Rainbow says, "Go," in a way that means she wants to be taken seriously. And out of respect, I go. But I can't get that pink-haired freak out of my mind, and I wonder what I did so wrong in life that *that's* going to be the extent of my interaction with her—verbally crossing the patient/caretaker boundary—instead of *actually* being at Rainbow's apartment and *actually* spanking her white ass and a*ctually* making her butt cheeks turn the color of her hair and then turning her over and fucking her pussy so good and licking and biting and sucking every part of her body that her *face* turns the color of her hair. *Damn*, if I wasn't a mental patient me and Rainbow could be having *so* much fun. - - - - Then there was Sadie. Sadie I met on the the couch, both writing in our journals in the group room waiting for evening meditation—there was electricity, we could both feel it, sitting in sock feet and pajamas, two of the more cogent residents of the ward. We hardly spoke, but gave each other the space to be non-objects the way men and women rarely do. I viewed her, and it was clear she viewed me, as a healing person in a healing place—and neither of us was about to shatter that peace and protection by behaving with respect to the other as a sexual thing. I didn't view Sadie as I view a sister—nothing like that. It's just that I could see that Sadie's mind was a deep pool, the kind of pool that must be approached slowly and with a certain ceremony. We sat for an hour and spoke nothing, and I loved it. Just to know someone else was reflecting at the level of journal writing was enough to be said between us. And women aren't the only ones treated as objects—I bloomed in the safety, with Sadie and with others, that we couldn't touch each other. There is something so human and respectful about that, reminding those of us who have spent time in psych wards and other no-touch spaces that—hey, wait!—you can't just touch me. That there are rules, that I can set limits, about who touches me. That I don't belong to anyone. I felt—I felt it in the air—that Sadie and I were respecting the brokenness of each other. I'm an empath—I feel other people's feelings so deeply that I *take them on*. This is very dangerous..for me. Because I can't be happy when someone I love is hurting, distraught. And combined with a role I learned in childhood—please all the adults so they don't get mad at me—I am left, as an adult, with some just *impossible* relationship goals. I don't understand the boundary between you and me (as well as I could) and because of this I spend a lot more time than necessary feeling, *experiencing* other people's angst, when on my own I'm pretty much fine. They say there is a thin line between genius and madness. But after 11 stays in five different psych hospitals, I can definitively say that there is not "a thin line between genius and madness." Madness does not imply genius—but where genius is found, madness often is too. Check this out: If there *is* such a thin line between genius and madness, why can't I choose which one I want to be? - - - - I suppose I should tell you about my doctor. My first stay in Tyler 2 I had horrible Dr. Criminal who released me early (while I still had suicidal thoughts). During my release process, Stripes said: "Look, you're clinging to the bed. Look at your body language. You're not ready to go and you'll either kill yourself or you'll try to kill yourself and you'll be back in two days." The releasing nurse also had a problem with me leaving, as I was bawling and sniffling and she said she wanted my doctor to talk to me again. Dr. Criminal came back in. "Are you suicidal?" "I don't know." "Do you have a specific plan?" "I guess..no." Dr. Criminal determined I was ok to go. Didn't even put me on an antidepressant. Initially I was discussing with another patient about who my psychiatrist was. She was incredulous. "Dr. *Criminal*. Like a criminal..like one who breaks the law..and that's your *psychiatrist*?" "Yeah, that's my psychiatrist. Dr. Criminal. And yes, that's his real name." The head nurse, after speaking with me, thought I was unsafe and left and had the doctor come and do a third evaluation of me and he let me go, even though the head nurse was shaking her head the whole time. Dr. Criminal (who all the staff called "the old-school psychiatrist" even though he was the youngest one), treated a depressed, suicidal patient with two previous diagnoses of bipolar disorder, with no medicine, just a suggestion to go to an outpatient program. I'm mad about that. I wasn't at the time 'cause I wasn't all that aware of what was going on back then, but the more time I have to think about it, the madder I get. I walked out of that hospital and tried to kill myself. And after that, when he and I saw each other on the ward and hospital halls, we shared a special kind of look that not many people get to share: the *maybe if you had believed the bipolar diagnosis, I wouldn't have attempted suicide* look. We never said a word. - - - - There was this guy Mark who was in the Refuge after going psychotic from some bad ecstasy. I was friendly to him at first, then he was in ALSA (the Adult Low Stimulation Area—basically a higher level of security—ward within a ward) and while he was in there he yelled constantly, banging on the ALSA door when I was staying in the room right by ALSA for my suicide attempt. He seemed ok before they put him in ALSA, then he flipped out and became Captain Caveman, then they let him out and he was always weird after that, like the kind of guy if you passed him on the street you would just hope he would keep walking..forever. Then I was checking out and Mark was hovering over me while I was at the contraband closet collecting all my street stuff and he saw that I had an iPad charger in my bin. "Say, man, can you loan me that?" "What?" "Your iPhone charger, mines's broke." "I don't think this will work with your iPhone. It's for an iPad." "That's not what I asked you, is it?" The nurse I was with called for help down the hallway: "Uh..Mark's ramping!" "So is you going to loan me the shit or is you gonna puss out?" I didn't answer. It was just me, the nurse, and this guy whose brain got fried by—whatever drug?—and he's standing over me. I put all my stuff in my bag and I was real ready to get out of there when Mark's facial expression: Jack-O-Lantern smile. He holds out his fist like an invitation to bump the rock and I put my fist out and this motherfucker *punches* my hand so hard it needed an ice pack. "I see how it is," this wannabe thug says. "I'll see you around town." "Ok," I say. "Yeah. We'll do that." "Is he making fun of me?" "Just don't say anything to him," the nurse tells me. "I can't tell if this guy is making fun of me or not." The nurse says, "He's not. Just go. Mark, go meet me by the med station." So I went to my first group at Birches with an ice pack on my hand and a story to tell of how it got there. My social worker-led peer group asked me why I had an ice pack on and I told them some brain-fucked asshole punched me in the hand on my way out the door. "He did the bump the rock thing and when it was his turn he punched me instead!" That added mystique to me. These people had never been to Tyler 2. They were living in a peaceful house, watching TV every night with their only stipulation that if they drank they would be kicked out of the house. They weren't living in a place where somebody might punch you for any reason, ever. On the last night of my Dr. Criminal hospitalization I wrote all these cards about it being like trying to sail a paper boat across the ocean—as in *life: it's* *like trying to sail a paper boat across the ocean*—and I put those cards all over the unit: on top of the TV, in the freezer, on the nurses' station desk, everywhere. That was a cry for help. Someone could have picked up on that..Stripes did..did she show it to the nurses? I don't now. But someone distributing that message all over the ward on his last night should not have been allowed to go. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (2)** > > Patient Admitted September 23, 2011—Discharged September 29, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is a 33-year-old male with bipolar disorder NOS, alcohol dependence and stimulant abuse abuse admitted September 23, 2011 for depression, suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. > > **Chief Complaint:** "Depression." > > **History of Present Illness** > > The patient was recently discharged from the Refuge after completing alcohol detox. He has been depressed and irritable and states that he drank once since his last admission. When not drinking he has experienced mood lability and irritability. He describes a good response to Lamictal in the past and this was recently restarted. He does not believe that it is helping him yet but he reflects that he is not yet on the target dose. He describes homicidal ideation towards people who have hurt him in the past including his ex-boss, people who disrespect him in general and people who treat him lower than others. Specifically he reports significant anger towards his ex-boss who he believes fired him without cause. He denies any history of auditory or visual hallucinations. *[On the entrance interview one time, into the Refuge, they asked about homicidal and suicidal thoughts and I had both, I wanted to kill my ex-boss and I wanted to kill myself. Do you have a plan for killing your boss? Yeah, I would stalk him while his pudgy butt was hiking and fucking shoot 'im in the head!! Do you own a gun? No. Then how are you planning on shooting him? I would buy a gun. Obviously!! And your plans for killing yourself? I would do it in a bathtub. Do what in a bathtub. Cut myself, deeply. And then there would be no more me, and no more problems, and my family wouldn't have to deal with me. I'm sure your family would be very sad if you killed yourself. I'm sure that some of them would be, I say. And I'm sure that some of them would not.]* > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > The patient was admitted to Tyler 2 on September 23, 2011 *[Tyler 1, where I was before, is mainly a detox unit—Tyler 2, where I was admitted this time, is mainly a psychiatric unit.]* Urine drug screen done on admission was negative. Screening physical exam was unremarkable. Treatment during his hospital stay consisted of medication management and group therapy *[There was no group therapy—Tyler 2 has excellent classes on medication, coping skills, art classes, yoga, meditation, but I never did any group therapy in Tyler 2.]* Medication changes made during his stay included: increasing his Lamictal dose gradually to a final dose of 100 mg at bedtime and starting hydroxyzine for sleep. He tolerated these medication changes without any adverse events. Over the course of his hospital stay he reported a gradual improvement in his mood. He was without any reported or observed psychotic or manic symptoms throughout the duration of his hospital stay. On the day of discharge he denied suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation and he convincingly contracted for safety. At the time of discharge he did report significant ambivalence and anxiety. However after careful reflection and conversation with several staff members he concluded that discharge was a safe and appropriate decision and that although the thought made him anxious he realized postponing facing this would not help. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar Disorder NOS. Alcohol Dependence. Stimulant Abuse. Kidney Stones. Social Isolation. Financial Problems. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 50. > > **Condition on Discharge:** Stable and improved. > > **Prognosis:** Good *[Well, I guess they fucked that one up because the next time I came back it was in an ambulance after a suicide attempt].* ### 60 But they did release me to the Birches program. Sadie was there and we exchange numbers and hug, we say, "It's good to see you." She says she'll drive us to a meeting sometime. I hope Sadie is sober today. As I write this, after some years have passed, I hope that woman did better than I did and has been sober all this time. I know it's hard—if it wasn't hard I wouldn't fail at it so often. I just want to believe that that woman's life turned out fine, and that she's arranging the chairs or that she's tonight's speaker at a speaker meeting somewhere. I guess I just liked her. I know I'm getting all teary, but seeing Sadie in Birches on my first day was a wonderful sight, wonderful eye contact—my misplaced hope for myself is on some woman named Sadie that I hardly knew..that's fucked up. I follow my same pattern from Tyler 2 and before—of my entire life—of getting mad at assholes. This dudebro guy in small group who liked to brag about physical violence during his share time, the mushroom-addled schizo dude who thought all his doctors were crazy and that he was connecting with beings from another universe. And I started seeing Sadie around town, on the street and at AA meetings, and I desperately wanted to, but I was in no place to fall in love. - - - - I'm grocery shopping one day—after the events of this book—and it's me and my mom. And *I'm* paying, this whole mega shopping expedition is courtesy of my food stamps. I'm pushing the cart, and I see some carbonated blood orange juice in glass bottles—*beautiful*. I grab a couple of those and a couple of the grapefruit, too. I put them in the cart, and as I look up, my mom has gone ahead—she didn't know that I had stopped—and I saw her watching me pick out juice, and I saw the expression on her face..and..it was..an expression of pure *disgust*. It said: *Who do you think you are to pick those out? What do you think* you're *doing?* Like I don't even have a right to put something in a grocery cart without her permission. The message is total disapproval. Like her telling me when I was a kid, about my writing. What she said was: *Don't show this to anyone or else they'll think I raised you wrong.* She thinks that my creativity (which is sometimes viewed as oddity) reflects poorly on *her*. Sometimes I think we had a disapproving parent and an approving one, but other times I wonder if it's more realistic to say we had two parents uninterested disapproving unloving, who don't show love, don't *do* love..they don't *admire* us, *hug* us, *love* us. - - - - And I'm in this morning social group in Birches, at the Refuge, and someone is talking about hugs and I simply say: "My parents didn't hug me. I mean *occasionally* they hugged us, but they never showed their love through touch, with a hug, you know, just the touch of a hug." This fat-bellied bodybuilder wrestler wannabe dudebro says: "I'm sure your parents love you." He's all dismissive and he starts to go on talking about his bodybuilding schedule, which in my mind is irrelevant to this group therapy session, so I don't feel bad interrupting him. "But what I'm telling you..is that my mom..never hugs me." "I was talking," this bodybuilder says. "Well I'm talking now. I don't think you understand what I'm saying. *My mom never hugs me.*" "I'm sure she loves you, dude, don't worry about it." The social worker jumps in: "I think what he's trying to say, Frank, is—does your mom hug you?" "Yeah, we hug all the time. We's real tight." "What Matthew is telling you is that his mom doesn't show love through touch." "You wanna be touched more by your mom, dude? Where do you want her to touch you?" "Frank, don't mess with me. This is group therapy, not a place for you to tell us how many reps you do to work out your glutes or whatever. This is an emotional discussion. The fact that you just brought up sexual abuse says more about you than it does about me. If you want to tell us where your mom touched *you*, ok, but share about yourself, don't respond to my share, you got that?" "*What* did you say to me?" "I said: 'You got that?' " Frank is sitting next to me in this group. He's huge, everything about him worked out except his flabby belly which I guess is from him losing weight. He turns his body to me and starts getting close to me, trying to intimidate me. I say: "Frank. Sit back down in your chair. This is a group therapy session in a mental hospital. It's not a wrestling ring. You're getting all hard and aggressive like you're gonna fight me or something? Yeah? You're gonna throw a punch in a mental hospital? If you hit me, I'll just sit here and take it, I won't do a thing and about five minutes later, some nurses who can bench a lot more than your faggot ass are gonna give you a shot of Benadryl and carry your limp dick to a locked ward with a padded room and you'll share that ward with a guy name Mike whose brain got fucked up on some bad ecstasy and if you think *I'm* crazy..or if you think *you're* strong..well, you haven't met Mike." "Are you *threatening* me?" "No, I'm just telling you what happens when you punch someone in a mental hospital. So sit your faggot ass down and don't ever get in my face again. I'm in this group to heal. I'm not gonna let you or anyone else get in the way of that. This is a *group therapy session*. I don't know if you know *how dumb you are*, but if you just wanna come in here and talk about your workout routine and how all women are 'bitches' and act like you're some kind of gangsta in Brattleboro, Vermont, then fuckin' leave. Just fuckin' leave." "Mrs. Scalliano, you're gonna let him talk to me like that?" Mrs. Scalliano, the social worker says, "Everyone gets their turn to speak here." Frank jumps up and stands right in front of his chair. He's like flexing his muscles and tightening his fists and doing all this faggoty-ass bodybuilder stuff. He starts hitting the palm of one hand with the fist of his other. I laugh. "Why are you laughing, punk?" "Because it's a *group therapy session*, and you're trying to start a *fight*—like a fucking fist fight. That's all you ever talk about in here, is how you kicked this guy's ass and you kicked two guys' asses at the same time. That's your solution out there, that's your solution in here. I just think you're funny." "It's not gonna be funny when I beat your motherfucking face in." The social worker says, "Frank, leave the room." "Oh, no, go ahead," I'm laughing, "beat my motherfucking face in! I welcome it!" "You're sick, you know that?—Like truly fucking sick." I'm cracking up so much I can hardly breathe. "I'm in..a mental hospital..*of course* I'm fucking sick!!" Frank fake punches me, suckering, pulling the fist. Mrs. Scalliano stands up and puts her hands on Frank's shoulders. He instantly, reflexively, turns to her. It looks like he's gonna hit her. Kelli, this little borderline girl that I desperately want to fuck, stands up. She looks like she's been in a fight or two. Mrs. Scalliano helps Frank out of the room. All the while, Frank acts like she's the only thing holding him back from kicking everyone in the room's ass. I look around. Nobody looks scared. Melissa rolls her eyes. Courtney says: "I'm glad he's leaving. I'm tired of that punk calling women 'bitches.' " Frank breaks free of Mrs Scalliano and comes back into the room and he's like: "ALL WOMEN *ARE* BITCHES. NOBODY'D WANT TO FUCK YOU, YOU ALCOHOLIC WHORE!!" Now Mrs Scalliano is yelling down the hall: "Need help!" The program nurse says, "You want me to call it?" Our social worker says, "Yes." Frank is intimidating Courtney now and I'm finding myself surprisingly calm. My pulse is normal. My anxiety is low. Maybe all this time spent in Tyler 2 is paying off. The PA shouts: "Code gray, Birches short hallway!! Code gray, Birches short hallway!!" Frank is up in Courtney's face like: "I'LL CALL YOU A BITCH ANYTIME I WANT!" And I'm like, "No you won't." "Wha'd you say, you fucking psychopath?" "Frank you can call me a psychopath all you want—actually I enjoy it. But if you insult anyone else in this room, if you call women..that word..again—" "Then what you fucking psycho?" "If you actually thought I was a psycho you wouldn't provoke me." "Yes I would, because your Hannibal Lecter bullshit is no match for my guns." He holds up his arms like Popeye and flexes his biceps. "Actually, Hannibal Lecter bullshit beats your guns any day." "Oh yeah, and how is that, if I kick your ass?" "Because, you flabby-belly fucktard—oh, don't you think we all notice that? Don't you think we all don't know that you used to be Fat Frank, and all your bodybuilding bullshit is just your way to distance yourself from the days when you were just a *fat motherfucker* that girls didn't want to fuck and guys didn't want as part of their crew. You can build up those guns pretty quickly, can't ya? But that extra skin on your belly, from when you were fat—that's gonna take a long time to go away, I'm talking years. And for the next two years, when you look at that belly fat, when you feel it between your fingers, you're gonna think about me, in this moment, and how Courtney, and Kelli, and all those other girls you wanna fuck—including your ex-wife—will never fuck a fat-ass aggro motherfucker like you who calls women *bitches* and you're gonna wish you threw a punch, got me somehow, some way, but you never will." He steps right to me. "You'll never lay a finger on me, and when I get out of this hospital, I'll spend maybe ten minutes thinking about you, ten years from now, when I write my memoirs. But your ass is gonna spend the rest of your life being needlessly pissed off at me for telling you off *like a bitch* in front of all these girls I see you staring at every day. I'm daring you, you fucking meathead asshole, *lay one finger* on me. But you can't. You're not a tough guy. You're just a fatty little kid with no friends who doesn't get laid because you're fucking disgusting—physically, mentally, every other way. Look at that fatty belly, fucking loose skin. You've got more camel toe right there than any of the fat bitches you ever talked shit about in small group." "Brattleboro's a small town," this guy says. "I look forward to seeing you on the outside." "Yeah you and everybody else." "I'm serious, I will fuck you up." "Good luck with that, 'cause you'll be in jail, faggot." "Why is it ok for him to call people 'faggot' when you all won't let me call bitches 'bitches?' " Frank whines. But before anyone could answer his question two super-huge Whopper-style dudes came in, popped a needle in Frank's neck, then just stood there holding him by the arms for about the three seconds it took Frank's eyes to roll back in his head and his whole body to go limp and he was still awake, still talking about bitches and how all his earthly problems stemmed from evil things they had done to him, right back to his mom, but now he was doing it real quietly and bubbles were coming out of his mouth. The nurses put Frank in a wheelchair and took him away, I assume to Tyler 2, where he could see what the definition of crazy really is, and find out that he fit right in. ### 61 It saved me a little to see Sadie every day in Birches. Even the colors she wore. Like this burnt orange turtleneck for fall. And she was such a peaceful person. Sadie was number one on my list of people who would never hurt me physically or psychologically, and you have to love a person for that. She seemed well and solid. But you can't see these things from the outside. She was prob'ly freaking out inside. I know I was. Maybe I wanted attention. Maybe I needed more attention than I was getting. I was just going on gut. For me that meant freaking out wanting to bite through my own tongue to make myself bleed—that was how the idea occurred to me. I went to the birches program hallway but skipped classes to lie on a pale blue couch at the end of a line of staff offices (including Dr. Criminal) and I laid myself down on that couch and attempted to bite through my own tongue. Tongues are very strong, it turns out, but I was able to give myself a great deal of pain and aggravate my TMJ to the point that it still bothers me today, five years later. Then I pulled a pushpin off the message board at Birches and I took it into the bathroom with me. I thought: if I poke myself in the arm enough times, along vein lines, I can kill myself with this little pushpin. I was so excited that they had forgotten to remove all the deadly weapons from the area. I mean I was in a different kind of place. Birches was a place for people who were pretty much stable, to learn some techniques about how to deal with your life. I wasn't sure I wanted to live mine. When I came out of the bathroom, Lisa, the counselor, was there and she looked at my face and she looked at the pushpin and she said I think you should give me that and I did and she said you're looking worse than the last time I saw you and I said I am worse and she said do you want to talk about it and I said: "No, I don't want to take up any of your time." She said: "I have time." And she let the group she was in go on to their next meeting and she sat with me in soft chairs right outside the main room of Birches that due to its windows everyone called "the fishbowl." Every question Lisa asked me I just sobbed. I was unable to make myself speak. I just looked at her face and her kindness made me so open to everything in the world that I *hurt* more than everything in the world. If you're bipolar, you're probably like *Yes, he gets it!* about that last sentence and if you're not, you're probably like *What the fuck is this dude talking about? Isn't he overreacting?* I'm bipolar. Of course I'm overreacting. Lisa took me to my social worker. The three of us sat in my social worker's office and the two of them talked. "He had this," Lisa said, cupping the pushpin in her hand. "What's he going to do with that?" Mrs Scalliano said. "I think he's suicidal," Lisa said. My social worker came to me and it was like was interrogating me, where she should have been dealing with an emotional being. She said: "Are you suicidal?" I just shook my head and cried and bowed my head. "Why don't you take your medicine? What's your PRN" "Clonidine?" "Yes, that's seemed to help you in the past." "Clonidine doesn't do a single goddamn thing for me. It's just that time passes and you think the pill did something." "So you just need some time to pass." "If I meditated, that might help." "I think he needs to go back inpatient," Lisa said. "I'm his social worker. We're handling things here just fine." "That's why he's hiding out in the bathroom considering self-harm with this!" "How could he possibly hurt himself with that?" my social worker laughs. "Do you want me to show you?" I asked. "See," Lisa said. "I don't think he's safe enough for Birches." "Well, I'm sorry, but I do. We'll release him back to Tyler 2 if we think it's necessary." Lisa threw up her hands. She knelt to me. "Come find me if you need me. Ok? You know where my office is. You have my card. Promise me." "I will, I promise." Then Lisa left the room and my social worker was like giving me a hard time for involving someone else from the Refuge in a supervisory manner and I didn't have time for her ego bruises so I just walked out in the middle of her talking. Lisa had insisted that I was in trouble, and I was. There were more pins on that board. I was going to impress us all with the amazing damage I was going to do to my arms, wrist, and neck with one of those tiny little pins. That could be a whole lot of puncture wounds and a whole lot of blood. And in my wrist, in my neck, it could be as deadly as a knife. When I was on that couch, I bit all the way through my own tongue trying to make myself bleed enough to be admitted to the hospital. I had fantasies of being taken care of. I knew I needed to be in the hospital and wanted to do whatever I could to make others see that. My suicide attempt was the same thing—begging for help—trying to demonstrate to others how severe my situation was. To make them pay attention to me. But I also wanted to die. Like when I sent my suicide "threat" (notification) email to my family, and was thinking of cutting myself in the bathtub, I wasn't trying to get into the hospital, I was looking for a way out of my life..a way to end my life..a way for this to be the end—of suffering, yes. Wanting to punch myself in the arm with a pushpin, meditating with my iPad timer and going crazy biting through my tongue on the couch at Birches, seeing Lisa and she took me to my social worker and they argued, each, for how sick or well I was at that particular moment. Lisa was right, though, even though my pushpin idea was silly from a certain point of view, the key element, which Lisa got and my social worker didn't, was that I was ready and willing to hurt myself at any moment—exact reason unknown. But I could do it with a pushpin—I could do major damage—I could do it with a pair of scissors or a shoestring or a plastic liner from a trash can. Remember cutting off the wart. I had other late-night excursions in the bathrooms of our family..like the night I first shaved my head in the tenth grade with nothing but a pair of scissors and a disposable razor..no clippers. Both nights were just a lot of night and a lot of quiet, locked in there, with a lot of clock to think about my life and (in the case of the wart) all the female attention I wasn't getting because of that wart—overcoming that was worth a lot of pain right there. See, the pain was not going to be a problem. I could have killed myself with a stapler or a piece of dental floss. We had status reports at the end of the day in Birches. Everyone else was putting 4s and 5s on a scale of 1 to 5 of how safe you were, and I'm putting 1s and 2s. My answers to questions on the reports disturbed the program nurse who led the end-of-day class and she often asked me to stay after to talk about my safety "Right here the question was, 'Name one thing you learned in the DBT class with Nathan Jennings.' " "Right," I said. "And your answer is, "If you want to waste your life, then listen to what other people say." "Asterisk," I said. "What?" "There's more on the other side, an expansion of the initial text connected from one place to another on the leaf of paper by the sign of a star." She turns over the paper and reads what I have written very quietly, under her breath: "I am sorry I was ever born. I am sorry I was ever born. I am sorry I was ever born. I am sorry I was ever born. My parents did not know me then nor do they know me now. It's unfortunate (for them) when people don't understand me in conversation. I am capable of anything because I am not held back by anything. People have no idea what's about to happen. What does that mean?" " 'People have no idea what's about to happen?' Well, it's true: people, in general, have no idea what's about to happen." "Do you know what's about to happen?" "I'm in the dark as much as you. But you never know when someone might be in small group and they might have their larynx ripped out." "By who?" "By any type of animal that rips out larynxes, I guess." "What does this mean?" The program nurse points to the covering I have applied to the entire form, front and back, in tiny writing—my Birches daily summary sheets were always the best. "I can't even tell what it says, it's so small." In a bored, protective voice I say: "You can't imagine it away..and you can't imagine it there, either." The program nurse leans back and looks at me, trying to figure me out. "That's what this says?" I nod, a tear lingering. "You must have written it two-thousand times." "It was worth it," I say, and get up. "I'm just going to the water fountain. Don't worry, I'll be back in a minute and we can discuss my safety." - - - - My social worker and her multi-PhD counseling intern spoke to me about my daily summary sheet from the day before. Her PhD intern said, "This writing is so small I can barely read it, and I've seen your handwriting, and it is small, but it's never been this small before." "There's so much of it. How could you have done this all in one day?" "Well I skipped all my classes so I had plenty of time." "This is so small I can't read some of it." "Do you think you were manic when you wrote it?" I'm quiet. "Do you think you're manic now?" "Actually," I say, "I don't think I know what that word means." They gave my summary sheet to the program psychiatrist, Dr. Le, and she called me in to talk about it. "This is a very unusual check-in sheet." "I haven't seen as many of them as you have but I suspect that's true." "Are you manic?" "You know what I figured out recently?" "What?" she says. "I figured out that I'm not a psychiatrist. You know, I've done my own reading so I think I know what I'm talking about, but I don't. I can't diagnose myself so from now on I'm just going to live my life and let you all handle the diagnoses and such." "Do you think you're safe off the ward?" "Yes, I am able to perform all normal functions without help." "Are you suicidal." "No, not specifically. But I am having some meaning of life issues." "There's someone I'd like you to talk to." "Ok. Who is it?" "The director of the Birches program. His name is Dave. I just want you two to chat, ok? Are you amenable to that?" "Sure." "Great. I'll see you later." ### 62 "Dave"—David Something with a very long German name met with me that day at 11 o'clock. His office was filled with plants. This is how our conversation went. "Hello." "Hello." "Tina asked that we talk a bit. Is that ok with you?" "It's fine. You have a beautiful office. I love all the plants." "Thank you." "Did you bring them in all at once or collect them gradually." "Ahh..gradually. Actually I just started with one plant and then one of my colleagues assumed that meant I liked plants especially and he brought me another, and this action repeated itself until you see the jungle I have the privilege of taking care of now." I laugh. "It is a jungle." "So why do you think Tina and I wanted to speak?" "I think she thinks I'm suicidal and she wants to cover her ass by having the program director talk to me." "Actually I wanted to speak to you anyway. I like to have a brief conversation with all of our clients who start the program and then talk to them a little later to see how things are going. But yes, Tina did specifically mention you to me and she is worried about suicidality." "Well I don't know what to tell you. The most helpful thing I can say is I don't specifically want to die—which is what I understand suicide is—but I do want out of my current life as I see no way forward in it so I do I have suicidal thoughts even though I don't think of myself as suicidal. I'm not sure I'm organized enough to actually kill myself." Dave laughed. "You know? I'm so confused about how I feel it's like jumping off a merry-go-round—my chances of completing anything with much intention seem fairly small to me at the moment." "You're very disarming. That's what Tina said about you." "Isn't that what we try to do in relationships? Disarm the other person, friend or foe, so that we can intellectually/emotionally/physically/spiritually have our way with them?" "What would it mean to spiritually have your way with someone?" "You might want to inspire them." "So you would disarm them first so that they would be pliable to your inspiration?" "Yes." "Do you find it easy to disarm the staff here?" "Yes. Except for you." "You don't have to say that." "I'm not. You're on point. I would never want to disarm you." "Wouldn't want to, couldn't, or are you just disarming me with that remark?" "I don't think that's how it works. For me, at least, there aren't people I can disarm and people I can't. There are people I can disarm and people I wouldn't want to." "And the ones in this latter category. They are.." "People I like." "Do you like many people?" "No." "How many would you say?" "Five." "I think you're doing pretty good," Dave smiles. "Yeah, the world is a lonely place." "Is it, for you?" "Yes. Isn't it for you?" I ask. "Yes I suppose it is," Dave says. "Most of the time." "What's your purpose in life?" I say. "Helping people who need help," he says. "And you?" "I don't know. I don't seem to have much use to this world." "But what use do you have to *you*?" "Is that the way you're supposed to think about it?" "It's one option." "I'll have to get back to you on that one." "Ok. Dr. Le says you're a writer." "Yes, I'm a failed novelist." "Why failed?" "Because I want to hit my head against that wall until there's a purple spot on my face the size of a basketball." "That's what I want to help you with." "Yeah?" "Yeah. You've been diagnosed a few times—by a few different psychiatrists in different clinical settings—as having bipolar disorder. Do you think this is accurate?" "How would I know?" "I'm led to believe you're well read on all the common psychiatric diagnoses. You have your own copy of the DSM—is that true?" "I have a stolen PDF." "And do you think bipolar is the correct diagnosis?" I look this guy straight in the eye. "Yes. The diagnosis fits like a glove. And I don't see any other diagnoses that fit any better." "And you like cocaine?" "What's not to like?" "I agree," says "Dave" the program director of Birches. I look at him and he smiles. "Aren't you afraid I'll tell everyone the director of Birches has done coke?" "No," he says. "Fuck," I say. "Which is it? You're not afraid I'll tell or you're not afraid of anyone finding out?" "I'm not afraid of either. This whole conversation you've indicated no desire to hurt me. I don't believe you will suddenly start being someone who is out to get to me. And I don't give a fuck if anyone knows I've used cocaine." "Sucks to be so easily read." "Not when what is being read is such a complimentary fact." "What fact is that exactly." "Your kindness." I start to cry. "Why did you cover your daily summary report with tiny writing that says that you can't imagine it away nor can you imagine it there?" "I'm trying to communicate with them in language they'll understand!!" "I'm sorry you don't find our staff very smart." "Dr. Le is. But my social worker..she's so basic. It's hard to get a good evaluation from someone who's far less intelligent than you. You know what I mean?" "Yes, unfortunately, I do." "From personal experience?" "I think you know the answer to that question is yes." "You know, this is simultaneously one of the most depressing and comforting conversations I've ever been in, so I'd like to congratulate you for that, but I have to go now. I have to deal with some petty business—the mail—applying for Social Security—all this junk my social worker wants me to do over lunch. Will you forgive me if I leave now?" Dave holds out his hand. "It was a pleasure talking with you." "With you, too," I say, and I leave his jungle of an office, closing the door behind me. - - - - My social worker did want me to start my Social Security application at lunch, but I had more important things to do. I went by the post office and picked up a box of copies of my own book, *Things Said in Dreams*, that I had made for myself on some website. I had said I was going to publish a book so—fuck, there, boom!—it was published. I also looked for my next unemployment check—but it wasn't there. I took my book to local book stores to try to get them to carry it. Of course none of them would. For all the *buy local* rhetoric that's so fashionable these days, no one was willing to put a book by a local author on their shelf. Of course they had *whole shelves* for local authors, but after one glance at the opening page of *my* book they *definitely* weren't going to carry it. Their local authors shelves were for Vermont housewives writing novels about apple pie—shit like that. On the way back to the Refuge I saw the Birches program director and as we passed each other, crossing the same street in opposite directions, I could see in his eyes a genuine look of appreciation for our conversation earlier, and I gave him the same look, and it made me feel like a human being for the first time in a while. ### 63 Killing yourself is a funny thing. Well, it's not funny. If you're unsuccessful, and you live, no one in your family will understand you for the rest of your life and it will will mar your family history forever. That's a best-case scenario. If you're successful, and you die, you will destroy some part of everyone who was close to you, forever, people will end up being mad at you instead of sad for you—they had their selfish reasons for wanting you around. Plus, if you're like me—and like a lot of people—the final act of suicide is an impulsive one. Some people plan for months, yes, or years—but for me I was just walking innocently down a hallway of a psych hospital when I realized I had all my prescription medicine in the pockets of my cargo pants. I walked past the receptionist. I sat in the waiting room. I knew I had prescription sleeping pills with me and I felt compelled to kill myself. Nothing was going my way. I had lost my job and so was about to be homeless in the winter in Vermont. Plus the humiliation of losing your apartment, which had happened to me once before in Los Angeles—it's just not how your life is supposed to go. So I sat in the waiting room of the Brattleboro Refuge, knowing what I should do: hand over all my pills to the receptionist and say, "I'm not safe with these right now. Will you please take them for me before I kill myself." Instead I walked out the main double doors, said goodnight to the woman behind the desk, took a whole bottle of pills without water and then handed the bottle to the security guard and suggested he call an ambulance. So, I mean, no, suicide isn't funny. But there's an element of chance that permeates all of life—and this element of chance comes into play with suicide as well. If I had more money in my bank account and could afford to pay my rent, I might have been just depressed, but I might not have been as suicidal, because I would know that each night after my classes at the Refuge, I was going to have a home to go to, where I could at least have the dignity to sleep in a bed and bathe, shower, shit in a civilized way. And the mind itself is a maze of elements of chance..there's no telling, with someone like me, what kind of chemical tide occurring in my brain will push me to elation..or will push me to despair. With bipolar, often there's no external reason we feel the way we do. The best way to explain it is to say that our emotions are like the weather—there's no *reason* it rains, it just does—there's no *reason* for a beautiful day, they just happen sometimes. Bipolar people seem irrational to neurotypicals—with good reason. People with normal brain chemistry don't feel sad *for no reason*. They think there must be some iron-clad, logical *reason* for killing yourself, but that's not the case. Something like 90% of suicides are carried out by people with a major mental illness (bipolar disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia). Yes, stockbrokers sometimes jump out of buildings when they lose all their money, but most of the people who kill themselves have mental illness. One of my Vermont psychiatrists, when I told him I liked to write, brought up Ernest Hemingway and said, "Matthew, as a person with bipolar disorder, you *can't afford* to drink. Alcohol is not only a depressant, but as I'm sure you know it's a disinhibitory agent. Think of Ernest Hemingway. If he hadn't been drinking, do you think he would have killed himself?" "Maybe not." "Maybe not," Dr. Sbarro said. "Why risk it? One out of five people with bipolar disorder successfully kills themself. For the general population it's one out of a *hundred*. You need all the inhibitions you can get, and that means no alcohol, no drugs, get regular sleep, and *don't get angry*—anger is a killer for bipolars, trust me, I see ten people a week with your condition, and you need to do everything you can to live a calm, measured life." Dr. Sbarro trailed off to me—well, I stopped listening. I was thinking about Hemingway. What if when Hemingway put that shotgun in his mouth, he missed, chipped a tooth, had to go get an emergency crown and forgot to kill himself. I'm just saying: there's a tragic element of chance to all this. Or if your person is unsuccessful at suicide, maybe that element of chance isn't only tragic, but also glorious in the worst possible way. I left that small group that night feeling *so low*, seeing only dead ends, knowing I shouldn't drink but not knowing how else to console myself. And I wasn't drunk—I had stopped buying wine, stopped going to bars. Sobriety was a requirement of Starting Now, and I was giving it a try. But when I stopped drinking, things got worse. After a few days sober, I get a little bump, physically—I feel better for a second. And when I'm sober my body feels better, no doubt. But there's a reason I've been drinking all these years—past the early days of experimenting with and enjoying feeling tipsy—alcohol calms my mind. And I have a very busy mind. It's too busy for it's own good, actually—ask anyone with bipolar disorder. I remember the first time a psychiatrist asked me if I had racing thoughts. I said I didn't know what racing thoughts were. I didn't—because mine are always racing. You mean there's another way than *chaos brain*? *Yes*, they told me, but to this day, even on lithium, that's just how my mind is—I overthink things to a *paralyzing* level. I'd heard horror stories of people turning into zombies on lithium, being unable to create. Not me. The therapeutic level for me is twelve-hundred milligrams a day and that shit doesn't slow me down *one bit*. Alcohol, however, *does* slow my brain down, and it's a magical substance for me. It frees me from the burden of *too much thought*. I really can't socialize with normal people unless I'm drinking, and no, it's not because sober me is too afraid of social contact without alcohol to *bolster my courage*, as AA's brilliant theory goes. It's because *people like me better* when I'm toned down a little, when I'm not as sharp, when my thoughts are slow enough that we can tolerate each other. Also, alcohol helps me sleep. I remember times, in my early twenties, before I really started drinking, when I would wake up for weeks in a row at 1 or 2am with my girlfriend lying next to me, and the only thing I could think to do was quietly go to work and move some pointless project forward—but it gave me a sense of loyalty and it gave me something to do on those sleepless nights. When I stop drinking, I stop sleeping, I'm even *less* inhibited in some ways, I am completely out of control socially—a general terror. But when I made my suicide attempt, I was completely sober, completely clean off drugs. That was part of the problem. When I'm drunk or using and I get depressed, I drink or use more and it gets me through it. When I'm clean and sober and I get depressed, I look for ways to kill myself. Drinking and using was a way to not kill myself—and I'm glad I had that cushion for as long as I did. I lied down on a picnic table and looked up at the stars and thought about those sleeping pills and then I thought: *Maybe tonight is the night.* Maybe I'm ready to let go to my present—my future is empty. Better to die here in a place that I like than die freezing as a homeless person somewhere in the woods. And maybe they would save me. And maybe they would help me this time, realize I had something really fucked up about me and not just send me out in the world like Dr. Criminal. I knew I should have handed my sleeping pills over to the receptionist because of what I was about to do, but I didn't do it. I sat right next to her in the waiting room, borrowed her phone, but I didn't know who to call. My Brattleboro Refuge emergency card had a list of numbers on it, and the first one was the Brattleboro Refuge, which is right where I was sitting, and I still couldn't ask for help from them. It was embarrassing. I mean admitting to someone that you're about to kill yourself unless they help you..that's a little weird. I had such a strong impulse to take those pills—and a slightly weaker one to ask for help. So I took the pills. I sat on a picnic table and I took the pills. I took one, dry swallowing it. I knew one would have no effect on me. Then I took two. I knew two would put me to sleep in 20 to 30 minutes. Then I took three, then four, and I knew that there was a threshold here where if I took enough, I wouldn't wake up. So I kept taking, and taking, and I took until I thought I was across that threshold. Dry swallowing them became easier and easier, as my intention strengthened. I mean if you have trouble dry swallowing sleeping pills when you're trying to kill yourself, you've got problems. Are you trying to kill yourself or what?? I took enough that I was sure I would die without a trip to the emergency room then I tossed the rest of the bottle in the grass. In fact I hadn't made up my mind about whether those pills would kill me but I was prepared to die if that's what happened. I just dried up, came to the end, felt so alone, so cold, so empty. I rolled the dice, thinking this was a way to get the attention I needed (after not being taken seriously by my last psychiatrist on my last visit to the Refuge). Then I got off the picnic table and walked up to the security guard. I handed him the empty bottle and said, "You might want to call 911." I started walking away from him while he called 911. He came after me and had me sit on a bench by the front entrance and wait and while I sat there I wondered if I would die. ### 64 There it is, the ugly truth. My suicide attempt wasn't really a suicide attempt. It was a cry for help. And I'm worried people in my family who read this will take me less seriously now that they know. Because I do have problems. And they need attention. And I could have died, even though I didn't want to, I was that close. In my suicide attempt I didn't want to die. I wanted to get back into the hospital, because I knew I needed more and better treatment. So I took a risk. I took some pills that could have killed me—but not too many. Just enough to have my attempt taken seriously and get me admitted back into the Refuge. I could have messed up and taken too many pills and died. But it was worth it..to have the chance that I would get into the hospital and have a serious psychiatrist treat my bipolar. Someone like me can't just walk up to the admitting window at the Brattleboro Refuge and say, "Hey, I'm suicidal, please admit me." They would admit me, but they wouldn't take me seriously. I needed them to take me seriously. That's the problem with looking like you're ok on the outside, being well spoken, being intelligent: you don't fit the picture of someone who is in extreme distress, sometimes not even to trained psychiatrists, even after they've interviewed you extensively. But I got what I wanted. A three-week stay in a mental hospital, with a good doctor this time, and someone prescribing medication for my bipolar disorder. One thing I think is telling about this whole situation which I haven't explicitly mentioned yet, is this: when I went out, I didn't tell any of my family or friends. I didn't leave behind any justification nor did I feel the need to explain myself or even reach out one more time to say *I love you*. I didn't write a suicide note—I think that says a lot right there. Other people's thoughts and feelings were of zero importance to me at that moment. My problem isn't between me and some people running around this planet like ants. My problem is between me and the stars. I wasn't trying to make a point to anyone I knew. I didn't want to connect with my family through my suicide. I didn't have any last words I wanted to share with anyone. All those relationships were severed or meant nothing to me at that point. There was no one to talk to, not even to say goodbye. Although I'm asking you to see this as a cry-for-help suicide—because it was—you have to know that I was in a suicidal state performing a suicidal act. In the movie version of Michael Crichton's *Sphere*, Dustin Hoffman plays Sharon Stone's psychiatrist. He's discussing Stone's character with their mission leader. Hoffman says: "It was a passive attempt." The mission leader: "A passive attempt?" Hoffman says: "Yes. People who really want to kill themselves get a gun and shoot themselves—or go over a bridge. They don't call up their boyfriend and say: 'I just took twenty Nembutal..help me.' " That's what I did. I took twenty Vistarils, which had been prescribed to me for sleep. I took them in the courtyard of a mental hospital, with a security guard visible to me at all times. I didn't take the whole bottle of pills. I guessed at a high number of pills that would put me in the hospital with [whatever effects] without taking enough that I thought I couldn't survive those effects. Then I emptied out the rest of the bottle, sprinkling the pills underneath a tree, certain in my paranoid mind that someone would find them—that they would scour the grounds like the crack team from some police procedural. I worried about that for days, that in the ER some doctor would come up to me holding my prescription bottle and say, "We found half a bottle of Vistaril scattered under a tree at the Refuge. You want to tell me how many of these you *really* took?" But I dry swallowed at least twenty of those pills and in the ER doctors did all kinds of blood tests. It was late and there weren't many people on staff, so they took my blood twice—once when I first got there and once many hours later, in the early morning. When they came back with the results, some doctor walked up to my bed and he did question me about how many pills I took. "The whole bottle?" "Well I was using them normally for a while, so it wasn't *the whole bottle*, but I took what was left of the bottle." "How long had you been using these normally before last night?" "I don't know..two weeks..one week? I really have no idea." "The problem is," this doctor said, "we're not seeing high levels of Vistaril in your blood, so.." "I don't know what to tell you," I said, hysterically. "I took what was left of the bottle." "Was it like..forty..fifty pills?" "Something like that. Maybe the charcoal got it out of me, I don't know, I'm not the doctor. Obviously I wasn't thinking clearly if I'm trying to kill myself with my sleeping pills! I wasn't exactly *counting them out* one by one. It was dark. I was outside. I couldn't see how many pills were left in that bottle. I took what was left of the bottle. That's all I can tell you." The doctor stood there looking at me skeptically, holding my Vistaril bottle up at the level of his head. If he had stood there one second longer I was going to bring up the fact that somewhere in this dinky hospital's process, there had been a breakdown by which a suicide patient's initial blood draw had been *lost* (the second nurse who took my blood told me this) so the data he was looking at was based on my blood after they had made me swallow a bunch of charcoal that binds with poison in your stomach in a way that your intestines can't digest it, and after I had been lying awake all night drinking water and having a fucking IV drip clearing up my blood for hours and hours and hours while I awkwardly tried to make the security guard who was assigned to watch me, laugh. He was friendly, but he didn't laugh. He just sat in his chair and made sure I didn't try to kill myself again. Anyway the blood this doctor was looking at was taken seven or eight *hours* after I swallowed those pills—of course the levels are going to be low, don't give *me* a hard time about it. The doctor lowered the prescription bottle, looking at me doubtfully. He walked away. It made me want to kill myself right there in his hospital. While Dustin Hoffman's psychiatrist character in *Sphere* has a point: taking pills is one of the least lethal methods of suicide (jumping off a building, hanging, and shooting yourself in the face are much more effective), attempts by overdose are by far the most common way of trying to kill yourself, so even though suicide by overdose fails most of the time, it still results in a huge amount of deaths just because people do it so often. - - - - When I was in my first interview with Dr. Meggs, my psychiatrist at the Refuge, she passed along to me this information from the ER doctor at Brattleboro Memorial that there was very little Vistaril in my blood, but unlike the ER doc, she did it in a non-threatening way. She wasn't accusing me. She was completely neutral. We were just discussing facts. I told her that his data was based on a 5am blood sample, that they had lost my blood taken when I first arrived at the ER, and, with her head lowered, looking at my chart, she shook her head—but not at me, at Bratt Memorial, and I finally felt I had someone on my side. She gave me some different medicine for sleep, but told me we were making a deal. "I'm only giving you this if you'll promise not to..try to kill yourself with it. You have to assure me that you will not do that or else I won't give it to you. While you're here, you'll be getting it from the med station, but when you get out, I'll only give it to you in one-week prescriptions. So it's going to be a pain for you, you're going to have to refill it every week, but I have to make sure that you don't do what you did before. Understand?" I nodded tearfully, and sniffled. "Do you want a tissue?" I shook my head and wiped my nose on my shirt. "Oh and another thing," my doctor said. "You can never abuse this. I'm saying this for your own good—not because we don't want you to die (that's one thing)—but I want you to be able to sleep and if you try to hurt yourself again, and you use this medicine, no one will ever prescribe it to you again. Ok? I want to help you *create* options, not cut them off." - - - - An implicit statement here was that no one would ever prescribe Vistaril to me again, since I used to to try to kill myself. And that's true. No one ever has. In fact, when I got out of the hospital, and moved to different cities, there were about five years there where I couldn't even remember the name of the sleeping pill I had used to overdose. Doctors would ask me and I just couldn't remember. I think my mind was protecting me—why would I want to remember the medicine I used to risk my life to get back into the hospital? I think my brain said, "No, we're going to keep this from him for a while, until we think he can handle it. He's not ready to think specific thoughts about the specific pills he used that night, used to manipulate a security guard into calling 911, manipulate an ambulance to drive my half-conscious self to the emergency room, manipulate two nurses to make me swallow two big glasses of this charcoal mixture that may have saved my life. Or maybe not. Maybe if I had been able to go home after I swallowed those pills—or if I had been able to refrain from taking them—I could have woken up in the morning feeling horrible or beautiful. But I couldn't have gone home that night. I was never going to leave the courtyard of that psych ward. Something was going to happen. I might have slept in the grass and forced the security guard to call the cops and come arrest me or kill me, but I wasn't leaving that courtyard that night. Something in me, starting during my outpatient class, was slowing down, not making sense. Something unavoidable and fatal was rising up in me. When I went to the bathroom downstairs I knew I had those pills in my cargo pocket—I had all my pills with me. I looked myself in the mirror and just as I used to lie to myself so deeply when I would get in my car and say: *I think I'll go for a drive. Maybe to the grocery store. Maybe back to work*..when I knew just underneath my lies that I was going to the bar..just like that, when I stared in the mirror of the Refuge bathroom I told myself the lie that *maybe I'll just go home and try to sleep off this depression, maybe tomorrow I won't feel like giving up*..I knew right then, when I realized I had sleeping pills in my pocket, that I was going to take them. When I walked past the receptionist, enclosed in glass in the Refuge lobby, I knew that the smart thing to do was to go up to her, give her my pills, and say: "I don't feel safe with these right now. Will you hold them for me?" I knew that. But I was on a track, my actions were determined. I sat in the lobby and meekly asked the receptionist if I could sit here for a while. She said fine, if you need to use the telephone or anything, let me know. I said I'd like to use the telephone. She slid open a window and pushed an old-style telephone out for me. I thought of who to call. I had been in the Refuge, inpatient, twice before—right?—once for pointless rehab off a week of drinking and one night of smoking crack that was too much for me to get over alone. I reached in my wallet. I had my Brattleboro Refuge emergency card with me, with the twenty-four hour emergency number on it (which would ring the woman who had given me the phone, sitting right next to me). The card also specifically reminded me that in an emergency I should call 911. I imagined an EMT crew busting through the front doors of the Refuge—thirty feet from where I sat—and them finding me huddled in a corner with the wire stretched from this phone into the receptionist's cube. *You called 911 from a psychiatric hospital..because you're suicidal? Why not tell the woman at the front desk?* The admitting door to the psych units was just on the other side of that desk. I was exactly where I needed to be. I knew what I needed to do to avoid a suicide attempt. I just couldn't do it. I thought of those times in the tenth grade when me and my best friend were walking together in a long hallway, approaching a place where you would have to go either left or right. And his class was to the left, and my class was to the right, but we'd talk about free will and wonder if we had any. Could I actually go either way I chose, or was *choice* an illusion, was everything determined? It seemed at the time that there was no way to know, but even then, the more we both thought about it and discussed it on our way down that long hallway, the more it seemed like choice *was* an illusion—just a feeling you had, mostly after the fact, that was there to torture your mind with major and minor regrets. You ever do the wrong thing when you know what the right thing is? Ever cheat on a monogamous relationship? Make a totally unnecessary dangerous move on the highway? Take a drug you know is dangerous, just because you're curious? I've done that a lot. And maybe I'm stupid. Or maybe I'm smart, and exploratory. Or maybe it all is determined, and there's no such thing as choice, and we're just watching a movie that none of us can change. Free will is a metaphor. It's useful to us to organize the complex reality we're experiencing. But that's all it is—a metaphor. It's totally false, but we need it as one of the little pieces of magic by which we construct an identity—also a false but useful metaphor. There is no way I "could have done" anything, that night, but feel low and tired in my outpatient class, feel my stomach sink like a block of ice, feel like a baby without a blanket—too cold and neglected, alone. That Brattleboro Refuge card, the emergency plan written on it, a collaboration between me and Michelle, the head nurse, was useless to me. The emergency numbers of people who loved me and I could call in an emergency? 1) I didn't feel any of them loved me. I was suicidally depressed! Love was not something I was feeling for anyone and it was not something I felt I deserved. If anyone said they loved me, they were pretending. What if I do call my old friend Ashley, my mom, my sisters? How do you discuss that with them? *Hi, I want to kill myself. Can we talk?* That is not a discussion people prepare to have. Maybe we should. I was too ashamed of my feelings anyway—if for no other reason, I didn't pick up the phone and dial one of those numbers. I didn't leave a note—what is there to say? If I kill myself, *that's* the statement. Ending your own life? That says pretty much all there is to say. I gave the woman back her phone. I left her and said, "Good night!" "Good night," she said. I feel so cut off—so alone. *And I've felt this way forever.* I hate myself. I feel like an idiot, like everything I do is wrong or displeasing to my parents. Maybe to me. I don't know. I can't even get a job anymore. It felt good to a small degree to do useful things for Mead Research or Anthem, even though it was meaningless work, unchallenging work. At least I made my bosses smile. My bike was chained to the rack at the bottom of the stairs. The security guard was doing his rounds in the parking lot, right where expected. He was part of my plan. I went to a picnic table and fumbled in the dark to figure out which of my bottles was Vistaril. I could see by the light coming from the double doors of the Refuge, barely, and I opened the bottle and started dry swallowing pills. Like I said, I knew with the first few that I was just putting myself to sleep. But I kept taking them. And I knew that with each pill I took, the chance of this being a cry for help and this being the last night of my life, increased. I took another, and another. Dry swallowing pills is hard but I made it work—I needed to—just like when I was in high school, embarrassed by a wart and my parents would not or could not afford to take me to a dermatologist, I got up in the middle of the night and I used a pair of scissors that almost broke with the force it took me to cut through human skin. It was pain beyond pain, but I could not take one more day of the girls at my lunch table looking at my hand and seeing a wart on my finger. That wart made me feel untouchable, and that was pain for me much greater than the pain of cutting around the skin, deep enough to take out the root, in the bathroom with the door locked and my blood running into a porcelain sink. But I did it piece by piece, I cut that wart out of me, with disgust so visceral I can still feel what it's like to use a pair of scissors to cut off the side of your own finger, to cut through your own skin, removing the prints such that they'll never grow back, such that to this day I have a scar on my right index finger. But there's no wart there. And it's a reminder. That I can walk through almost unbearable pain. That I can do what is necessary. That I don't need anyone else to solve my problems—I can solve them myself. If not with an injection or dry ice at the dermatologist's office that I could not get to, I would handle it myself, the old way, with willpower and a pair of scissors. Inside the little bio of Emily Brontë at the end of *Wuthering Heights*, it says that she was once bitten by a rabid dog. It then says that Emily used a "red-hot iron" to cauterize her own wound. She didn't tell anyone and no one knew until someone saw the scars. I don't have a girlfriend—but if I did it would be Emily Brontë. - - - - I took my pills, I looked up at the clear sky, the stars. I thought how many people throughout history and probably tons of intelligent creatures on other planets had looked up at the stars as they killed themselves. With each pill I cared less, and with each pill I wanted to die more. I wanted that to be my last sight, so I lied down on the top of the picnic table and adjusted my glasses, and I looked at all those tiny little stars. I was on the edge, you know? I didn't know how to proceed with my life—I didn't know how to take the next step. And I confused that with death, or I considered death a solution. I didn't have a job. I was losing my apartment. I didn't have friends anymore, since I stopped drinking. I wasn't having sex. My family was far away. My dad had chosen, long ago, to ignore me, and I was just now catching up. Man, if I had a kid who was homeless (as I had been once long ago), or if I had a kid who was up in Vermont (and he was just in Delaware), and my son had called me or emailed me weeks prior to say he had been in rehab, then in a psych ward because mental health workers in his outpatient support group thought he was suicidal, I would have flown my ass up to Vermont, or gotten on a train, or *walked* up that motherfucker until I got to my son, and I would have held him, and rocked him, and I would have cried for us both. Because the world is rotten, but without somebody to hold you, it's impossible. The stars grew blurry with my tears. I didn't even wipe them away. I just took my pills. And I didn't know if I was the manipulator or the manipulated. I didn't know if I was in control or if I was being controlled. But I remembered, somewhere within me, that I didn't want to die. If I twisted around the definitions, I wasn't suicidal, I was actually just lost. So I took my last pill and there were like eight of them left. Or maybe twelve. That's just an estimate from the sound they made when I shook the bottle. I got off the picnic table, went to my favorite tree, watered that monster with Vistaril, and went to the security guard. I think my tree slept well that night. The guard looked uncomfortable as I approached him but I knew he didn't carry a gun so I wasn't worried. I handed him the prescription bottle. It was open, empty, without the cap. "What do you want me to do with this?" he said. "Well, you might want to call 911," I said. And I was laughing. I was laughing and crying in this poor guy's face. He pulled out his phone. Dialed 911. "Yes, this is Mitchell Anderson. I'm with Akai Security Consultants and I've got a young man here who—No, Akai, A-K-A-I. He came up to me and handed me a prescription bottle, it's a big bottle—No, *Akai*, alpha, kilo, alpha—*Listen*, I need an ambulance at the Refuge *right now*. This guy took, I'm assuming—how many of these did you take?" I'm hysterical now. I'm grabbing the guy by the collar of his jacket. "*What does it matter? Hahahahaha!!*" Then I'm burying my face in his jacket and crying and snotting all over him. He firmly pushes me away. "See that bench? I need you to go sit on that bench." I look at the bench. "Yeah, that's him. Right. The Refuge. We're right at the main entrance. You won't miss us." He clicks off. "Would you please sit on that bench?" I go to the bench. I sit. The guy comes and stands in front of me. I bend over and cover my ears and my face with my hands and I start weeping—tears, uncontrollable breaths. I look up and see the stars are still there. I look up at the guy and I take a huge breath in. Huge breath out. "Why do you want to die?" he says. "Because *everything* is a huge farce," I say, and I raise my arms as if to include everything..everything..the security guard, the Brattleboro Refuge, my outpatient class, myself, and all those tiny little, huge little stars that are raining down before me. ### 65 Sometime in the night they switched security guards on me. They didn't handcuff me to the bed or anything, but at first they had this guy—literally the hospital security guard—sitting in a chair watching me. We talked some, mostly me making wild jokes that he definitely did not think were funny: "What happened to the guy who tried to kill himself by taking 100 pain killers? After two he began to feel better." No laugh. "Ok, you'll like this one. I can tell you're a smart guy. So there's this physicist walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. He sees a man about to jump. Just before the man jumps, the physicist yells: 'Don't do it! You have so much potential!' No? Not into the physics jokes, o-k. Hmm. Ok. Ok. This one's good. You can't not like this joke. If you don't like this joke, there's something wrong with you, and I don't even like jokes. Here goes. Why did Hitler kill himself? Because he saw his gas bill." Fuck. "That went over like a lead blanket. Do you mind if I talk." "No. I don't mind. I'm here to keep you company." "And make sure I don't kill myself." He shrugs. "I have a lot more suicide jokes that are much sicker but I'm sensing you're not into the whole suicide joke thing right now, so I'm gonna leave those alone..you're welcome." The guy smiles with one side of his mouth. Then somewhere around 3am that guy had to go fill out security guard paperwork or something so they sent in the janitor. Guy looked like he'd lived in Vermont forever. Coveralls (Dickies), boots that could cut through a *lake* of ice, a hat that covered most of his face. He asked the security guard if I'd been any trouble, the security guard said no, and then this Vermonter sat in a folding chair by the door of the room where my bed was. He put his head down, his hands cupped over his forehead where I couldn't see his eyes. He sighed. "Long night?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, not looking up. "You always work nights?" I asked. He looks up at me. "I used to work days. Fifteen years I worked days. Then my wife died so I don't have anything to really do when I go home, so they needed someone to work nights and I said, 'What the hell.' Now I like nights better." "Nights *are* better," I say. "Because of the people?" he asks. "Exactly. Day people are aggro—" "What's aggro?" "Aggressive. Slang they use out west. But night people—customers and workers—it's a whole different vibe." "It's a whole different speed!" he says. "I know, man. Day people'll run you over just to get to work five seconds earlier. To a job they fucking hate." "Exactly right," this guy says. "Exactly." "You get many suicides in here?" I ask. He sighs heavily. "Two or three a year." "Got any advice for me? Like words of wisdom past suicidal victims have passed on to you, that you could pass on to me, so I can live my life better?" He looks at me for about nine seconds and then says: "Don't kill yourself." Don't kill yourself! That's his advice! That's why I love these fucking Vermonters: they're so down to Earth, so simple, so practical. I mean, yeah, what else is this fucking custodian going to say? He's no psychiatrist. It's like telling a drunk: *Don't drink alcohol.* It's advice so simple it just might work. Don't kill yourself. Don't drink alcohol. *Don't take a selfie with a rattlesnake.* Life is hard—ok it's *really* hard. But along with being hard it's also simple. You *know* what you need to do. *Doing it* is the hard part. If you ever need advice, I recommend you skip the internet, skip the psychiatrists, and find yourself a Vermonter. They've gone all the way around the complex stuff and come back to the simple—and that's what you need when you're in trouble. You don't need a philosopher. You need a guy who works the night shift, knows what it's like to lose a wife, wears Dickies to work, mops the floors without comment, and when he sees a snake or a bear on his property, he doesn't ask it how it's feeling—no—he grabs his shotgun and blows the motherfucker's head off. *That's* the advice you need. ### 66 In the morning they put me on a stretcher and take me away in an ambulance to the Brattleboro Refuge. I feel embarrassed and stupid and the EMTs say, "No, you're getting the help you need." During the ambulance ride from the hospital to the Refuge, I felt like a schmo that I tried to kill myself and this is really my life situation. This shit here is real. Talking to the EMT in the back with me. He was like, "How do you feel?" And I was like, "Stupid." He was very encouraging. "How did you get here?" he asked. So I went through the whole thing in fast speed. "Suicide attempt in the Brattleboro Refuge lawn. Jump back a little. What had started all this was me getting stressed with work, starting drinking again, losing my job, getting drunk and lonely enough that I blew the rest of my already-failing bank account to smoke crack with a couple a strangers, coming out of it in the morning like: *Fuck, I have no money. No job. I'm going to get evicted. And being so mad at myself that I smoked crack again. I fucking hate crack. But that's the only way you can get cocaine when you're dealing with poor people!!* Next came a week of rehab, this Refuge outpatient program where they observed me and said I was acting suicidal. So I had a first hospitalization where Dr. Criminal didn't do a good job—his name is actually Dr. Criminal, yes, I'm not making this up..like there's a guy in the midwest who sells RVs, his name is Tom Raper, no lie..so Dr. Criminal didn't take my suicidality seriously, didn't even really pay attention to me to be honest, during a week-long stay in the fucking *hospital*. It's like, *you're a psychiatrist dealing with suicide cases*, you can't exactly phone this shit in. Now here we are presumably at my next admittance..after a suicide attempt..or was it?..maybe I'm just crazy enough to risk my life to get back into the hospital to get the help I *THINK I FUCKING NEED*. This *could be* my way of asking for help. I *could have* just *said* I was suicidal but when I did that *my doctor didn't listen*. He discharged me before I was ready to go and *without diagnosing me* or *giving me any medicine*. SO THAT'S THE BRIEF VERSION, SINCE YOU ASKED, MY DROOGIE!!" The EMT looked at me, totally calm, and said, "I hope you get the help you need this time." They admit me. The EMTs leave. The second I got on Tyler 2, I went up to the nurses' station and said: "I am requesting a doctor change." Michelle said, "Who would you like?" "I don't know I just need to try someone different this time. Stripes swears by her doctor, can I have her?" "Actually for you I'm going to suggest Dr. Meggs." "Great. Thank you, Michelle." "You are most welcome," she sings. That little event that just happened was one of the most fortuitous events of my life. Yeah there was transference and countertransference but in a way there *had* to be in order to have as productive a doctor-patient session as Dr. Meggs and I had over the next three weeks and beyond. I was a special patient to her. She was a special doctor to me. Given the circumstance, that was what was needed, and that was thankfully what I got. On every visit to the Refuge after my suicide attempt, I saw Dr. Criminal as we passed each other in the hallway. Those were always awkward looks! We never spoke. I wondered how he felt, and I always nodded at him respectfully. As I mentioned, one of the substance abusers counsellors tried to explain to me that "He [Dr. Criminal](#) is old school." That was supposed to mean he didn't believe in prescribing a lot of medication. I was never mad at Dr. Criminal back then. I was very pragmatic—I just wanted to solve my problems, I just wanted to get the help I needed. I wasn't into blaming anyone (but myself). But looking back at Dr. Criminal now—yeah I'm mad. A patient comes in on the recommendation of your own staff because he's expressing suicidal ideation in his outpatient rehab class. He's been diagnosed bipolar by two hospitals now—one in California five years ago (where he ended up after calling a suicide hotline) and then diagnosed bipolar *again* after being admitted to the rehab unit of this very hospital. At least throw a brother an antidepressant, you know what I'm sayin'? All he gave me was sleeping pills and a weak anti-anxiety med. - - - - My first interview with Dr. Meggs. My first interview with Dr. Meggs was incredible as a clinical example of doctor-patient exchange. I wanted to talk and she was ready to help me do it. I quickly found myself crying uncontrollably and this psychiatrist I had known for thirty minutes gets me to reveal something I'd never spoken about to *anyone*— doctor, family member, anyone. Part of the reason I never talked about it is I didn't realize it wasn't normal, but somehow Dr. Meggs asked the right question to unlock the fact that during my potty training period, my dad would humiliate me by making me clean my own shit out of my shitty underwear with my bare hands, rubbing my underwear in the toilet to manually clean them. Dr. Meggs told me that was an act of humiliation of me by my dad. She told me we learn how to relate to people from our first relationships and one of the first relationships I learned—thanks, Dad!—was humiliator/humiliated, and that she thinks ever since then, I've been playing that same game with others, only with me in the humiliator position because I wanted to make sure I was never in the humiliated position again. Best therapeutic lesson of my life. Right there. Dr. Meggs. Boom. Yeah, head nurse Michelle—thank you—thank you for picking that doctor for me. Holy shit. I started crying tears of catharsis that moment and I've been crying them ever since, right up to today as I type this fucking sentence. Right as I typed that period: tears of catharsis. Whoah. I'm been humiliating others because I was taught to do so before I learned to talk. I've been making myself humiliation-proof since *before I learned to talk.* In thirty minutes of talking she gets me to share something I've never shared before with anyone in thirty-three years of life and multiple years of therapy. In her notes she writes, "Patient is very labile" which means I was weeping like they do in the Bible, wailing, crying my fucking head off. I told Dr. Meggs that Dad used the bathroom (took a shit) with the door open in the first floor bathroom near the breakfast table where us kids were eating breakfast, that he's obsessed with taking a shit the same time every day and precisely manipulates his diet with fiber to achieve this. That he showered with us to a late age. That Mom tells us stories that he couldn't deal with us (his family) in the early days in Dallas, Texas and he would disappear to Florida for weeks at a time and write Mom letters about how he just couldn't handle the stress and responsibility of having a family. When confronted about this, Dad flatly denies it ever happened, even though, when scanning Mom's old stuff for her, I found the letters, written in Dad's hand, postmarked from Florida. Even in the face of me telling him I've held the letters in my hand, read them, seen the postmark, he denies that ever happened. My hate for putting together furniture, yard work, mowing the lawn, fixing things especially plumbing, and carpentry..I have strong negative associations of doing those things with Dad and memories of Dad yelling and cussing at inanimate objects that didn't do what he wanted them to do. To this day I have a strong, decompensatory reaction to lawn mowing, putting together IKEA furniture, any kind of house repairs..I was always the guy holding the flashlight while my dad did the real work. He never explained what he was doing or included me in it—he just made me hold the flashlight and yelled at me when it drifted into the wrong place. My mom had her sisters over to visit when my parents were newly married. Dad came out in his underwear and acted like it was completely normal and acceptable to be conversing with his wife's sisters in his underwear. Mom was like: "What are you doing?" Dad dances around a little so my mom's sisters can see the outline of his cock. "Nothing," he says. "Go put some clothes on!" "Why?" My mom's sisters squirm uncomfortably on the couch. Dad says: "What's wrong? Why is everyone so tight about human sexuality? It's natural. It's part of life. God made it. Anyway my dad put the down payment on this house so even though we're married I figure this house is at least fifty-one percent mine." He jumps up and down, in just his socks and underwear, and his penis bounces with him. *Fifty-one percent.* "Does anyone disagree with that figure?" After Mom and Dad divorced, Dad and his new wife had sex in the same tent where his daughter, my sister, was also an occupant. He didn't care for the effect of this on her, or was just so clueless and insensitive that he didn't think it would *have* an effect. After Joanne shut him out of her life for five or ten years, he stopped inviting her to Thanksgiving. When I accepted, and was at his house with Leona, I discovered that he hadn't invited Joanne and that became a pivotal point in my period of anger toward him. If you are the parent, you keep inviting your children—all of them—to holidays until you're dead or not doing any more holiday parties. Years later I sent email to my dad and his new wife making fun of her face and calling her a "chipmunk bitch" (which is exactly what she looks like). I told him in those letters [voicemail, actually] if he ever again failed to invite Joanne to a family event that I would kill him. Then I told him I was going to come to Delaware and kill myself on his porch so he'd never be able to forget me. He filed a restraining order. I was in California coming down off crystal meth at the time and felt much more reasonable when the drug worked its way all the way through me. But I have always wanted my dad's attention. I think I still do. But I know by now that is something I will never, ever have. - - - - Memory of squatting over the cooling vent in the floor, looking out the picture windows, and taking a nice warm shit in my underwear. Then Dad, gruff voice, yelling at me in the bathroom and making me wash the shit out of my underwear in the toilet. "Did you play with fire as a child?" "Yes, up to the ninth grade I made my own bombs, traps, explosives. I had my own mixtures of wax and rocket fuel that would burn and I set ants on fire with caps and a magnifying glass. My mom was terrified. These were large fires I was creating. My dad and I almost burned down a state forest playing with fireworks in the summer." "Did you wet the bed?" "Until the third grade, at least." "How often do you deal with thoughts of suicide?" "Every day." "Every *day*?" "Yes." "Since when?" "Since high school." "Well, we're lucky to still have you with us, aren't we?" "Uh..I'm not sure what modicum of luck that furnishes for you or what degree of unluck it rains upon me." "Well I think we are lucky you're still with us. Will you allow me my opinion?" "Yes, of course." "If you think about suicide every day, how come this is your first attempt? How have you overcome the desire—or the temptation—for so long..for years?" "It's a discipline. Mostly I just keep in mind that like any of us, I could die any minute, so why rush it? I mean the reality is that this may be the last conversation I ever have with anyone, so I might as well enjoy it. Obviously I'm of two minds on the subject—I am struggling, sometimes very intensely, to be able to enjoy life in this society, with the actual people who are present for me to interact with..but also I do find great joy in experiencing certain types of moments." "Like what? Give me an example of a moment you enjoy." "Anything. Like drinking a glass of water. Or..mostly..talking with smart people." "Sex?" "Yes, I enjoy sex, especially if it's with someone I love, or at least a friend that I'm sexually attracted to." Dr. Meggs is taking notes furiously. Our session lasts a full hour that day. It is one of the formative hours of my life. "I probably shouldn't tell you this—I could get fired for telling you this but there's a certain school of thought..well at least some people say that life starts after your first suicide attempt. *Don't repeat that.* But since you've already done it, you might as well think of your attempt in as positive a light as possible. That's what I'm thinking anyway. Anything else you want to tell me?" "Yeah. In LA I used to change my number every night. Sitting in front of a movie, eating enchiladas and drinking wine, I'd call my carrier and request a new number, any number, just something that no one I knew, had—to guarantee no one could call me. Paranoia? Need for security? Need for isolation? Not being able to trust people, in general..my dad." Dr. Meggs nodded like that made perfect sense. And I was glad it did, to her. "And you know what else?" "Tell me." "I have this memory, my last night in LA, talking to my dad on my cell phone in my second-floor room of Gideon's crack motel. And when we were done, even though I needed help desperately and my dad was the only person who could give it to me, I felt like such *shit* after my conversation with him, that I felt something that had been an undercurrent all my life, but had never surfaced until now—I wanted to kill myself. I can't blame my suicidality on my dad, of course. It's *my* psychology, it's *my* responsibility, as far as I can do anything about my psychology. But the fact remains, that after a certain point in my life, every time I had a conversation with my dad, the things he said, the things he didn't say, and the spaces in between, made me feel very clearly that my dad did not want to have a relationship with me, even a one-call-a-week relationship..and as I thought back, as far as I could remember, I knew something that was so harmful to my psyche that I could hardly let myself believe it—and that is that my dad and I have *never* had a meaningful relationship. The only thing he got right was taking me and my sisters to walk in Fairmount Park when we lived in Philadelphia. I loved playing with my sisters on rock formations. But Dad walked along behind us, probably thinking about his childhood and his dad. There was no relationship. We didn't play *together*. We didn't talk, except for when he told us it was time to go home. That was the only thing he got right. The rest of it was stuff like forgetting to pick me up from the SATs, when it was an hour after the test had ended and all the students and teachers had left and locked up and I was standing alone in an empty parking lot in the winter, in west Philly, doing breathing exercises so my body wouldn't shiver so much..*that's* when my dad finally showed up. He wasn't going to waste any of *his* time getting there early *to be ready for me* when the test ended. He got there when he knew *he wouldn't have to wait* on me. It was that way with every after-school activity me and my sisters did. He was always late, one-hundred percent of the time—and that sends a powerful message. "So I was in that crack motel realizing for the first time that listening to Dad talk made me want to kill myself. He let me know—and he has let my sisters know—over and over that we are not priorities in his life. Work takes priority over his kids. Sex takes priority over his kids. Home improvement projects take priority over his kids. His cats take priority over his kids. Once he called me, telling me Tiger, his cat, had gotten hit by a car and died. I couldn't find a honey drop of empathy within me. *How about don't leave the front door open when you have inside cats?* was the only sensible thing I could think to say. But of course I didn't want to suggest that he might have been partially responsible—that thought, with a cat, with his kids, would have been too much for him to take. "So I changed my number. I thought, why should I be accessible by voice to a man who, when he speaks, drastically increases the chance I will kill myself *tonight*." I told Meggs I spent my childhood trying to please my dad, to figure out what I could do that would make him happy. She explains to me that probably nothing I did would have ever made him happy. "But I think in general, my number changing didn't have as much to do with my dad or Josh from work calling me and pretending to have a relationship with me that they did not have. "It was *my* fear. "It was just *my* fear of being close to other people. "But, I mean, Josh, my dad..those weren't people who had any kind of benefit to offer me. They were leachers, manipulators, and I think M. Scott Peck would agree with me that both of those people were evil in the greatest sense of the word." And then later I was talking about how: "I hate strip clubs. Except the part where they spread their pussy lips and it's all red inside—I like that part. I mean this is LA, this is meth, and this is how motherfuckers like Josh English dream of (and talk a bunch of shit about) fucking strippers, but I've actually done it. But Josh took me to my first strip club I ever went to and had me drive even though he knew we'd both be drunk—obligation to the superior employee at the company (how could I say no?). I hate strip clubs and I pretty much hated what they had to offer. "But you know what I do want? "What?" "I want somebody I can talk to sixteen hours a day, fuck the other eight, and drive across the country in a pickup truck for the rest of our lives. It has to be somebody totally crazy, or I'd never be interested, so my best chance of meeting this person is in a psychiatric ward. Unfortunately I don't plan on spending too much more time in the psych ward, as it's not my favorite place to be, so I figure AA meetings or meditation retreats, those might be my last great hope for places I could find some beautiful, formerly crazy person who is currently in the business of getting well." I'm silent. So is my psychiatrist. So I talk some more. "What I never told anyone then, and what I'll tell you now, re: my suicide attempt, I just knew I needed to be back in this hospital, I knew I needed this kind of care, but better than I had under Dr. Criminal. I did what I needed to do to get back in this building, simple as that. I communicate well. I look ok from the outside. I seem smart. So it's hard for me to get the care I need. You know what I'm talking about, about how a doctor makes an assessment not just on symptoms but also on *class*? I did something that would make my doctor take me seriously and I made sure I had a better doctor than the one I had before. I needed help, and I was willing to risk my life to get it." "Next time just come to the front desk." "Would you all have known how dire my circumstances are if I had done that." Dr. Meggs looks at me deeply. "I don't know." - - - - "I want to say: *It's sad when the person in the family who's tried to kill himself and has been to two different mental hospitals and the most therapy of everyone seems (most of the time) to be the family member who has it most together, psychologically.* But it's not sad, it's not even surprising. When people don't seek help, sometimes it is because they don't need help—but sometimes it is just because *they aren't seeking help*. Ironically, the person who survives a crisis may end up with better help, better coping skills, and a generally saner mindset than those who cope on their own without occasionally leaning on the professionals. "It's just like alcoholism: if you drink in a way that causes you problems so small that you never become aware of them, you may ultimately find yourself in worse shape than the alcoholic who drinks to the point of crisis, has to face their problem, and stops drinking. A recovering addict in Tucson shared with me his theory that everyone is an addict, but that we all have our own trajectory of addiction. If your trajectory is low, you'll be causing yourself drug-related problems all your life without ever being forced to face the cause of those problems. If your trajectory is high, you'll either a) die, or b) you'll be forced to face the reality of the role addictive drugs have been playing in your life, and you'll have a shot—just a shot—at living without them. "I think of it as the pebble/boulder analogy." "What is that?" "If you're walking on a path, and over time all these little pebbles are getting in your shoes, but they're so small you don't notice them, you may be in worse shape at the end of the walk than a person who finds a boulder in her way, totally obstructing her path. She won't be able to ignore the problem. She'll have to address the problem of the boulder one way or another before she can continue on the path. Better to encounter a major obstruction than a minor bump. One you're forced to deal with; the other, ignored, causes more pain over time." During our talk, Meggs and I talked about the grand and the small, the abstract and the concrete. I told her that I feel bad for not paying my rent lately—that that was one of my biggest stressors—and Dr. Meggs literally responded by saying: "Shit happens." "Is that your professional opinion?" I laugh. She says, "Well, let's just say we have bigger fish to fry." This was a huge perspective shift for me. And it didn't just apply to recently. I've been making out the losing-my-apartment stuff as huge, and minimizing the mind-not-working stuff, all my life. My jobs have always been my #1 priority, even above my own needs—making sure everything goes great on the job has been my primary objective since my first computer programming job. Guess what? I learned that from my dad. That was the example he set: even when it came down to job versus family, with him, job won. And I became the same way. And it took many more visits to the hospital and many more years of my life to deeply understand this: that all these ages I have been sacrificing my life and my mental health to make *job* and *apartment* and *girlfriend* work out, when my priorities should have been *my mental health* and then all those other things. I shamelessly blame my father's influence in stressing the all-important work ethic..work at all costs, never let the mission fail, the job as a whole is more important than me as an individual. I'm expendable; the job is eternal. That kind of thinking almost killed me. But in the end, we're all building sand castles. You're going to die. How about live a *jaw-dropping* life on the way down. And to my critics, really, walk in my shoes: try to stay alive, with bipolar, even on lithium, without killing yourself. Try to live through psych hospitals, and mania, and depression, and see if you wouldn't make the exact same decisions I did. End of meeting with Dr. Meggs. ### 67 Then someone brought me my lunch in my room. It was Michelle, the head nurse, and I picked at my food. It was dry hamburgers and I had to apply all the ketchup and relish and mustard packets that came with them to make them possible to swallow. A girl came by, maybe 19, covering her mouth with her hands. Then she opened up a window in her hands so she could speak. "I'm Faith." "I'm Matthew." "You tried to kill yourself?" "Yeah." (I start crying.) "Don't feel bad," she says, and she shows me her arms. "I've tried to kill myself lots of times. You'll be ok." Patient info is supposed to be private, so how Faith knew I tried to kill myself is unknown. But she was the only patient who came by to comfort me. She was so accepting and comforting, and I found out we both have bipolar! We talked at the door (because you're not allowed to go into people's rooms) and an old woman from next door butted in and offered me her lunch but I said I already had one and that's the only time I saw her—that was her last day at the hospital—and by the time you read this she'll probably be dead. Faith was so matter of fact. There was no charge associated to suicide with her..she didn't have any stigma, any judgment. She talked about it like we were discussing basketball scores. How you did it, when you did it, did they take you to the ER, what happened at the ER, were the ambulance drivers nice? I was in a new world now, where suicide wasn't a hush word. Even in my family, as open as we are, it's not something people feel comfortable just discussing. I think that's because of the *why* question—in my family setting, there's always the question of why you would want to do that. It isn't understood. But in here, with Faith, it was understood: a) you were ill. b) life sucked. I mean, god, doesn't everyone understand how hard life is and how much life sucks for me? They probably don't. They're probably able to tolerate what me and Marlon Brando call, "The horror, the horror." And some of them are actually enjoying it. That is a truly horrifying fact to me—that some people are actually enjoying this world. Faith left, re-covering her mouth window with her hands. - - - - Then I thought I was all cried out and I found my hunger for that second hamburger and I went to the break room to get some ketchup for these incredibly dry hamburger patties and I was just standing there in front of the refrigerator with the door open and I started to cry silently, and then I was wailing like a dog who lost her baby puppy to a traffic accident, lost everything that was important to her in the world. I didn't care who heard me me, I didn't care that the refrigerator door was open, I didn't care about the ketchup or the hamburger patties or how anyone in my family would perceive my actions or if I died or lived, if I ever made another step forward in my useless, *useless* fucking life. And that is when I wailed the most—I sounded like an animal who was being tortured *right then*. The night before I had wanted help—so I cried for help. I did what I had to do to get back into this hospital. But now that I was here I knew something about myself that I hadn't even known taking those pills, rolling the dice with my life, looking up at the stars. And that was this: I may not have really wanted to die..but I *really* did not want to live. And those two things are a lot closer to each other than one would like to think when trying to figure out if you or someone else is *really suicidal* or "just" crying for help. If you are crying for help by rolling the dice with your life, then you really are suicidal. In the break room of Tyler 2 in the Brattleboro Refuge in Brattleboro, Vermont, standing in front of a refrigerator full of milk and juice and zillions of disposable condiment packages..that was my precipice. Staring at what I had come for—ketchup—I could neither grab a handful of ketchup packages nor close the refrigerator door and not grab them. I could not go back—I could not undo a *suicide attempt*, the scariest part of which is that I didn't take it all that seriously—and I could not go forward: I did not know how to live my life..*in this world*..*with these people*..everything up to now had been jobs that made me wish I had never been born and people whose talk and whose minds made me wish *they* had never been born..I deeply hated this world and thirty-three years of genuine and optimistic and energetic attempts to fit into high school and college and corporations made me want to die. It did. It always had. I had only endured for this long out of what I now know is an extraordinary sense of optimism. And maybe staying power, persistence, determination to solve a problem..that cannot be solved. I wanted to die when my mom dropped me off at preschool and I wanted to die every first day of school and I wanted to die when I met the young men I would be living with in my dorm at Ohio University and I wanted to die in every single job interview I've ever been to and I wanted to die on the first day of every job I ever worked because it was all these people running around doing things that *made absolutely no difference* to the world—it was all *empty*—and they were doing it anyway. Either they had gotten used to the emptiness, sometime in their lives, or *they didn't know* it was empty—both were horrifying. I could not move—literally and figuratively. That's why I was standing in front of the refrigerator in the break room with the refrigerator door open, down on one knee, then down on two, one hand on a flimsy wire shelf to stabilize myself, the other covering my face. I have been stuck before. I have stopped walking on the sidewalk and stood there for an hour, unable to move because I can't justify *moving on* in my life, until a friend came along and un-stuck me. I have been stuck other times, I have been trapped in mazes, chasing phantoms and running from them. But I have never been stuck like I was in that break room, not before or since, in my whole life. I was crushed, crumpling, threatening like some black hole to go supermassive, reach the size of the entire universe then disappear—nothing—a speck of dust collapsed upon itself, leaving no evidence of the torture it had been living under for three decades..just..gone. Then there was a hand on my shoulder, and I could see just what my tears allowed, but a gentle voice was there and someone closed the refrigerator door. And then this mental health tech—taller than me, taller than my father—wraps his arms around me and hugs my shoulders, holds me tight against his chest, and I can feel his breath, and I can feel my breathing, and we synchronize, and my breathing slows, and we are one animal, wrapped together in arms, two brothers become one brother, two cells become one cell, and my convulsions calm and my wail becomes a weep and my weep becomes a sob and my sob becomes a cry and, with the comfort of a stranger who has maybe never even felt what I felt, but who knows, simply, that I need a hug, my cry becomes a tear, just a single tear coming out of my left eye, small enough that I can wipe it away with my index finger. Now that I can see again, I see this kind man who took me into his arms when *I NEEDED A GODDAMN HUG!!* That's all I needed right then, was for someone who had some peace in them to give me a goddamn hug. And someone did, this mental health tech who I only had one short conversation with, days later—and when I say short I mean he and I have shared fewer than twenty words with each other. But that hug—*that hug*—was the hug that so far I have needed the most in this life. And someone gave it to me. A stranger—who like any good mammal will take care of babies it didn't even give birth to, babies of another *species*—a stranger gave me that hug. My own parents have never hugged me like that. My mom doesn't like to touch—the closest we usually get is a high five—and my dad gives that weak slap-hug that men do so they don't get close to each other. I'm not like that. I need *touch*. After the first night we slept together, my friend Astrea said, "I never knew how much I like to be cuddled." Yeah, that's how I do it—I want you to know all night long, through your sleep, through your dreams, that I love you. I want your *body* to feel that I love you. And when I give hugs to people I really love, I touch their heads. I put one hand on their back and one hand on their head. Now *that's* a hug. And that's the kind of hug *I* need..and that I have gotten so rarely in my life. Our conversation was impossible to understand, even by us—he said there are rules about mental health technicians touching clients, but that he thought this was a case where breaking the rules was a good choice and I said thank you. That hug is exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it, and I told him I was glad he broke the rule because that hug helped me start to survive again. And it is an event I will never forget, my entire life. - - - - The next day after my suicide attempt I didn't realize I had black chalk residue all over my face from the hospital and I knew how horrible I must have looked when David the RN took my vitals and right after that for Dr. Mary Alice Meggs's initial meeting with me, where I was wailing and weeping. But it quickly sunk in with me that I was in a place where, as Dr. Meggs had put it so succinctly, we had bigger fish to fry. - - - - My first night in Tyler 2 after my suicide attempt, I put a note on the outside of my door asking them to please kill me. I think I used the word, "execute." I'm not sure. Then I lied down to go to sleep. This mental health tech named Frank came in when he was doing his rounds and sat down on the side of his bed and said he wouldn't kill me. He had the note in his hands. "Why do you want us to kill you, Matthew?" "Because then it wouldn't be suicide, you know, but I'd be dead anyway. Don't you do executions here?" Frank laughed. "No, we don't do executions." I cried. "I heard you tried to kill yourself," Frank said. And I said, "Yeah. I guess I didn't try hard enough." Frank laughed. "See. That's good. You still have your sense of humor. A sense of humor can be like a flashlight in dark situations like this—believe me—I've seen it many times. People who are able to keep their sense of humor have a powerful tool that other people don't have. Because humor is a perspective..on life. You know what I mean?" I nod. "You can see a thing as funny, or you can see it as sad. Most things are both. But if you can *choose* which was you see a thing—even for a second—you're in a lot better position than someone whose perspective is chosen for them." And as Frank talked to me I remembered something. A me I used to be. I am at dinner. It is the first city I ever lived in. Someone says something funny, and someone else makes a play off of it. I feel my lips curling. And I put my fork down. There will be no eating for me for the next few minutes. My mom says, "Swallow." I swallow my food. Then I laugh. And I laugh. And everyone stops eating. And even my dad smiles. What is funny to everyone else is hilarious to me. My laughter is so out of control, the joke echoing in my brain, that I clutch my sides to try to keep it in, but it builds and builds until I am holding onto the table to keep myself from falling off my chair. But that's exactly what I do, as my family watches. They laugh tamely and I am laughing out of control, mouth open, hands on my cheeks and and the top of my head. Then I slide off my chair like some thick mixture of flour and water and I am rolling on the wood-slat floor, filling the dining room with my response to some tiny intellectual pun, or more likely some subtle piece of irony, and I roll on the floor, dinner to me forgotten, and my parents look at each other and they can't help but laughing, and my sister Joanne, usually the serious one, is looking around at everyone for cues that it's ok for her to laugh at me laughing—not even at the original joke, which everyone has forgotten. And my littlest sister Leona, in a baby chair that attaches to the surface of the dinner table in a way that never looked safe, is laughing and laughing and laughing and she throws her fork down, and it bounces across the table, and I can't see my parents, but I'm making eye contact with Joanne and Leona, and they are laughing purely because I am, Leona so young she can't even speak, but she gets in on the frenzy of the thing, and either my mom or my dad—I can't remember which—says to the other, "Well, there he goes," and takes a bite of their food. See, this was a nightly event. Because I could find something funny in every conversation. And the world wasn't just small-chuckle funny to me—it was fall-on-the-floor-laughing funny to me..every single night. That is a goddamn happy childhood right there. And I remember doing that as far as into the second city we lived in, even when at first the neighborhood was so scary to us that on the first night we ordered pizza in, huddled together in the living room, and listened, outside, to the sounds of gunshots and screaming. There were crack vials on the sidewalk, burning cars on the street. But I still fell on the floor laughing at dinner, and I laid there till I was all laughed out, till my sides and my cheeks hurt and my mind had fully comprehended just how fucking funny this world can be. Then I would climb back into my chair, straighten my placemat, and look at my mother's eyes—the only one to still be paying attention to me at that point in my laugh recovery cycle. She was taking in every detail, trying to figure out if this was something to worry about or if it was something normal. That's the analysis she would have been doing. And I don't know what conclusion she came to, but eventually she looked away, and I returned to my food—with maybe a little straggler laugh—and my mom suggesting I do one at a time, laughing and eating, so I wouldn't choke. So I exhale and return to the communal activity, but inside me I was full, and light, and clear, and bright. Humor has always been a way I tell someone's sharpness, and my ability to respond to it a way I keep grips on my own health. When I was a kid, some things were so funny to me that I literally lost control of my body, in my echoes and convulsions, and fell on the floor laughing. Like *Cecilia*: *I fall on the floor and I laughing. Jubilation. She loves me again.* As a fourth grader, and before, I had that kind of laughter, that jubilation that is spoken of in the Bible—trumpets, cymbals—a kind of laughter we don't think is possible today, that is reserved for the times when God spoke to people directly and Goddesses took their pleasure from men..times when there was real cause for jubilation and not a daily mass of horror on the television, which seems to have been invented solely for the spread of not just fear but *terror* into our homes every night we watch it. Only children, who have not learned yet to fear, can fall from their dinner tables at a puzzlebox of wit, convulsing and snorting and breaking up on the floor. - - - - That night I dreamed that someone was banging the back of my head against a bathroom counter, pink tile like the Dallas bathroom, as an infant—the tile was breaking like a dry cracker, my malleable little skull taking the hits and misforming itself to protect what was within. ### 68 Every other Saturday was sing along with David the RN who played the guitar and belted out the lyrics which were laminated and spread out on the floor and we each got to pick a song to sing and Faith sat next to me and maybe because we were both bipolar we belted out the lyrics and I liked her sitting next to me because she threw it all out there and didn't care what anyone would see or hear. And I was the same way, belting out the lyrics with Faith and David while all the other patients sat there meekly mouthing the words to the songs. You're in a psych ward, god dammit, if you can't let loose here then you can't let loose anywhere! Almost everyone you meet here will be gone in a week!! Do you care what they think? I picked *Brown Eyed Girl* and when we actually sang it, it made me cry so much I left the room. I loved Faith for the way she sang, and I thought she really got something right about life that way. And I feel like people outside of psych hospitals are so god damn *unemotional* and I think you're all really missing out on life—no less. Faith and were sitting next to each other when *Brown Eyed Girl* came around and she looked at me, scared, while for the first half of the song I was belting it out with her even as I had begun to cry. I sat there belting it until the tears were streaming down my face and Faith was looking from me to David to check and see if I was ok but David the raucous RN was jamming away on the guitar keeping the music going. I didn't care who saw me cry—if you're in a mental hospital, and you're that self-conscious, maybe you're in the wrong place. But eventually the emotion got too much for me, and I'm not sure which brown-eyed girl those lyrics were killing me over, if it was Rebecca, or if it was my sisters, or my Mom, or—more likely—none of the above, just a song of love and laughter and light hitting me so hard in my chest that I was beaming it out like a prism and I had to get up from that room and leave. And Faith will come after me, when the song is over, and check on me sitting in the cushy chair outside the social workers' office, and she'll break the no-touching rule for a second and hold my hand and tell me it will be ok. And I will lean forward, and really break the no-touching rule, and put my hand and my lips on that girl's head long enough for it to mean *thank you*. - - - - Now a week will pass, and a Saturday without a sing along will come, and it will be sad, and in the psych ward's slow way another week will pass—of washing clothes, changing safety levels on the nurses' giant whiteboard, going through the motions of changing clothes and taking a shower. And two weeks later it will be another sing along, and almost all the people will be new, except David the RN who belted the lyrics and blasted the guitar and me and Faith, the only two bipolar people in the place, and a couple other regulars. I won't care if they call me Lewis Carrol 'cause faith is *twenty* (or nineteen anyway, she's of age) and I'm not fucking her—not that I wouldn't—but in here she's my friend because we have the same disease, and we understand each other, we understand it when we cry and when we rage and when we hop around like bunnies and slam our hands on the desk saying "Yahtzee!!" scaring all the nurses. Faith is my friend because we both have bipolar disorder, and yes, that means we are attracted to each other, as whatever—as everything—but I do know that it's good to have a friend in a psych ward. Faith at the Refuge, the only place I ever saw her. I saw her there over multiple visits, at first gaining her trust after seeing her as an interesting person who was enemies with everyone. She had a ball or a stuffed animal or something and I asked her if I could hold it. She says "No," of course, "You're not gonna give it back." Finally I convince her to do it, with copious promises, and the instant she gives it to me I give it back to her—and from that moment on Faith trusted me. I loved her, with all her ODD and bipolar and violence and craziness..wanting to hug, wanting to fuck, even though she's crazy..but having a real connection with her. This one mental health worker brought a whole bunch of his own feelings to bear and compared me to Lewis Carroll for having an innocent thing for young girls. "But Lewis Carroll never *did anything* with Alice Liddell," he said, counseling me unnecessarily. "And I'm not going to *do anything* with Faith—but I do like her unnaturally," I admit. But it's not true: I would fuck Faith if she also wanted to. Why not? She's nineteen, not fourteen! That's of age. She's mentally ill but so am I! She has bipolar disorder—so do I! Does that render you unable to make decisions about who to have sex with such that you should never have sex in your life? Faith and I would have been as good a pairing as any..and we were good company for each other in a psych hospital, and it didn't really matter if we wanted to fuck or not because that wasn't going to happen in here!—Mostly what Faith and I wanted was a friend! But that guy honed in on me and felt it was necessary to give me a talking to—like I needed a talking to on how to interact with Faith! This mental health worker sat me down and basically accused me of something untoward, of being a pedophile, when we're talking about a thirty-something and a nineteen year old! Totally legal, totally above board—and all she and I ever did is talk! Besides, if anything, it's Faith who has a crush on me, not the other way around! Fucking bullshit. The one friend I have in Tyler 2, the only other bipolar person, and this guy is trying to drive a wedge between it, talking about Lewis Carrol and Alice Liddell and all that shit. *You* try being in a psych ward and having the staff tell you not to hang out with the person you connect with most! Sex? No sex? Who fucking cares! I'm talking about psych ward friendship, and that shit is rare and you take it when you can get it. Asshole. I'm not going home to a wife and a family and a town full of friends every night—I'm *living* here, not like you, working a shift and then going home. Don't fuck with my friends. And that's the funny part: of all the things this health tech thought Faith might be to me, it never occurred to him that she might be exactly what I needed most: a friend. Men in our society get a bad rap like the only reason we exist is to take advantage of people sexually. Well guess what, some of us are respectful, delicate, careful people who love other people regardless of sex and I think I speak for all of us when I say I don't appreciated being treated like a monster! Striped got it. I mean Stripes was on my level. I was flirting with Stripes. I was not flirting with Faith. Stripes said: "I get it. You two are friends. You both have the same brand of crazy and in a place like this how could you *not* be friends? I have friends like that—you know that guy Jon with Asperger's?—I like to talk to him doesn't mean I want to jump his bones. No, you need your Faith. And she needs you, too, in a way maybe I wish you needed me, but you and I share something different." "What, that I want to lick your pussy while I'm sucking on a lollipop?" "Well, that, and—" "That I want to stick a lollipop up your butt and then slather it all around my mouth?" "You don't even, know, boy. I would do things to you that would make your granddaughter blush." "I hope that's a promise," I say. "Oh. It is," Stripes says. If you can't see the difference between me and Faith, and me and Stripes, then I'm doing a really bad job as a narrator. - - - - I had more scalp dreams that night. This time it was a dream that someone cut my hair with a razor, and took off some of my scalp on the back right side—I woke up with that side of my head hurting. ### 69 I saw Donald Mutebe in the employee parking lot of the Refuge. I was out on a walk with patients and he was coming to work and he saw me and realized I was there as a patient and there was this moment on his eyes where he wondered what could possibly be sick enough about me that I was in the Refuge but then he just accepted this black box of illness and we approached each other and he gave me a loving and a strong hug and I loved that man, that African man who had a child with Darling Nikki, that man who had bought my car for drinking money, that man I had shared a few wonderful drinks with. We clicked from the start—good conversation between Mutebe and I—quality fucking person. - - - - I was telling Dr. Meggs.. ..about that time.. ..I had heard Mom and Dad arguing, when I was maybe four, and I went to them and said, "Are you guys getting a divorce." And my mom's answer was, "No, not right now. Your father and I have no plans to get divorced." And she looked sternly at my father. And she said, "But that is something that happens sometimes to people's marriages." My dad's answer was to look at me square in the eye—he from his great height up there to me at my lesser and lower place closer to the floor—and say, "No, your mom and I will never get divorced." Which was obviously—even to my four-year-old mind, not something he could know. It was not something someone could be certain about—so why was this adult (the big person) telling the child (the small person) something that was so obviously out of the realm of *what he could possibly know*..why was he telling me this as a fact when it couldn't *be* a fact, to him, to me, to anyone. I remember knowing, at that point, that my father could not assess what I knew. And most importantly—and this was scary to me as a child—he could not assess that in some ways I knew more than he did. Dr. Meggs says, "He was trying to comfort you." "I didn't need him to comfort me. He wasn't capable of it. I never felt safe around him so all I needed was the fucking *truth*." "How do you feel now?" "I feel like I'm *breaking down*." "Put it in more specific terms." "Ok, it seems architectural—like I'm a building whose pieces are falling off. Like my mind is beams screwed together with bolts, and those screws are coming unscrewed, and those beams are falling right out of my head. It's like my sanity and my culturedness are structural—like an uncompleted skyscraper—and the structure is coming apart. Does your mind ever feel like that?" "No." Then we meditated together. She asked me first if I wanted to. I said, "Yes." After some struggling with the plugs and the light switches and the relationships between them, we had her little music player working and a man was leading us through a guided meditation. The doctor sat in a soft chair, back straight, mouth open. I sat in a soft chair and did my best to focus on the meditative words. After a while I was able to focus on my breath at the point where it came in through the nostrils, one of the places the guided meditation suggested focusing on. My thoughts swirled, too. The meditation went quickly. "How was that for you?" my psychiatrist asked. "I was able to focus on the breath some of the time." "That's good if this is your first time meditating! Is it?" "It's one of my first..the first was a long time ago and I don't think I got it." My psychiatrist asked me how that went for me and the simple respect of caring about my experience got me teary again. I felt honored my psychiatrist would meditate with me. Even to take ten minutes out of an extremely busy schedule to lock us in this room that was all windows on one side and looked through fall trees and up into the mountains. I felt honored. You know, maybe that's a big part of the psych ward experience. Out there, you're the crazy one and you're disrespected, disregarded even by your family. But in here you're the client, and people respect you because it's their job—it's their job to feed you, to keep you safe, and to try against the odds to heal you. - - - - There was an autistic guy, Daniel, who wrote numbers all over newspapers and worked jigsaw puzzles and never talked to anyone, including his doctors. Well, his doctor was Dr. Criminal, and when Dr. Criminal would approach Daniel, Daniel would lead him to the Patient Bill of Rights which was framed on the wall which I suspect only Daniel had ever read, in the entire history of patients and doctors roaming the halls of Tyler 2. And he would lead Dr. Criminal to this tiny-print document and point to the relevant sections and explain, in indecipherable English, how his patient rights were being violated—and I'm sure they were. Daniel let loose a storm of verbs and adjectives and maybe threw some pronouns in there and according to everyone except Daniel it made absolutely no sense. Daniel insisted he was being held against his will—illegally. Dr. Criminal explained that he needed to take his medicine or he wasn't going anywhere. Daniel, like Chad, was at the end of the line. He had probably been arrested for some minor criminal act like an altercation with his neighbors, and through that altercation he was discovered by the Vermont mental health system, put here, and determined not to be able to live on his own. But one time Daniel did speak to someone else. I had been there three weeks and I always nodded to Daniel when I passed him and said, "Good morning," even though he never said anything back and apparently all those little gestures added up because one day at lunch I sat across from him at a square table and he opened up to me and spoke volumes. The only thing he ever said to his doctor was point to the patient regulations on the wall and repeat, "I have rights!" Everything else was unintelligible. But today I was in a conversation and it was like talking to John Nash—there were bits I could understand and I had to learn to talk all over again and listen quickly—but we made out a decent exchange about how the weather would be changing soon. Of course to Daniel, this was measured in exact numbers—the weather predictions he had read—where to me it felt more like a painter, like Degas, washing broad strokes to form a dress and then inciting a portion of the canvas with a concentration, a detail, to indicate a face. So our metaphors had a lot of room to cross, but we got them to cross, and I was speaking and he was hearing me and responding and I was hearing him and understanding a great deal of the words in his slurry and I think when you threw the whole thing together you could call it a conversation. When I got up from the table, when I eventually left the hospital, every time I left the hospital, every time Daniel and I said goodbye, came Daniel's refrain: "Good luck to you, sir. Good luck to you." Repeated. - - - - And speaking of refrains, for a while there was this crazy old T2 woman who is in a wheelchair and the staff were all confused as to why this woman had been transferred here and wasn't sent to a regular hospital. She had an oxygen tank and was old, old, old. When she get's going, she gets going: "My cats need their attention 'cause you can't just take people from their homes and leave twenty cats behind!" "You have twenty cats?" "Twenty-two to be exact. And the little ones can't reach the food basket so you see the problem there, don't you. You have a college degree, don't you?" "Yes, I have three." "My problem is I don't want to die in a hospital. That room back there is even shaped like a coffin—you shaped it that way on purpose, didn't you?" "As far as I know, none of the rooms were intentionally shaped like coffins." "Well take another look! That one you have me in is a straight-up coffin, you ask me. I want to die at home." "But there's no one at your home." "My memory of all my chirren is there!" "But your actual children..where are they?" "Oh they moved all over the place. They don't want nuthin' to do with taking care of no old woman and I don't blame 'em. They gotta wash me and I gotta wear diapers—do you know what that's like?—sitting there watching Family Feud and you shit your pants, gotta wait *days* for some home health worker to come along and change your drawers." "Well that's why you're here. I'm going to go now—" "No, Dr. Meggs, you're the only one who ever treats me nice in this place." De. Meggs smiles. "I will back to check on you in a little while. I have to check on another patient now." "IS SHE DYING?" "No but everyone here has problems." "Just transfer me out of here. My physician signed the forms. I just want to die at home." She never stops talking and that she is going to die soon seems to be actual fact and also a fact clearly known to her. No matter what she says, her closing refrain is, "I want to die at home." That's all this woman wants, in the whole world, is the dignity of dying in her own fucking home. I don't know, but that sounds pretty solid to me. ### 70 And that whole thing where I told Dr. Meggs about when I asked my parents if they were getting divorced and my mom respected me and gave me a real answer, while my dad treated me like a kid and gave me a bullshit answer..and Dr. Meggs said something I hadn't thought of, which was that he was trying to reassure me..but the point was *I knew more than he did* about the situation, and I'm not sure I ever got that point across to my doctor. I was four at the time..I might have been younger than that. And my doctor telling me during meditation..*we take our first breath when we are born; when we take our last breath, we die*..we meditate together in the sun room with a CD. Afterward she asks, "How was that for you?" Memories of Rebecca, the first time I meditated was probably in that stress-relief class in the seventh grade, the second time was with Rebecca. Dr. Meggs suggesting I think of guiding my thoughts back to the breath as if I were guiding a puppy I loved back to the training papers. "You're not angry at the puppy, you're just guiding him back to center." "Did you make that up in response to my shit story I told you about my dad?" (Like I was thinking she was that brilliant of a psychiatrist.) "No," she says, "I just stole it from something I read. So don't quote me on that, it's not an original idea." "I won't quote you," I promised. - - - - Seeing a young kid who had escaped his ward, his floor, and the building. And seeing him dragged back in by two security guards. Thinking about kids spending a significant portion of their childhood in places like this and that being a hard thing to think about, possibly because we see the kid inside ourselves as him, the real little boy crying as he's locked up again. He might not even understand why he's here or what's happening to him. On walk outside after it had snowed when it was only me in the whole ward who was on level green, so it was just me and the nurse who did my checkout the first time I left Tyler 2 and she had Dr. Criminal come in and do a second assessment because she thought I was unsafe to leave. Anyway the two of see that Gretchen has left flowers on my bike, which has been chained up in front of the institution this whole time and the nurse says, "How nice, do you want to bring them in?" And I say, "No, it's kind of an unhealthy relationship." Back in the Refuge it's me and Stripes in the window room. "Why are you back here?" she asks. "Suicide attempt. Why are you?" "Suicide attempt. You can talk to me," she says. "We're the same. You can say anything you want to say to me—we're in a psych ward. All the social rules are off. This is not a coffee shop conversation—you know what I mean?" We show each other our tattoos. She asks if mine is big and gangsta. I take my shirt off and she's like: "My god, it is big and gangsta. High five." "High five to you, Virgin Mary." (Which is what her tattoo is of.) Stripes smiled. Stripes and me make up our own refrain, which allows us to get out of any activity we don't want to do, once we leave this place. It goes something like: "Oh, no. My doctor said if I do that I might have to go back to the hospital." "Oh no. If I chew gum my doctor says I might end up back in the hospital." "I'm sorry. We can't have sex 'cause if we do, my doctor says I might have to go to the hospital." "Shhh—if you keep speaking I might have to go back to the hospital." Stripes laughs. "If you look at me for one more second my doctor might make me go back to the hospital." We decided that at least in our heads we would say things like this, that even if we didn't tell anybody, we would live like this. This is how a 3½-week visit to the Brattleboro Refuge goes. It's just minute after minute without your usual distractions. Minute after minute of waiting for the next activity, which will save you from the passage of time. Boredom followed by laughter. Not being able to touch anyone. Lunchtime. Art time. Substance abuse class. For level greens, outdoor play time. Going outside. Seeing Donald and being like, "What are you doing here?" and he was like, "I work here." In this huge grassy field, everyone kicked a ball around—except Stripes, who sat by herself far, far away from everyone—and except for me, who did handstands and cartwheels and somersaults and rolled around the grass making loud and joyful sounds. Matt the spineless substance abuse counsellor said, "Do you think you're a little manic?" And Stripes, from far across the lawn, yelled: "Maybe he's just happy to be outside." *Goddamn right, Stripes—why does everything have to be diagnosed?* The meditation guru, Lisa, and someone else who they worked with come and visit me in Tyler 2 (they find me coloring) at a table with Winehouse and friends) and they're looking at me like they're proud of me and I'm like: *What are these people proud of me for..trying to kill myself?* I was so callous about and careless with my own life, it didn't strike me that they might be happy that I was alive, that for them, this was a success story and they had seen others before me go the other way..leave their group and never come back because they were dead. We hugged. They smiled. They said I was welcome back in their program anytime I wanted and I said ok but inside I was like *Why would I ever go back to that program? It depressed the hell out of me. It's totally not where I belong, with a bunch of otherwise mentally healthy recovering alcoholics*—*I belong in here, with the people who are crazy even when they're sober.* Anyway it was nice that they visited but it made me feel like a failure. "What's wrong?" Winehouse said when they left. "I just feel like I let them down. They were trying to help me. Then I just walked out of their program and tried to kill myself. I feel like they don't know I care about them, that I'm thankful for their help." "They stopped by *because they like you*! Did you see their faces? They just missed you. They're you're friends!" I look at Winehouse skeptically. "You think nobody likes you." "I guess..I think that *is* true that *most* people don't like any particular person." "You think too much. They just miss you and they're glad you're ok. You have a hard time letting people in to love you, don't you? I do too, don't worry. We're fucked up." She cocks her head to the side. "Why do you think we're in Tyler 2?" she says, and laughs. I have a sick look on my face and I say: "That's more response than I got from my own *parents*." "Did you try to kill yourself to get your parents' attention?" "Not primarily, but that would been a nice side effect." - - - - I went for snacks on a break from Tyler 2 with Stripes. We both had green level and if you asked ahead of time, a mental health tech would walk you down to the Refuge snack shop as a way to get off the ward, buy some necessary supplies. I had money but Stripes suggested she buy me whatever I was buying that day with the deal that I would take her out to lunch "on the outside" for Indian sometime to make up for it. "Hold up, Stripes, are you asking me on a date?" She blushed, hard. Lynne, the mental health tech who did the morning meditation was there watching us. "Is this just payback for whatever you're buying me today or are *you* asking *me* out on a *date*, Stripey Stripes?" She looks at me like *Why are you making me say this out loud?* "Yes, Mr Temple. This is a loaded gun. If you play your cards right all kinds of things could happen." Now I was the one blushing. I picked out a whole bunch of stuff for Stripes to buy. We bought Faith dot-to-dot books because she asked for them..but she wanted ones with big dots so she could work it with her tremors..but all they had was ones with like a thousand dots per page. I looked twice for her but that's all they had. I got her some puzzle books in case those keep her occupied. "Mmm, I can't wait for my Indian food," Striped said. I went up to Lynne and put my arm around her and addressed Stripes: "Are you sure this is really a date?" "It's a live grenade," she says, "—no pin—fucking may happen." "How do I make *that* happen?" "You say the right things at dinner." "Well—" I start. "Yeah," Stripes says, "I know you, I know you'll have no trouble saying the right things. You know I live on Oak, we're practically neighbors." "This is excellent," I say. "Then my walk of shame will only be like two blocks!" "That's assuming I let you fuck me in my bed," Stripes says. I'm keeping an eye on Lynne. She's looking at us like, *Yes! I have just seen two high-functioning mental patients make plans to fuck the crazy right out of themselves. Score!* ### 71 Lining up by the ward's locked entrance/exit for art class or to go to lunch in the downstairs cafeteria always took twenty minutes because everyone had their own unique agenda that had nothing to do with leaving the ward, and this agenda must be followed before joining the rest of who were already lined up waiting. I took to eating every meal upstairs to avoid this problem, even though I had level green. A bunch of other patients did the same thing, so then the staff made a rule that if you had the proper level, you *had* to go downstairs to the cafeteria to eat. Now I'm going to tell you about something special, that happened on one of those trips downstairs to the art room. It was a simple thing. But you know how simple things are..sometimes they hit you in just the right way that they stick with you forever. And this was one of those. I was standing at a table drawing, and I looked over, and through a doorway into a smaller room, I saw Stripes working the pottery wheel with an apron on and I fell in love a little—with her beauty and her sadness. The old-fashioned-ness of the apron, the dirt-hands creativity of the potter's wheel. Like all true things I cannot describe it. All I can do is flail like a fish on a dock and say, "I fell in love with a girl at a pottery wheel." But that's what happened. I fell in love with a girl at a pottery wheel. And that would be the only time I fell in love in the ten years before or the ten years after my trip to the Refuge. I'd been so isolated, and would continue to be isolated—and the bar had been raised so high by past loves and past friends, and my own personality had developed so specifically and eccentrically that while meeting acquaintances became so natural that it was almost no work at all, meeting someone who thrilled me such that I could be *in love* with them became so rare that I stopped hoping it would ever happen for me again. I met girls I wanted to fuck—I fucked some of them. But as for being in love, I think it requires an extraordinary match and I may be far more fortunate than most to have found it once—or even twice—so long ago. I may have told you this in another book already but there was a realization of how at home I felt doing arts and crafts on the permanent-resident side of the first mental hospital I stayed in. This is in California. I specifically thought: I would rather spend my time making sailboats out of popsicle sticks with these so-called crazy people than spend another minute in a corporate office of my choosing. To me, the crazy people aren't the ones in the psych ward—that kind of crazy is usually a deficiency that makes people nicer than usual, because they have to appease mentally healthy people to get their basic needs met..they (we?) are dependent on others, which tends to break you down and make you more polite and caring—no, to me the crazy people are the ones who have developed enough underhanded, lying, snake-tongued illogic to run a company or please the sociopath who does. If it's between successful people and crazy people, I'll take crazy people *any* day. People at this crafts table said *please* and *thank you*—people at my job intentionally sabotaged my work to make me look bad even though *we work for the same company*. Somehow these depressed, schizophrenic, institutionalized, brain-damaged people knew something that my college educated, condo dwelling, engineer coworkers did not, and that is that *we're all on the same side*. And by *we* I actually mean the whole universe. - - - - "No but check this out, see what he's *saying*." That was Stripes. A bunch of us were sitting in the main room eating ice cream sandwiches, Stripes had grabbed my notebook, spun it around, and tapped on the page. "That's what *I'm talking about*, right there." She gives me back the book. "Read it," she tells me. I read: "*There is no prison / that can take freedom; And there is no freedom / because no prison can take it.*" "You see? You *see*?!" Stripes stands up and makes a whooping motion with her ice cream sandwich. Little droplets of vanilla ice cream splash around the room. The nurse tells her to sit down. "I'm sitting down. But I'm telling *you*, you better listen to this shit *this* motherfucker is laying down, because you got a rare bird up in this cage right now. Tell her what you're saying." She points at my journal with her ice cream sandwich and I'm lucky none of the drops get on my paper. "Oh I'm sorry! Did I drip on your philosophy?" "No." "That really scared you, didn't it? You thought I was gonna drip on your paper. Would you ever let me write on one of your pages? What if I take a pen and just do..this." She makes the tiniest mark on the edge of one of my notebook pages. "Are you trying to provoke me?" "Provoke you right into my pussy," she mouths the words so only I can see them. "Tell 'em your fucking theory." "It's not a theory—" "It *is* a theory. It's a fucking *brilliant* theory about freedom. And a *proof*. That it doesn't exist. Read that thing again. And explain it. Most of these mental health techs never went to college." "Actually," one of the mental techs who's sitting on the edge of this conversation says, "mental health techs have to have a bachelor's degree." "Marlboro College doesn't count," Stripes says. "Educate these motherfuckers." "Well I was just thinking about being stuck here, and I was thinking about people on the fourth floor or people in jail who are stuck behind walls for longer than *I've* ever been, and I was thinking about *The Shawshank Redemption* and Nelson Mandela and it hit me that if you are the kind of person who even walls can't imprison, then there's really no such thing as prison..because if it can't take away your freedom, then it isn't functioning as a prison. It's not doing its job. If it's not imprisoning your mind, then what *is* it imprisoning—we know from being in here that what matters most is the mind—if you can't imprison my mind then you can't imprison *me*. If in general you can't imprison people's minds then in general there are no prisons." "But tell 'em how you wrote it." "I'm stuck between two versions, but the main contender is: *There is no prison that can take freedom; And there is no freedom because no prison can take it.*" "Do you hear what this motherfucker just said??!!" Stripes flails her ice cream sandwich and a single drop of ice cream gets on my book. We have a two-second staring contest in which it is decided that neither of us will ever do anything to hurt the other, even if one of us crosses the other's line. Stripes leans over the table, dripping her ice cream sandwich all over Brigham's drawing, and licks the drop of vanilla off my book. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I promise I'll make it up to you." "What got into you?" "New med. Dopamine. Makes me want to fuck." "*Jesus.*" My mind is flashing through fantasies of her licking a single drop of vanilla-flavored precum off the tip of my cock. "Tell 'em how you redefined freedom." "It's more of an obliteration of the concept." "Then tell 'em that." Stripes leans back in her seat. "Well," I start slowly, "if there are no prisons that can take freedom..because the mentality of the people is such that no prison can take it.." "Can take their freedom." "Right. Then a surprising result arises..which is that this valuable concept of ours..freedom..so important in history and class and race and gender struggles—" "You sound like a fucking feminist, I love it." "I am a feminist." "Fucking hot." Stripes is gnawing away at her ice cream, not even looking at me. "So if freedom is so strong in the mind of the prisoner that they functionally *cannot be imprisoned*, then the concept of *freedom*—as beautiful as it is and as much as we strive for it and think we need it—freedom *disappears*. There's no such thing as freedom *if no prison can take it*! Because what is a prison for? To take away your freedom. So if no prison can take it, then it never existed in the first place. There is no such thing as freedom if there is no such thing as a prison. They need each other to exist, see? For some people, there is freedom and that freedom can be taken away, via prison. For others, since prison cannot take away their freedom, then it means that there's no difference between being *in* prison and being *out* of prison..and hence—" "*Hence.* Love it." "And hence what they might have called *freedom* on the outside, really doesn't mean anything because no matter where you put them, nothing fundamental changes in their minds. If you can't be imprisoned, you can't be free—it's all the same. In a strange way freedom implies that you have something to lose. But if you are prison-resistant, in the sense that prison can't take anything away from you, then you must never have had anything to take away in the first place. *Hence* you never *had freedom* from the start." The room is quiet. Every patient. Every staff member. Health techs are perched on countertops. Nurses' pens have stopped writing their reports. Psychiatrists have stopped in the hall to listen. Stripes broke the silence. "That's my boy!" she bellows. "You see that book? Every *page* he's got *fifty* sayings like that, all worth a philosopher's weight in *salt*..pure..fuckin'..titanium *nitrate bath* melodies for a dream queen. *That's, my, boy.* Now watch him eat fifty eggs." I laugh. Some other people laugh—patients. "I bet none of you know what movie that's from," Stripes says. "*Cool Hand Luke*," John says, from behind the nurses' station. John is bald and compulsively wears rugby shirts to work and he's one of the kindest nurses on the ward. He's worked in prisons, actually. "Not *you*, motherfucker! Ever thought of giving *someone else* a chance to answer?" Some nurse says, "Change the language." Stripes says, "I ain't changin' nothing." This is Stripes craving her night meds. "Then your green level is gonna change to nothin'," says the nurse. "Nothin'?" Stripes says, and she looks like she's gonna do something stupid. That huge Virgin Mary tat makes me think Stripes on pain meds could be a tough customer. "Hey Stripes. Remember? *Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.*" Stripes turns her eyes away from the nurse, where they had turned into the eyes of some Brazilian gangster—containing the bile of poverty not even poor Americans could understand—and she turned her eyes to me, and I swear they did this reptilian move like Miley Cyrus on crack, some CIA replica designed to take over the world, and those eyes blinked once and all the alien evil was gone from her, and she was sad..Stripes addicted to pain medicine, Stripes whose mother was dead to suicide, Stripes who had no way out of her current relationship except to pack her suitcase with A-quality art supplies and come to the Refuge. She looked at me and knew that I knew why she was there. And she wiped a tear from her eye and laughed. Then she laughed and laughed and laughed, looking up at the ceiling and looking at me and she laughed like only someone who has tried to kill themself can laugh—really it's only at that level of self-hatred that life gets truly, deeply, insanely funny—and she laughed with all of that truth and all of that depth and all of that insanity, like she had just been exposed to an hour-long Anthony Jeselnik routine compressed into one second, and she was laughing at *that*. There was nothing funny going on in the room anywhere but inside Stripes' head. The laugh wasn't contagious. It was scary. It was unexplained. It was over the top. It was inappropriate for the situation. Patients started to leave. Philosophy and ice cream sandwich time was over, and by the time most people had left, Stripes' laugh had turned into a cry and she was sitting upright, brushing wet hair out of her face, looking into my eyes, and I could tell what she was doing. She was role-playing all her hate for her boyfriend, for her mother, for her father, with me, and I felt the hate, and was glad when bald headed, rugby-shirt John came and took Stripes by the shoulders and helped her up and helped her down the hallway to her room, all the way down at the end. I stood up and closed my journal. I started cleaning up Stripes' art supplies—hundred-dollar colored pencils, oil and chalk pastels of all sizes, pencil sharpeners which had somehow been allowed on the ward (they contain razor blades!), and her huge, off-white, eighteen by twenty-four inch drawing pad whose paper's coarse texture caught Stripes' gestures so well. She was drawing a goddess. But to me she was a goddess. It's like this: people who hurt that much, either hurt *so* much that they die..or, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, every time you strike them down, they become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. I was desperately hoping Stripes was one of this last kind, because I needed to know that somewhere in the world there was another like me. ### 72 Thirty minutes Stripes was back like, "Night meds let's party!" Yeah, hers were pain meds, so to her it was a party. And I was glad she had them, so she wouldn't be in pain and because I liked Stripes on meds a lot better than Stripes off. I'm playing Yahtzee with Stripes and two others. Stripes is yelling at me to stop mixing the dice and it took me a second, and another girl saying, "Stop! Stop!" to realize I was shaking the dice with a motion similar to the jerk-off motion. "Just throw the dice!" Stripes was saying, before I realized what my dice-rolling movement reminded them of. And I'm like, "Why?" and I make the motion again. Stripes catches my wrist in her hand to stop me. "You're in a psych ward with horny women just *roll the fucking dice*." So I roll. I get Yahtzee. I stand up, I run to the nurses' station and bang on the desk three times and yell "*Yahtzee!*" I sit down without looking. I ask Stripes what their reaction is and she says she thinks I scared the new girl nurse. - - - - At Stripes' request, we listen to audiobooks just the two of us in the sunroom, lying down and wishing she would touch me, feeling content. She was sharing something that was special to her with me—Stripes and I developed a relationship in the ward. I even told her how I felt about her and she said you've seen how I react to you—you can see that I feel the same way. I told Dr. Meggs that even Stripes and I, who know each other from the outside, are aware of making this a time to focus on our own selves, but I imagine if I was a psychiatrist of a suicidal patient that seeing him attracted to someone wouldn't bother me a bit. Stripes and I started meeting at certain times of the day to work on our web design business and talk about how its website will work and look. And every night we met in the hothouse room to listen to audiobooks on her iPad. I laid down close enough for her to touch me, but she didn't. We were in the wide window room. Stripes was so close—I wished she'd touch my hair, touch my head in a caress. We listened to a recording of one of her favorite books on her iPad and she was happy at the end of each chapter when she asked me if I was enjoying it and I said yes. I said, "I give you looks, and I think you can see in those looks that I like you, that I want more of you." And she said, "I think you know that I give you those same looks, too." And I did. The deadliest of those look exchanges had happened that day at lunch with the two of us sitting across from each other at a square table, coloring, with two others at our sides, and there were just two looks: one from me that asked a question..and one from her, held long and steady, that answered it. This is something Stripes wrote in my notebook that I've never showed anyone: > when she makes me cum my feet cramp > > or when she cums, her feet cramp > > "This is your personal piece of heaven. > > You can have it whenever you want." When the tally is taken at the end of my life, please no one claim that I was given a short portion of love. ### 73 I tripped inside the Refuge, flirting and talking with that one art therapy instructor. Tripping in the mental hospital, that first time I realized it in art class, talking to the art instructor and we found each other fascinating—she was totally into the weird things I was saying and drawing and I felt out of control morally like I would say or do something inappropriate. How I would trip every day, and make art at the height of my trip. That one time I felt it coming on sitting down on the floor in the med line talking to the old woman getting a hard on at the medicine and needing to hide it so I sat down. The poor sweet woman who was standing next to me in the med line when I had to sit down to hide a medicine-induced woodie—me sitting on the floor outside her room listening to her tell her sob story. She's an alcoholic who lives with her husband and they both drink together but she's obviously the one with the real problem because she's in the hospital (lol..designated patient, anyone?). And the medicine was getting to me, fracturing me—can you feel it? When I sat down in the med line because all these serotonergic medicines were getting me so excited my dick was getting hard. Talking with the old woman with the walker in front of me. I notice this woman—twenty, thirty—at a table eating breakfast. We've interacted before but now she has compassion in her eyes—probably because I'm sitting on the floor like a lost child. I call her Winehouse—something about the hair and general badassity of the two (her and Leona Winehouse) paired them in my mind. Then the med nurse (remember Rainbow?) leans out the window and looks down at me sitting on the floor and says, "Why don't you come up here and we'll get you fixed up." So I stand, trying to hide my erection, and take my meds. Winehouse slides out a chair with her foot and invites me to a table full of girls. She asks me questions and opens my juice for me because my hands are shaking. She cares for me like a mother and makes sure I'm ok before I leave her sight. She was brilliant to me. And how my art changed when I was tripping, to this very detailed almost technical muralistic form and how Dr. Meggs could see the change in my art when I pointed it out to her—and that fascinated her about me that I could see that. The first time I was tripping in the art room confiding it to a patient who was about to be released and telling him not to tell anyone because I wanted to keep tripping. And then leaving the room for the trippiest check-in ever with Lynne in the hallway, telling her I was seeing the shapes of words in my eyes and her saying I was saying some bizarre things, then getting passed of to Dr. Meggs, crying uncontrollably, the clock moving with one second taking like five seconds, her taking my pulse and walking me through breathing meditation: breathe out anxiety and stress, breathe in sky/I'm ok. For days then, chasing the sunlight with a piece of copier paper, sitting on the floor by the nurses' station looking at a blank piece of paper in a ray of sunlight, catching the last glimpses of my texture hallucination. What you would have seen if you looked at me was a thirty-three-year-old man staring intently at a blank piece of paper. But that's not what I saw. To me that paper was a petri dish in fast motion, a universe of movement and form, changing, growing, performing just for me. - - - - I see the dietician, Paula, and she's like: "How's it going?" And I'm like, "Great, I'm learning a lot of things about my mind." And she's like, "What?" And I said, "Like maybe a little psychosis isn't a bad thing for a writer!" "Ahh! There's a way to look at it! Think of all the psychotic people out there who have no idea. At least you're aware of it, you can manage it and even use it like you say!" "Exactly!" "You're just here for a checkup," she says. She obviously had no idea what I was here for or what had been going on with me (or maybe she did) but she treated me like a well human being who was capable of insightful talk with her. And we had in the residential hallway, paused, as she took another, newer patient somewhere, maybe to check in to the ward, and (as always in my life, and it's usually with therapists or psychiatrists) I felt like a human being simply by the action of having an intelligent conversation with someone. We talked a while about the somewhat random-seeming basis by which it is decided who is *in* and who is *out* of the mental hospital, and other fairly progressive thoughts. Paula and I just clicked. We'd say hi in the hallway and twenty minutes later we'd be standing in the same spot talking ardently, and she'd have a patient with her standing mostly silent while we talked up a storm and then she'd have to go—but I got the feeling that with me and Paula, the conversations were bottomless. - - - - I remember asking Dr. Meggs if we might talk about a release date. I was scared I was taking up too much hospital time, time that someone who needed it more could be using. And Dr. Meggs said, "I'm not even going to begin to talk about a release date with you until I understand the events leading up to that night [of my suicide attempt](#) and I feel sure that they won't happen again." That made me feel safe, like someone was looking after me in a way I had needed many times in my life but hadn't been able to get. You see? Sometimes I need someone *to protect me from myself*. - - - - There was a day I was walking to the fitness/game area with about five patients and the clueless substance abuse counselor Matt and we walked by the sober house where the Birches people stayed and the borderline girl who had flirted with me in social work group (even though she had a boyfriend) came over and hugged me and wished me well and I thanked her but I didn't remember her name. But I know you're out there somewhere, now a borderline woman, and you're reading this, and I want you to know this little paragraph is for you, because your hug meant at least enough to me back then to put a little paragraph in my book thanking you, now. - - - - Ready to get trippy again? Imagine yourself on like eight serotonergic meds with a history of psychedelic drug use. You're in art class—regular art class, on the ward. You are starting to hallucinate looking at a blank piece of paper and you turn and look at the guy next to you (who you've never seen before) and he says, "You're seeing things, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes but don't tell anyone because I think the medicine is causing the hallucination and I don't want them to take it away." Then I start drawing and writing this amazing stuff and the beautiful young art teacher comes over and we have this amazing conversation about art and Everything and she said, "What you're doing on that paper is amazing!!" And we connected so well and I told her: "I'm having some kind of medication effect that is affecting my ability to tell what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in action or talk and I am really enjoying this conversation but I am afraid that I might say something inappropriate to you without knowing it and I don't want to do that." She said, "Why don't we just enjoy our conversation and we'll deal with that if it actually happens." *(By the way,* *I definitely recommend that all future psychiatric care take place in art museums.)* She wasn't scared. I agreed and we went back to our wonderful conversation about art and humanity and life and I was saying all these brilliant things and she was recognizing and appreciating my genius and she was able to converse with it. And she was beautiful and I could see her and smell her and hear every beauty of her. Then Lynne came and said, "I can see you're having a beautiful conversation here but would you mind if I borrowed Matthew for a check in?" The art teacher said, "Sure, if that's ok with you." I said, "Yes." And the art teacher said you might want to tell Lynne about what you were telling me about what you're seeing on the paper, and the appropriateness/inappropriateness boundary difficulties you were describing. I agreed and went with Lynne. This was my most bizarre checkin with Lynne and my panic attack streaming tears thinking I'm going to die the clock seconds ticking away like minutes and Dr. Meggs staying by my side taking my pulse and helping me breathe out *fear*, breathe in *I'm ok.* She thinks it was a panic attack, I think it's a side effect of clomipramine. Dr. Meggs stays with me for what seems like a long time..I feel guilty for keeping her but I'm glad she's there..she takes my pulse with just her fingers and her diving watch, never uses her stethoscope..and she has me *breathe out panic*, *breathe in calm*; *breathe out humiliation*, *breathe in security and comfort*; breathe out chaos, breathe in a deep blue sky.. Then, while I have my eyes closed, breathing becoming more regular, she tells me a story. She says, "When I was in medical school, one of my teachers taught me a lesson. He said, let's say you walk into a triage situation, and you're in charge, and you have this kind of surgeon doing this and that type of surgeon doing that and everyone's running every which way and you don't know the state of the patient but there are five different monitors telling you gobs of information and you walk on the scene, and it's your job to save the patient's life. What do you do first? And do you know what this teacher said said to me? Don't answer—keep breathing. He said the first thing you do is *check your own pulse*." Of course she's making that into a metaphor for what I should do with my anxiety. And she tells me this while she's taking my pulse during my medicine-aided panic attack and while she knows that I have an OCD anxiety that is literally about taking my own pulse. I understood why Dr. Meggs told me that story, understood it in a basic way, right when she told me. But its meaning has deepened for me over the last four years or so and I have only recently come to understand it as a story about metacognition—you know that term? *Thinking about thinking*, *knowing about knowing?* What I was doing when in the fifth grade I marked my own test—I knew all the answers I had gotten wrong. I wasn't just thinking about the test, I was thinking about my thinking *about* the test. One of the painful features of bipolar is that you don't think you have it. Every doctor I see, I try to get a new diagnosis, genuinely believing that I might not really have bipolar, that somehow the twelve (or twenty) preceding psychiatrists I've seen have been deluded, that they've just based their diagnosis on the previous diagnosis and the first diagnosis was wrong. And going along with this is the even stronger effect of not knowing when you're manic. *Denying that you're manic* is a symptom of mania—that's a very weird thing to think about. And this is how I understand Dr. Meggs's triage story now. When I wake up in the morning, I have to notice my first few thoughts. This is kind of like meditation, too. Notice your thoughts and notice something about them. Is that a paranoid thought? Am I worrying? Am I having ideas of reference—thinking things have special meaning just for me? Do I feel expansive? Irritable? Grandiose? Are my thoughts spiritual in nature. Am I thinking things like, *I feel like I'm on a new plane of consciousness*—an example from the other day. Some features of mania I am unable to have metacognition about and I need to rely on those around me, which is very hard. And if mania is bad enough, you just *flat out don't know* that you're manic. It's like trying to know you're in a dream, as the characters in *Inception* are trying to do. Cobb says, "Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." It is hard to realize you're dreaming, but there are clues. Same with mania. That's *metacognition* about your dreams, about your mania. It's a funny thing: Once someone tells you (or you read) that denying you're manic is a symptom of mania, it *creates* metacognition—at least it has in me. *Insight* is mentioned in three out of seven of my Refuge discharge reports. In my last reports, Dr. Meggs lists "relatively good insight into his mental health issues" as one of my strengths. And it is. Reading about bipolar does not cure me of my bipolar, but that metacognition, that insight, helps grease the rails for me to be an active participant in my treatment. When I meet a new doctor, I often understand *why* they are asking the questions they are asking, what they are trying to determine. I am more apt to do self-checks—for hallucinations, suicidal ideations—*I am taking my own pulse*. - - - - VINCIT QUI SE VINCIT is a Latin phrase which is carved into stone above the school where I marked my own test. I kept asking the teachers at that school what it meant, and no one knew. So (being that this was before the internet) I wrote it down and kept it with me, waiting to meet someone who could tell me what it meant. Then one Sunday a new couple came to our church. He was a student, and she was working to support his studies. "Studies of what?" I asked. "Latin," he said. So I pulled out this piece of paper and showed it to him. He translated it, and said: "Vincit qui se vincit. She conquers, who conquers herself." I have loved that saying ever since. I have it tattooed on my back. I believe it's a very important idea. Maybe it should say: *She conquers, who knows herself.* Or: *She knows, who knows herself.* I don't really think you can conquer. I don't really think you can *know*, either. But maybe you can know a little. I know once I saw *Inception* I became more aware I was dreaming. I think we all did. Because we thought about Christopher Nolan's concepts a lot. And I find now that I have more lucid dreams, and more dreams where I'm aware I'm in a dream, than before I watched *Inception* five times in the theater, countless times after. You know what my favorite thing to do is, once I realize I'm dreaming? I go up to someone, a dream character, and I say: "Guess what? You're not real. This is a dream. I'm dreaming!" And the person says, "Well I *feel* real. How do you know I'm fake?" And I say, "Because in a few seconds, I'm going to wake up, and all of this will be gone." And they say: "How do you know that I'll be gone? How do you know that I'm not really me, and that dreams aren't just a way for our minds to connect that science hasn't discovered yet?" And then I wake up. And I don't know. ### 74 Dr. Meggs, with her swimmer's watch and rugged shoes, looked more like she was a deep-woods camper than a psychiatrist. Twenty-four patients to the ward, maximum—and we were usually at the max—and only three psychiatrists among them. That meant each psychiatrist was seeing eight patients a day, and one of their requirements was that they actually meet with each of their patients face to face every single day. Sometimes you'd get five minutes, sometimes you'd get an hour, but if you got five minutes it was because those doctors were *smashed*—they had to do research on your condition and your past hospitalizations, communicate with your family in some cases, go to team meetings to coordinate your care with nurses, mental health techs, nutritionists, social workers..and they also had to deal with the occasional death, seizure, or fight on the ward—I would say working as a Tyler 2 psychiatrist is one of the most stressful jobs in the developed world, right along options trader and air traffic controller. Oh and trauma surgeon. Yeah. Working in the ER has to be extremely stressful. An ER doctor makes the difference between your physical life and death. That's hard. Of course if requires special knowledge. But I think a psychiatrist's job is more complicated. Diagnosis of a physical trauma can surely involve seeing past false indicators. But diagnosis of the mind..that, at its most difficult, must involve a great deal of doubt—greater than that encountered in the emergency room—because the system you are dealing with (the mind) is less understood than the body. It's loads more complex. We haven't really developed the proper tools to deal with it yet. And it's more subject to masquerading than physical problems—even though there are well-established textbook definitions for various kinds of bipolar disorder, bipolar disorder remains extremely complex to diagnose. As in: it takes an average of ten years to do so. Imagine if it took ten years to diagnose patients in the ER—by then they'd all be dead. It's just a lot more complicated to figure out someone has bipolar disorder than it is to determine if someone has a crowbar stuck in their head. ### 75 Me and Stripes sitting in the main room watching this woman Judy who was constantly falling over even with a cane and Stripes says, "She shouldn't be here." Stripes went around insisting to the nurses and mental health workers that Judy should be in an ER. And Stripes was right, because two days later Judy died, she collapsed in the main room by the nurses' station. Stripes tells me this later because I was out of Tyler 2 by then, but I saw it, too: I was downstairs in the cafeteria and heard the code blue and saw EMTs go in and come out with a stretcher with a dead woman on it and I knew it had to be Judy. - - - - On a Sunday, at the Refuge, I met with Michael Miller, who used to be the director of the clinic (like over the whole Refuge), who now comes back one weekend a month to meet with patients. "You're a smart person, aren't you?" I ask him how he knows that. He says, "By the way you answered my previous question, I can tell that you're articulate." I tell him my theory that cellular automata may have infected my brain and we both agree that it could be true. He says, "It sounds like something out of The Matrix." This conversation is the bright point in my day, the chance to speak to someone intelligent. So many of my conversation partners are so dull. I know I have some strange theories about programming and the mind, and when I'm manic I consider them more realistic. But they are theories—even when manic I am able to doubt them. And of course I'm more likely than the average Joe to think of ideas related to programming—I've been programming computers since I was a little kid. *And*, the concept of programming brains or "mind control" isn't a far-fetched idea, even among common culture of the mentally healthy variety—we as the public have at least been led to believe that governments have been working on (and may have achieved some successful results with) mind control. To suggest that my brain may have taken on the ability to operate a simple program suggested from the outside is not really a *crazy* idea. Right now, not manic, I don't believe that has happened, but even if I am less lucid than I think, I think I'm lucid enough to make the reasonable suggestion that a) brain programming is something we will see accepted widespread as reality in short order, and b) it may already be occurring on a very large scale, to a depth and degree hard for us to fathom, as we fucking speak. Mr. Miller shakes my hand. "Great talking with you." "Great talking with you, too." Lynne comes up to me. "How was that?" "It was great! That's a very smart man!" "That's great," Lynne says. "I'm going make a suggestion to you, that I just thought of." "Ok." "I think it might be good idea for you to spend ten minutes out of each hour lying down in a dark, quiet room." When she said that I was thinking: *How can I possibly manage a job while doing such a thing?* But Lynne continued. She said, of the psych ward we were standing in: "This is probably too much stimulation for you, even. You've got so much going on inside your mind, you don't need a bunch of noise and junk coming at you from the outside. Conversations stimulate you. Like the conversation you just had with Dr. Miller—whatever you guys talked about—got you running..ramping." "It did?" "*Yes.* You went in there calm. You came out *out of control*." "That's right!" I said. "I've had to stop working on projects before or thinking in areas that got me *far* too excited! I have to limit phone calls with smart people to half an hour. My brain is just like that!!" I have no idea how she knew I had a lot going on inside my mind—I didn't realize it was that *observable* to some people—but she was right. I also didn't realize fully until years later that Lynne's suggestion for me absolutely implied that she didn't see me going back to a work situation—what office is gonna let me lie down in a dark, quiet room for ten minutes every hour? At that point I still thought I had to work, I still thought I could. Who knows what the future will hold, but I know, today, at the time of this writing, there's no way I could work the jobs I've worked before. I hate the word, I think it's a misnomer, and I hate to say it about myself, but I am in some ways disabled. - - - - In a meeting the next day with Dr. Meggs, I show her the evolution of my art, as is hung on my walls and which creates a beautiful mural of color for anyone walking down the drab hallway of Tyler 2. I left my door open most of the time so people could see it. But what I showed Dr. Meggs is the break in style between what I was drawing before and after starting the clomipramine. Before the clomipramine my art was chunky and friendly—big lines, the zebra, Stripes—after clomipramine I started drawing these *incredibly* intricate abstract line art/word art things that were like they were done by the completely different mind of a completely different person. I explained to her the feeling of obsession and patience which I had now that I didn't have before, and when she looked at the art, she saw exactly what I meant. She titrated me down off the clomipramine to a very low level to address a possible allergy to clomipramine and the texture hallucination I'd been having. She was looking at me in a way I had never seen before. "What?" I said. And she said, "I'm just impressed as hell that you figured this out." - - - - The worst thing about being in a psych ward is waking up to go to the bathroom. The shock and fear and isolation and anti-homeness, strange-land-ness of waking up in the night to go to the bathroom and realizing you're in a psych ward..then you realize you are not leaving today, you will be here for days, weeks, months (this is one of the worst realizations I've ever had..waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and realizing I am in a locked psych ward and not cozy, home, in my own bed). Then you actually get to the bathroom. You open the door. You thought all you were doing was getting up in the night and going to take a piss—that would be adventure enough—but when I open the door, the whole space is flooded with fluorescents, Chad is leaned against the stone-block wall with one foot on the floor, one foot on the seat of a toilet. The curtain which would have kept that stall in privacy has been pulled back so the whole stall is visible. Between Chad's legs, on the wall, on the floor, on his hands, is shit. He is digging up his ass with his fingers, removing the shit from his ass, and it is falling onto the floor. When it doesn't, Chad smears it on the wall. Chad looks up at me in slow motion. He recognizes me. He knows I recognize him. There is no need to wave. Chad and I are closer than that. We're in a psych ward together—all formalities are waived. As Stripes says, *This is not a coffee shop conversation*. As I look at Chad and his array of shit, I know that's true—no politeness here. I let the door close behind me and walk to the stall opposite Chad's. I know what his problem is—he's constipated. The industrial food plus his meds make it so he can't take a shit. Half the patients in here are constipated. I have wanted to do exactly what Chad is doing—I have had that exact same impulse, have had such bad constipation that I've been sitting in a stall trying to shit and completely unable to do so that I have thought of sticking my own fingers up my ass and trying to dig the shit out of there. But I never actually did it. I either zen master meditated myself through the pain of squeezing that industrial-medicated log of psych ward poop out of my delicate little asshole, or I ate fruit for three days, or I asked the nurse for a laxative. Chad was one millimeter farther over the line than me, and he actually dug up his ass and pulled the shit out of himself. The man needed relief. I finished pissing and flushed the toilet—must maintain my own illusion of civilization. Said bye to Chad on the way out and he said bye to me. I thought about reporting Chad's situation to the night nurse but the conversation that would occur between us seemed like it would be either awkward, funny, or unbelievable, so I decided to do what everyone in the place had been encouraging me to do: I focused on my own healing and just went back to bed. In the morning, all the nurses on morning shift were talking about some "incident" that had happened at night—something that was so hush hush that even normally loose lips wouldn't speak a syllable on this one. I sat in the main room eating my breakfast, finding some humor in the psych ward staff keeping secrets about psych ward patients *from* psych ward patients. These first shift nurses were asleep in their beds when Chad was excavating the poop from his rectum, at the time when I was standing next to him taking a piss. The nurses with the hushed secrets that patients were not allowed to hear, learned about Chad's poop excursion at their 8am handoff meeting with the night shift. I was there, man, I was *there*—my own personal Vietnam. And let me tell you, soldier, after months of living in a psych ward, it would take a lot more than the sight and smell of Chad digging feces out of his anus with his own fingers to mess with my head—that shit was just business as usual. At night, too, trying to squeeze in a masturbation session, orgasm on Celexa between fifteen minute suicide checks..especially after what I had just seen Chad doing..impossible. Some nights I'd arrange all the furniture in the main room until it was perfect for me and then I'd sit in one of the gliders and rock away my extra energy or else sit at the round table using my special way of climbing into the chair (push the armed chair all the way in and then climb over the back) and I'd read, write, take notes in my notebooks. Some say that when a person is overly controlling of their external environment it indicates a chaotic inner life. I tend to agree. - - - - Dr. Meggs asked me to remember what and how I felt when I felt suicidal and to tell her next time we met. I said cold chills in my stomach and other things. She told me to get a heated blanket and combat the suicidal feeling on a sensory level. Only use that blanket when I feel suicidal. "I attempted suicide partially as a way to get people's attention, to get people to take my mental illness seriously. My dad never even called." Dr. Meggs said, "He's never going to." "Mom says I escalate my behavior to try to get his attention. And she says that nothing I'll ever do will get his attention." "Based on what you've told me about him, I believe that your mother is right. He is a sick person and he doesn't have the emotional capacity to relate to you in the way you want to be related to." "I think that's right. And I do pretty well when I forget about him and don't open up to him. I hadn't written him in four years till tonight. And I think I need to go back to that strategy of pretending he doesn't exist. It works the best. It's too painful to know that my dad is still alive, out there in the world, and he has no idea what's going on with me..and doesn't care." Dr. Meggs loaned me her personal copies of Pema Chödrön books—*Don't Bite The Hook*. This is what I would read late into the night in the main room with the night nurse John looking over me. I didn't just read them—I *studied*. I took notes. I read and re-read. And I remembered how I used to follow people to their house in my car if they cut me off in traffic when I was twenty. My psychiatrist and my mom both said I'm a very angry person. But the trick is to not bite the hook, of course, to *stay on your own trip*..when you follow someone to their house because you want to scare them, to kill them, you're no longer on your own trip. Staying in a mental hospital for a few months is good practice in staying on your own trip because in the hospital there is always someone trying to get you to go on *their* trip, to enter their psychological reality..and you need to decide if you really want to go there. Same with my dad: do I want to be on his trip? Do I want my trip to be modified by him in even the slightest way? The answer is no. I'm on my own trip of creation and sobriety and compassion, which I believe is the point of the 12 steps. - - - - Eventually Dr. Meggs lets me leave. Maybe she did keep me here longer than necessary because she liked my company. If so it was mutual—it didn't have to be sexual, it was never inappropriate, but, hey, there's nothing wrong with people enjoying each other's company once in a while, even in a psych ward, even between doctor and patient. But when we both felt it was safe for me to leave, my doctor set a discharge date and I prepared myself mentally for leaving the security of the Refuge. Some say life doesn't begin until after your first suicide attempt, and while I cannot recommend you attempt suicide, there is a sense in which this morbid phrase is true. There is nothing that can give you a stronger love of life than either *witnessing* death or *escaping* death—especially if *you* were the one trying to visit death upon your own head. It's a wonderful thing to fail at. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (3)** > > Patient Admitted October 5, 2011—Discharged October 27, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is the second Brattleboro Refuge third lifetime admission for this 33-year-old single white male *[loser](#)*. Patient is currently unemployed computer software engineer and a writer. Patient lives alone in Brattleboro, Vermont. > > **Chief Complaint** > > "Because I took a bunch of pills last night. I got angry yesterday and that's not a good thing for me because I go inward." *[Yeah, look, what I was trying to express is that anger is dangerous for me because I was raised not to hurt others, so when I'm angry with others, I point that anger at myself, and unfortunately for me that means removing myself from the situation..through suicide.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > On admission the patient reported that on discharge from Tyler 2 last week he returned to his outpatient program. States on admission that yesterday "it went wrong for me." I had a lot of "rising energy and felt anger and rage. At times like that thoughts come to my head about suicide but I had not been planning anything. I had not been planning suicide during the week. However last night I took the pills." Patient feels helpless and hopeless all the time. "I can't make myself hike anymore even though that's the main thing I love to do." The patient does not know how many pills he took but he took the entire bottle. > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > On admission to Tyler 2 patient wrote "I'm mixed up. I'm lost. I have no idea what to do." *[Have felt this way most of my life btw]* Stated "I thought I was getting better but I knew I really wasn't. I don't know if I wanted to really kill myself. I'm just confused. I just don't know." On admission to Tyler 2 the patient reported extreme mood lability *[emotional instability]*, racing thoughts, and ambivalence with respect to the fact that he had not completed his suicide attempt. Patient was begun on clomipramine and Lamictal was increased. In addition the patient was started on clonidine for anxiety. Clomipramine was slowly titrated up with good effect however patient reported odd visual disturbances with the clomipramine and in the end the clomipramine was discontinued despite its having helped with his obsessive thought process. In addition patient was introduced to meditation and breathing exercises as a way of controlling his panic attacks and anxiety. *[I don't think I've ever had a panic attack, but my psychiatrist Dr. Meggs disagrees. When I first came to the Refuge, I didn't even know the definition of "anxiety," though clearly the word characterizes my behavior.]* Trazodone was added for sleep with good effect. Patient was also begun on buspirone for anxiety. Celexa was added for depression with intent to maintain a low dose secondary to the patient's bipolar disorder and concern about inducing mania. As we had to discontinue the clomipramine secondary to visual disturbances, the patient was begun on risperidone to which he immediately responded with good effect. Ultimately the patient began to feel well with decrease in obsessive thought process and improvement in terms of mood and was discharged to the Birches IOP Program *[Intensive Outpatient Program—five days a week, six hours a day—group therapy led by a social worker, classes on substance abuse and mood disorders, dialectical behavioral therapy, individual meetings with whatever psychiatrist was on duty, and an end-of-day evaluation and safety check (meaning, how likely are you to kill yourself tonight?—I tended to do poorly at safety checks and was often held late for an extended one-on-one discussion with the program's nurse, Ms. Irwin)]* > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Mood Disorder NOS. Alcohol Dependence in Early Remission. Cocaine Abuse in Early Remission. OCD. Nephrolithiasis, Recurrent *[kidney stones]*. Financial difficulties secondary to unemployment. Close relationships with his sister and his mother. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 40 *[By the book, a GAF of 40 means I have, "Some impairment in reality testing or communication (e.g., speech is at times illogical, obscure, or irrelevant) or major impairment in several areas, such as work or school, family relations, judgment, thinking, or mood (e.g., depressed adult avoids friends, neglects family, and is unable to work; child frequently beats up younger children, is defiant at home, and is failing at school)"—I think that's pretty accurate]* > > **Condition on Discharge** > > Patient is well groomed, cooperative, makes good contact. There is no psychomotor agitation or retardation noticed. Speech is within normal limits. Mood is described as "anxious but excited." Affect constricted. Cognition is intact. Thought process is logical. Content is non-psychotic. Patient denies auditory or visual hallucinations and no overt signs or symptoms of psychosis are noted. Patient denies suicidal and homicidal ideation. Denies cravings. Denies pain. Patient not deemed an imminent threat to self or others. > > **Prognosis:** Fair. Note: at this discharge I was on eight different psych meds. I'd always been resistant to taking psych meds, from the first time my therapist suggested I see a psychiatrist for anti-anxiety meds. If I had started taking psych meds sooner, I suppose it's possible I would have been less likely to try illegal drugs—who knows. But the first time I was locked in a psych ward in Los Angeles and formally diagnosed as bipolar, I became willing to try pharmaceuticals (Lamictal), and when I was locked up in a psych ward in Brattleboro after a suicide attempt, I was totally willing to take whatever Dr. Meggs, my psychiatrist, prescribed. The antipsychotic she gave me, I took for several years with positive effect. Unfortunately, it gave me tardive dyskinesia, which is irreversible brain damage to the dopamine receptors which causes uncontrollable muscle movements which hamper social interactions, cause excruciating muscle pain, and increase your chance of suicide. During our final checkout, Dr. Meggs sat beside me on the bed in my room. "I was trying to work these jobs, for years." "You were trying to push something that didn't fit." "I needed mental help so bad but I didn't know it. I would just park my car in a mall parking lot, take my sunglasses and wallet with me and start walking. As they say: I just couldn't. And I would never go back. I think I wanted to walk out for my life, for real." "Being alive is hard." "No shit girlfriend." "It's good to remember where our bad times were." I exhale. Dr. Meggs asked me if I was still seeing the texture thing. I looked at the wall. I said, "It's there but it's faint. I know you can't release me if I say I'm still hallucinating, but I'm not going to lie to you. I've been as honest with you as I can up to this point and I'm not going to start lying to you know." I didn't see what she checked on her form, but she let me leave. On her way out the door she leaned back inside my room and said: "Don't forget to breathe." My doctor, my best psychiatrist, saying that to me, making those her parting words, etched them into my mind more permanently than VINCIT QUI SE VINCIT is etched into stone over my old school. "Don't forget to breathe." *I won't*, I said to myself at the time. And for a single moment, since then, I haven't. ### 76 I got out of the Refuge on Thursday, was walked by a nurse directly to the start of day at the Birches program *because they release you directly from Tyler 2 to Birches*—there's no chance to just leave and go home or go out and kill yourself again. Later, though, I did get home after my three and a half week post-suicide attempt stay at the Refuge after going to the pharmacy and buying movies and getting Indian food to go, at Spark's suggestion, and setting out all my prescription bottles on the red carpet. There were eight of them. And I thought: *Is this what's going to keep me healthy? Is this going to prevent me from dying by suicide?* And they all had different schedules, once a day, once in the morning and once at night, sometimes with meals, sometimes with water. Sometimes it was two pills. Sometimes it was half a pill and I had to break it with a splitter. For the first few days, I wondered if I would have to do nothing else but stay home and manage my medication, watch the clock to swallow every little speck of medicine at the right time, in the right way, to keep myself alive. And I took a picture of them, all lined up like that. I posted it on my blog. I was proud of all that medicine, because it was proof that I was really sick. Your friends and family don't know what to think when you tell them you're feeling low or suicidal. But they trust a psychiatrist—a psychiatrist has been to school. And when a psychiatrist thinks you need eight distinct medicines to keep you alive and healthy, and you take a picture of those eight brown bottles lined up next to each other on the red carpet, it's imposing. When people see it, they start to think: *Oh, shit. My brother's really sick.* On my second day of Birches, I ate breakfast by myself in the large Refuge cafeteria. That's when I heard the code blue, then saw EMTs take the woman out on a stretcher, knowing it was the one from Tyler 2..Judy..and Stripes telling me about it later, how she just fell over and none of the nurses or mental health workers even noticed. Picture of Stripes standing at the nurses' desk saying again and again, louder and louder, "I think Judy is dead." I was pulled out of class right away to talk with the Birches psychiatrist, a rotating position now filled by Dr. Sbarro. He asked me if I was with anyone. "No." "Well if you do decide to have children, you might want to pick a partner who doesn't have bipolar disorder to lessen the chance that your kids will have it." And he mentioned Hemingway after I said I was a writer—remember?—and he said it's important for me not to drink because alcohol lowers your inhibitions, including the inhibitions that keep you from killing yourself. "None of the medications I'm putting you on will kill you by overdose..they would just make you really uncomfortable. And by the way that Vistaril you took wouldn't have killed you either." Thank you, doctor, for telling me that even my suicide attempt was ill-designed—thanks so much, buddy, for telling me I even suck at suicide. "I had a recent patient who you remind me of. She didn't have enough aspirin or any lithium or any sleeping pills. She said the antipsychotic she had she was sure wouldn't kill her because she had a psychiatrist who knew of her previous suicide attempts and he told her which pills she had would kill her and which wouldn't." Lol. Great psychiatrist, eh? I think he told me this little story to keep me safe, because he knew my suicide attempt was a cry for help type. - - - - My social worker found me meditating on the floor during break in the hallway and told me to go downstairs and eat with my classmates, that it would be good for me. I felt like the first day at a new school, but my classmates were instantly welcoming, waving me over and getting me a chair. It was like they already knew me, or assumed they did, assumed we were all alike (and we were). When I was outpatient in Birches, I stole cheeseburgers from the cafeteria because I didn't have any money. Grabbing them when staff weren't looking and leaving through the entrance of the caf, back to the table with my fellow birches people. As Bruce Wayne says, you cross a line the first time you steal food so you won't be hungry. This line is not completely described as a moral line—you are acting against your morals yet acting in accordance with a greater necessity. Yes. There is a greater necessity than being moral, than living in accordance with your particular values. It is the deepest need. It is the need to survive. But I stole hamburgers even when I was paying for them by fact of being inpatient. One night decades ago I rented a limo, stopped at a convenience store and stole Doritos right in sight of the clerk and security cameras. The point was *I can do whatever I want and you won't say shit*. And I was right. And I still am. Right is something you *take*. I snuck hamburgers from the the small cafeteria inside the Refuge inside empty Fritos bags inside my pockets..then showing Faith once we got back to Tyler 2, removing the Fritos bags from by cargo pockets and then revealing that each one contained a hot triple cheeseburger..*that's how it's done*..and her being impressed. Then polo shirt John seeing me chilling in front of the nurses' station eating a burger after they practically *patted us down* to make sure we weren't sneaking food up from the cafeteria. He's like, "*Did you sneak that up here?*" And I nod and take another bite. He just shakes his head and goes back to filling out some form. Everybody was always getting caught trying to sneak easy shit up there, like a piece of string cheese and they'd get caught..I could get a whole hamburger up her..times two..and not get caught. But there was this one dude who was like the master..he used layers of ice in a soda cup to keep an ice cream sandwich cold..it was like he built a mini-refrigerator and even I was impressed with the technique. That one girl (Winehouse) relapsed—I heard this after she hadn't showed to class for a couple of days..and Sue had relapsed with her. They were shooting coke and I wanted to relapse with them so badly. You know? You're eating lunch with the Birches kids..you get one happy moment and then that was the last time I saw half of them because after being in Tyler 2, after being in Birches, they relapsed to shooting *coke* into their veins—which sounded fine to me—but it's like, what are you doing? Are you getting clean or are you hitting the needle? - - - - I didn't particularly like Birches—for me, that program was a way for nurses to daily evaluate me as the highest suicide risk in the group and daily recommend that I see a Birches psychiatrist, who daily recommended that I go back to Tyler 2. In my medical records from that hospital it doesn't say "suicidal"—it says "chronic suicidality." That's right folks, I hate this world and everything in it, including you, everyone I've ever met or never met, the whole system, seen and unseen, every job I've ever had, every business I've ever come in contact with, and me—I hate me most of all, deeper than almost anyone can imagine. I hate my faults. I hate my strengths. I hate that I'm here. I hate that someday I won't be. I'm terribly maladjusted to this world, and I'm smarter than most people, and with that slightly smarter brain I judge every single one of you who thinks it's an accomplishment to do well at your job, succeed at parenting, fake-ass romance, rising through the ranks of corporate success..none of that is worth anything, not to me. I never found pride at making more than my dad when I was twenty-three—I was embarrassed to be wasting my time at such a lowlife position at a Fortune 50 company. That's right: lowlife. If you work at one of those companies you are a lowlife, no better than a used car salesman or an assembly line worker. I was embarrassed every day I worked at Mead Research—mostly embarrassed to be working alongside people for whom working at LN was the achievement of their lifetime. Most of them are still there. They have a house on a golf course and make three or four times the median national income. Most of them have zero talent. Maybe one out of forty programmers at that company can write code—and no one made it an art. Frankly, to see myself associated with those people, who to me were dumb, talentless, and spiritless—that was enough to make me want to kill myself right there. Of course I have bipolar, and that'll make you want to kill yourself for no reason at all. But bipolar or not, whether among children, grandparents, soldiers, or whoever, the less life sucks, the less people kill themselves. I mean look at Iraq: toward the end, more of our soldiers died from suicide than in battle—that has to tell you, coarsely, that their lives sucked. Most of us think that the idea they were fighting an unjust war maybe got to their heads a little. You know, killing foreigners even for the tenuous ideals of "freedom" and "democracy" is hard. But when you've killed people to protect your country for a threat of WMDs *that everyone knew didn't exist* before the war started..yeah..that might create a problem of conscience in a US soldier that can only be fixed by a bullet to the brain. At the very least it paints a picture for the soldier, for all of us, of a world that sucks. - - - - The Birches program really left me feeling alienated. In Tyler 2 you could cry whenever you wanted to, no one would even notice. Birches people were generally functioning on a higher level than that. They're outpatient people. Some of them have jobs and some of them have come here ten years ago and are just back for a "tune up." (That old guy who was all gregarious and happy and flirting with Ms. Irwin, the program nurse—I think that's the only reason he came back, was to have dinner and nookie with that beautiful redhead who was about his age.) The guy who sat in the corner and listened to music from his phone on earbuds the whole time. The young woman who was on disability and was taking time to figure out her mind and heal before she someday goes back to work, maybe, living with her mom and her cats. The violence meathead dude in Birches we met earlier whose every other sentence ended in how he just needed to kick someone's ass..body building freak..and he would refer to women as bitches, in groups containing men and women. We all complained and when confronted about it by program administrators bodybuilder dude decided he'd had enough of the program, he was above it, he didn't need it, he didn't like to be told not to call women bitches—so he left, like a fucking bitch. In drawing class, everyone said my picture was the best—they gave me compliments and I was friendly back. But I wanted to scream, to kick chairs over, to interrupt certain people when they were speaking and inform them of how dumb they were and that their words were a waste of time to my ears. And some people I wanted to fight. Actually just one guy. The mushroom/LSD guy, he was so disruptive and so disrespectful that I wanted to jump across the room and grab him by the throat and bang his head against the fishbowl window over and over and over. Fucking asshole. That's something that really irks me: someone who's crazy who doesn't know how fucking crazy they are. This guy is telling me that he's opened up a portal to inter-dimensional beings and he's incredulously offended when Dr. Sbarro tells him that actually he's just done *waaaaaay* too much mushrooms and LSD. Now look, I ain't no simpleton—the idea that inter-dimensional beings connect and communicate with us through hallucinogenic plant life is a perfectly reasonable theory in my world. But when you deal with multiple/alternate/psychotic realities, you have to remember *this one*, the one reflected by the cultures of the people on planet Earth. I'm not saying you're *not* talking to inter-dimensional beings when you trip. All I'm saying is—and this is what I say to myself—*I am sitting in a mental hospital,* and *they don't let people into mental hospitals who* aren't *crazy (in the sense understood by most humans)*. So that's why I wanted to kill that mushroom/LSD kid: because he was always disrupting Birches groups by unzipping and unclipping and unbuckling and re-buckling his backpack, paying zero attention when other people were talking. He had the loudest backpack in the world. That was the thing that bothered me most about this red-headed crackhead dude in Tyler 2 that I told the fuck *off?!* He was constantly saying he didn't belong in Tyler 2 and he didn't need treatment, and the arrogance in that drove me *off a fucking cliff*. Same with this LSD/mushroom guy. He irked me to no end. I wanted to *shout* at this motherfucker: *You're in one of the world's best psychiatric hospitals. How the fuck do you think you got here? Remember the admissions process?—all those questions they asked you?? If you weren't fucking* crazy *you wouldn't be sitting here. Because, guess what, your ass in that chair is costing* somebody *a lot of money.* They say, though, that the people who really push your buttons are the ones that are a lot like you—but just a little different. The first time I was in a psych hospital, ten years ago in LA, I didn't think I needed to be there. I thought drinking was my problem. I didn't have any way to conceptualize bipolar disorder—that I had a mental illness that ran so deep in me that it had been affecting every aspect of my life probably for my whole entire life *and that all the while I managed to stay completely unaware of it, completely ignorant that I had one of the three "major mental illnesses" (aptly named) that make your reality so incompatible with most other people's that you really can't relate—it was a* miracle *that I had done as well as I had, for as long as I had, in the normal world.* So I felt a little compassion for mushroom guy. This was his first time in a psychiatric hospital. It was my fourth? Fifth? I didn't get this on the first try, and it was ok if he didn't, either. - - - - After getting out of the Refuge, on Megan's suggestion, I bought myself art supplies, a good meal, and some movies, taking it all to go, up to my attic apartment and enjoying myself..watching *Girl, Interrupted* while eating Indian food. The night I got out of the Refuge and like all such nights after Stripes suggested it, I treated myself to many purchases, sex toys (with a crazy manic sexual talk with the older woman who owned the store) and I bought a ton of movies, as always, used DVDs from the corner record store. One of the movies I bought was *Girl, Interrupted*, which I had always liked but now was obsessed with since I had stayed in a couple of mental institutions, and I still had the copy that Stripes gave me inside the Refuge of the book, which I took great joy in reading while I was within the confines of a locked ward of my own. In my attic apartment, I bought a membership to one porn site because I knew that on the Celexa I would need some serious help to get off. I fucked my artificial pussy and watched some of the cutest girls I've ever seen sitting on couches, fingering themselves and making themselves cum. But I couldn't join them. Everything I did felt good. The sensation of the pussy rubber was good. My brain activation was good. I was responsive to the teenage models. But I couldn't cum because of the damn Celexa. They say, "sexual side effects" on TV—*that's* the sexual side effect of antidepressants: *you can't fucking cum while you're on them!* Another time I got out of the Refuge, when I went to Whit's to get my special meal, Jill wrote a special message on my to-go food after I got out of the hospital. Donald Mutebe was there, drinking, and he said: "You know, with the Refuge, it's a business, and when they decide whether to admit you, if you're on the border, they might admit you even if you don't need the help, because it's money to them—you know?" "Yeah, I know what you're saying, my friend. I hear you." He was implying that I didn't need to be there—or might not need to be—and I wasn't sure if he was doing me a favor or harm by saying this. "I'm just saying don't let it determine your life," he said. Then Jill brings the food out and I read the message on the styrofoam container. It says something about hugs and kisses and I love it. Donald knocks his hand on the table. "I'll leave you to your dinner, my friend." "Thanks, Donald." "Just don't see yourself as a diagnosis." I nodded. - - - - I skipped my second day at the Birches program, left a crying message on my social worker's voicemail telling her I couldn't go back there. She eventually called me back and said she needed me to come in on Monday, they could help etc. I just lied on my bed sobbing. I wrote my family an email telling them that I had been in a psychiatric hospital and explaining the reason why (I thought they might want to know). I can't find the note note now but basically it said I was in the hospital for a suicide attempt and I'm fine now. The end result was that my dad never even responded—neither did a lot of the rest of my family. Those are those times when you reach out to the people who love you the most and they just shake their heads and refuse to take your hand. I thought I was alone before my suicide attempt—no—a suicide attempt is something a normal will never understand, and once you do it, you are not more welcome, you are less. After I left that message for my social worker, I went out to soothe myself with smoke and drink. They piss tested us on Monday when I did go back to the Birches program, and I must have had just enough time to clean out because my Friday drinking didn't show up and I hadn't drank the rest of the weekend. I didn't really care if they kicked me out of the Birches problem. Not that I'm a big rebel or anything—I follow rules that I think make sense. But trying to kill yourself is breaking one of the ultimate rules, and once you break that one it puts everything else in a new perspective. I was *suicidal*—I had bigger problems than displeasing my social worker by not showing up to group on time. ### 77 Gretchen's proved herself a true stalker when she went to the pharmacy to meet me there when I had mentioned I would likely be there, then she got mad because I didn't show up at the pharmacy—she met me there even though we never agreed to meet—I was just telling her about my day. I was like, "Gretchen, I don't need help picking up my medicine. If I make an agreement to meet with you in the atrium to talk, that's a date and you can be mad if I break it. If you ask me what I'm doing this afternoon and I mention I'm going to the pharmacy after my Birches outpatient class, and you show up at the pharmacy at a certain time because you know when my class gets out, that's not a date—that's you stalking me. You have no right to be mad about me not telling you that my plan to go to the pharmacy changed because my Birches class ran late! I had an evening class and there wasn't time for me to come all the way up here to the Hotel Pharmacy before my next class!" I started thinking Gretchen was part of the reason I was crazy—I actually had the thought: *I want to go inpatient again just so I don't have to deal with Gretchen's crazy stalking motherfucking bullshit!* And later, much later, very close to now, I occasionally return to thoughts of hiding in the psych ward. If I could hide in a nice enough psych ward—one with internet, where I could write my books—where I could hide from my dad and my mom and my insane aunts and uncles and grandmothers and cousins and neighbors and former coworkers and bosses..I would. Because I've been in the hospital and I've been out, and if we make the distinction between mental illness and *crazy*, all the crazy people are out here. ### 78 I went back to Tyler 2 for some reason. I don't know—maybe they thought I was suicidal. I got into the first fight I ever started. All the other fights I'd ever been in were like four guys kicking my ass on the playground because I was white. There was this guy—his name was Schizophrenic Mike—and he often looked like he was faking to me. Faking being ill. Like there was this gleam in his eye that the only reason he was there was because he wanted to escape being in jail or something. But I don't know—that could just be my misinterpretation. What I know for sure is he was walking up behind all the girls and standing there looking down at them and making them uncomfortable. So I told him to stop. And he didn't stop. So I provoked Schizophrenic Mike into starting a fight with me. I had laundry in the laundry room. Schizophrenic Mike was wandering around the ward—this is at like 6am. I kept telling him: "Don't touch my fucking laundry. Don't touch my fucking laundry," over and over and then, "Don't go into the laundry room. Don't go into the laundry room," and then, after he was in the laundry room, "If you open the top to that dryer I'm gonna kick your ass," real quiet, where I thought no one else could hear. In case you weren't clear on this, this is as scene where I provoke a deeply schizophrenic mental patient into starting a fight with me so he'll be blamed and I'll be the victim, helped by nurses and apologized to by psychiatrists—yeah, just wanted to make sure you had the picture. These aren't thing's I'm necessarily *proud* of. I'm just saying what happened. So I coax this fucking mentally twisted motherfucker into opening the top of the dryer and I had been taunting him all this time and I finally said, "Mike, that's it, I'm gonna have to [dialogue withheld because it's too awful] and he runs at me, like I knew he would, like I was preparing for, and before he can punch me I reach out and grab his throat and I squeeze like I'm gonna kill that motherfucker. Both our glasses falls off. His hands go for my neck. He sees what type of fight he's been drawn into. This isn't a punch you and make you bleed fight. This is a choke you until you die fight. I have to tell you I feel great—maybe not joy, but—satisfaction in remembering this. Because sometimes a man is a dog. And sometimes a dog needs to be put down. I squeezed, and squeezed, and pressed with my thumbs, and I shook his head back and forth like I wanted a grape to fall off the stem. I don't have any guilt about this fight to this day, even though he was schizophrenic. You don't go around making all the women uncomfortable. It fucks up the vibe of the whole joint. When you have a system, work system for instance, psych ward for instance, and there's a bad seed, that bad seed must be removed for the sake of the whole system. I've had bosses who didn't understand this, and that bad seed ate away at their company from the inside. I wasn't about to let this asshole mess with the peace of the ward. He needed to go to ALSA, and I did what was necessary to send him to ALSA. The fight was broken up almost instantly by nurses and mental health techs—the Tyler 2 fire crew works awesomely in situations like this. They instantly put Mike in ALSA and checked on me and apologized and soothed me and gave me my PRN for anxiety. They sat me in the vitals chair and took my pulse and all that. Fuck you. I win. You lose. That's how we do that. - - - - Stripes says she heard I got into a fight. I say yeah, I guess I did. "Did you kick his ass?" she says, nodding. "I don't know. I didn't do near as much damage as I wanted to. They broke it up pretty fast." "You kicked his ass," she laughs. "That's what everybody is saying." I am secretly overjoyed that Stripes thinks I won the fight. "So what is everybody *saying*, exactly." "That you're a badass psycho motherfucker and not to mess with you." "Oh, no," I say, "I wouldn't hurt a fly." "Unless you thought *he was messing with* the girls on the unit. You're a trip." "Is that really what people are saying?" "Scouts honor," Megan says, making the peace sign with her fingers. "They're saying you're a psychotic *unglued* motherfucker and that you never even punched him you just *went for his neck* and tried to kill him!" "Damn right," I say. "I was gonna squeeze the air out of that fucker's body." Megan screams, "THIS IS NOT A COFFEE SHOP CONVERSATION!! Woo-hoo! *Alright*, my friend, *right on*, you *kill* that motherfucker!" She has her hand out to bump the rock. So I bump the rock and her fingers go exploding all over the place. I do the same thing and our hand bump looks incredible, like we planned that shit, but all I can do is go back through all the times I got beat up in school and think that *this is the first fight* that I both started *and won*. It only took me till I was thirty-three. Being in the psych hospital does something to you. When I had my hands around that motherfucker's neck, there was no holding back. I was one-hundred percent trying to cut off the air supply to that fucker's head, which, I guess, could kill you or at least make you pass out. I did it just right, too, played every nurse in that room so that they saw Mike attack me and it looked like all I was doing was defending myself from a very random attack—all I was doing was standing outside the laundry room, pacing peacefully, waiting for my clothes to dry. (Quietly talking shit to him to make him come at me.) He ended up in ALSA, and I was given an anti-anxiety pill. The rush was incredible, though—I can see why people fight—the high was better than cocaine, my heart was beating a mile a minute. And when the nurses sat me in the vitals chair I was saying things like: "If you let him out of ALSA I'll *kill* that motherfucker!!" To which head nurse Michelle said: "You're not helping yourself." She was giving me this stern look. "Helping myself *what*." "You do want to leave, don't you? Language like that will only keep you here longer." "I don't *care* how long I stay here." Michelle goes back to writing in my chart. There are a lot of patients and doctors in the main room now. Guess they heard there was a show. Also it was shift change. "I'm sorry, Michelle." She looks at me. "I didn't mean to say I wanted to kill him. I don't want to kill him." Michelle makes a nice face. Maybe now she'll write that in my chart. "All I meant to say," I say for the benefit of the audience of patients who are sprinkled around the room, "is that if *any of you*, doctors, nurses, whoever the *fuck* you are, let that motherfucker out of ALSA I will beat that fucker's head against the wall until he's bleeding from the back of the head and they have to sew *tiny little fragments of bone* back into that motherfucker's skull *with dental floss*. I will fuck that fucker so hard he will—" "Hey! We don't need to hear this!" "Ok, that's fine, you hear what you want to hear and you see what you want to see, as the man says. All I'm saying is that fucker stands around the room looking down girls' pants, staring girls in the face, and I don't like the girls I'm stuck in a psych ward with to feel on edge, 'cause when *they're* on edge *they'll* be fighting and that's worse than any fight between two guys. *I don't like it* when people disrespect *women!*" "Ok, ok. Do you need a PRN?" "*Fuck* the PRN." "Do you need a shot?" "Hey, Michelle, I can be as calm or as wild as I want to be, any time I choose." "Do you believe that?" "Look, now I'm calm." "Please stay that way." "No problem. But if you let that fuckhead out of ALSA while I'm still in this hospital I will KICK HIS FUCKING ASS!!" Michelle stands up, comes around the nurses' station, kneels in front of me and says sweetly: "You already kicked his ass, the way I hear it. What do you really want?" "I want peace. He was making the girls feel uncomfortable." "That's *our* job, ok? Your job is to focus on your own healing." "Well you all are not doing your job." "You don't think we're doing our job?" "Not in Mike's case. Ask any girl in here. He's walking around, standing right behind people, staring people down." "Well you got your peace, didn't you. He'll be in ALSA for a while." "Good." "Maybe next time you can try talking to one of us about the problem." "I did! I told every fucking mental health tech in this motherfucker *about* that motherfucker—" "What I hear is that you need to calm down. Do you want me to get you that shot?" "That won't be necessary. I can calm myself down." "Then do it. And don't make any more death threats. The laws out there..?..apply in here, too." "Ok, I'll calm myself down. I can do it myself. I don't need help." "I know." "I'm going to my room to meditate." "That sounds very wise. Do you want me to bring your breakfast to you?" "No thank you. I'm eating breakfast with Stripes." Michelle blushes, smiling. "You have a crush on her, don't you?" "Well," I say, looking at Stripes, "if by crush you mean I want to strip her down and fuck her from behind while looking at that big-ass tat of the Virgin Mary on her left arm and imagine I'm fucking the *real* Virgin Mary then yes, I have a crush on her." Michelle stands up. "Thanks for that imagery," she says. "No problem. Our baby is going to be the prophet Jesus, by the way, but we'll treat him as our best friend." "Ok," Michelle says, going back behind the nurses' desk. "When is Michael coming out of ALSA?" "Don't worry, it won't be today." She looks directly at me. "And the way you've arranged it, he'll be on one-on-ones when he *does* get out, which'll probably be in about a *week*." "A week of peace," I mumble. "What?" "A week of peace!" Michelle shakes her head. She mumbles something. "What was that?" I say. She mouths the words to me: *Thank God.* She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "Yeah, see, you motherfuckers'll be thanking me that motherfucker's in ALSA." "Go to your room. And stop using that word. Don't come out until you're calm." I get up from the vitals chair, make my way by Stripes, brushing my hand from one of her shoulders to the other, touching the bare skin of her neck at the top of her shirt. All the while I'm saying: "Yeah, everybody *does* and *says one motherfucking thing* while *thinking* and *doing another* motherfucking thing. And you're not allowed to talk about motherfucking *shit*. If *I* talk about motherfucking shit, I have to *stay* here longer. If *you* talk about motherfucking shit, *you get fired*. Isn't that weird? If *you* talk about it, you have to leave—if *I* talk about it, I have to stay. But it's *the same motherfucking shit*, either way. This ward is full of motherfuckers *writing shit in charts*—you would think they *computerize* this motherfucker. Get some *iPads* up in this motherfucker. That whole fuckin' records room down there?—You could fit that whole fuckin' room on a hard drive 'bout *this* big. Turn that records room into a spa/sauna thing, you know, with the hickory chips and and guy/girl showers that are *clean*—not like these fuckin' showers up here—I'm talking some guy cleans them out with *bleach* every day. And—*and—before you ask*—because I get this question a lot—you were gonna ask me *what does the guy who pushes the cart with the medical records do* now that the whole fuckin' *Refuge* is automated with heads-up displays and high-class electronics and shit. Well, I'll tell you. I have an answer for that. What he will *do* is..something more human. What's that guy's name who pushes that cart? Pedro? Well now fucking *Pedro* can sit outside painting paintings and maybe he'll be the next Monet *or Manet* or whatever. Or maybe he can be Diego Riviera—is *that* a painter? Right. But the point is, *Pedro who pushes the records cart* is doing a job below his human standing. Pedro—you might not know Pedro but I've *talked* to Pedro on many occasions—and Pedro happens to be a very talented and deep motherfucking human fucking being. I don't like for Pedro to be *pushing a records cart* when Pedro could be utilizing one of his more *human* talents. That's why I say we need to automate this whole motherfucker. From top to tip." I'm walking backwards down the long hallway to my room. The discharge nurse—I think her name is Sharon, like my mom—calls out to Michelle, who is still up at the nurses' station: "Should I give him the shot?" This Sharon has the shot ready, and she's right next to me. Back in the day (or in a shittier mental hospital) that would be Haldol but here it's just Benadryl—they're not trying to knock me out for *days*, just calm my motherfucking ass *down* a little, take a six-hour nap, wake up like a sloth, that sort of thing. They just want me docile and I'm not *docile* right now and I know Sharon and Michelle are thinking this, using that exact term—*docile*—so I say: "I'm docile! I'm docile!" I put my arms in the air like a black man about to get shot by the police and I turn around in a slow three-sixty like I'm showing them I have no weapons on me. Then I sidestep into my room, and close the door, leaving Sharon holding a shot of Benadryl that will now have to be thrown away, thankfully, 'cause that's no way for anyone to take a nap. I've never been given the shot. That's because, for an out-of-control person, I'm unusually interested in staying as in control as possible, especially inside psych wards. That is definitely a place where you want to stay on *top* of the game. I take a thirty-minute nap, then go back out into the main room. I refrain from using the word *motherfucker*. I sit down and eat breakfast with Stripes and she tells me that I won the fight with Mike and I just try to imagine Stripes' voice moaning while I eat her pussy out. Years before, when I was in film school, I told this guy if he didn't stop blocking my view of the screen where my movie was playing that I was going to "kick his fucking ass." I picked up a gobo arm—a big metal pipe used on film sets—and he's lucky he moved 'cause if he hadn't I would have beat him until he was crawling off the soundstage on a pair of bloody stumps. Oh and also with no head. I get mad sometimes. It's called irate bipolar mania, and you really don't want to mess with it. ### 79 I hate how now that I have this diagnosis of bipolar disorder, now that I'm "mentally ill," people think that somehow means I'm less capable than them. No. Even though my mind doesn't work correctly in this very specific way known to doctors, that does not mean your healthy brain is more capable than mine! Actually, I'm still smarter than you, I still see the situation more clearly than you (unless you're my Mom), and I can still do way more complex things than you. And I've read more than you. So don't try to act like just because I'm ill, suddenly *you're* the expert. My best psychiatrists don't even do that to me, and they have PhDs. They're smart enough to know that I'm smarter than them, and therefore they have to treat me with mutual respect or else I'll just start fucking with them. It sucks when one of your role models is Hannibal Lecter—I always say if Hannibal Lecter and Björk had a baby, they'd have me. You know the part in *Hannibal* where Agent Starling goes to see Barney at his apartment and Starling says: "So when you turned Dr. Lecter over to the Tennessee Police—" And Barney says, "They weren't civil to him. They're all dead now." "Yeah they only survived his company three days. You survived him six years at the asylum. How'd you do that? It wasn't just being civil." And Barney says, "Yes, it was." Well, I'm a little like Lecter in this way—I like to be treated civilly. And I don't claim to be unique in this way. This is a common meme or else it wouldn't have shown up in these universally famous stories about Hannibal Lecter. And unlike the fictional Lecter, usually us real-life Lecters don't actually *kill* people for their disrespect, for exasperating us with their dullness. But we kill you socially. We kill you emotionally. We kill you at your job. And some of us sub-serial killer psychopaths kill you *psychologically*, planting little seeds of doubt inside your mind where there they grow as tall and as immovable as baobabs. Not even the little prince can save you from this type of Lecter. And that's the type of Lecter that I am. I push, and I push, and I push you till you have to move. Which is unfortunate. Because that's the way I've been pushed. And I know better than anyone that if you get pushed *too* far, you never come back. - - - - You know how I got under my dad's skin? His new wife was disrespecting me, and neither of them were doing anything to try to blend the two families..it was just like Eva now owned my dad and he no longer had a relationship with his kids or his former wife, not even civil communication. So I told my dad that I predicted his relationship with Eva would end before his relationship with me did. Instantly, he ended his relationship with me, and I haven't heard a loving thing from him since. He probably doesn't even consciously remember me saying that, but somewhere deep in his mind he is trying to win, to prove me wrong, and he's doing everything in his power to stay with Eva and to never speak to me, so that my prediction will ultimately be wrong. I hope it tortures him, the pride of maintaining his rightness over me, but I never thought Eva was good enough for my dad, and I let them both know it. Eva has kind currents within her, but deep down she doesn't have the muscle for real love—and in that way, maybe she and my dad *are* perfect for each other. If my dad was a full, whole, complete, mature adult, he would have never let me get away with insinuating such a setup. But he has never acted like my parent, and so, functionally, he hasn't ever *been* my parent. I grew up with a certain lack of guidance from him, which my mom filled in as much as possible, but I am still unruly, untrustworthy of those I call *adults* (even though I'm thirty-eight I don't consider *myself* to be one). I never knew kind authority from my dad, and I have zero trust that there is kind authority now, in bosses, police, government. To me they're all un-trustable. And unfortunately that isn't just the way I color the world according to my childhood psychology—it's the truth about many of those who govern. I recently told my dad about my tardive dyskinesia, which keeps me lying down twenty-three hours a day—lying down stops the clenching. I sent him an email. And I heard back?—nothing. It would be unwise to try to interpret his lack of response, but doing as little reading between the lines as possible, I will say it hurts for my dad to ignore such an announcement from me. As far back as I can think, he and I had the push/pull of neglect and abuse. He would ignore me until he needed me to hold the flashlight for some project he was working on. Then he would yell at me for holding it wrong, and physically force my hands to the right position. He would never give me details of what he expected from me, and then he would get mad when I screwed up some plan that was only in his mind. On prom night he let me borrow the van. I drove my date and two of our friends to dinner, to the dance, to a cornfield where we all lay on the roof looking at the stars, and then to one of the girl's houses for the night. My agreement with my dad was that I'd have the van back by midnight. It was a Saturday night, church was the next day, and he planned to drive my mom (who was the pastor of the church), me, and my two sisters to worship, using the van as we did every Sunday. But I never planned to have that vehicle back by midnight. They had my mom's Honda that they could use to get to church and me not coming home that night was a calculated *fuck you* to my dad. He didn't respect me; I didn't respect him. That is how it's been for as long as I can remember. And lying on top of that eight-passenger van with my friends, looking at the stars, making out with a smart and beautiful woman, I imagined my dad getting madder and madder as midnight came and went. I never thought for a moment that he was *worried* about me, as my mom was—I knew he was *mad*. That's his primary emotion. He tries to control things—when they don't work out he gets *mad*—unfortunately I inherited that pattern. I really don't remember the kisses between me and my girlfriend that night. The thrill of disobeying my father, however, is something I will *never* forget. - - - - Living constantly with the ultimate option as a real option is difficult, but it also gives you power. Everything else is nothing compared to ending your life. I used to find myself in salary negotiations, and they'd be like we're going to give you a ten-percent raise, and I'd be like *twenty*. One piece of advice: don't ever try to bargain with somebody who doesn't give a fuck. With me, the nuclear option is always on the table. When you say: "We can't give you twenty." Then I say: "Friday will be my last day." See, you came into this meeting with some false assumptions. Like the assumption that I want this fucking job, that I'm as desperate as you to maintain a residence where I can impress my friends with the ultimate goal of getting them to take their clothes off and have sex with me. Fuck pussy. I've had enough sex to last a lifetime. That was your first assumption—that was where you went wrong. And faced with the new choice, in the new reality, they give me the twenty-percent raise. Like I said, don't ever fuck with people who have less to lose than you. When I'm living every day hating life to the point of wanting to die, words like "no" and "fuck you" and "this relationship is over" come easily to me. I had a girlfriend named Rishi. She always used to say, *You're too quick to play the break-up card.* That's right. When I find myself, day after day, in pointless, abusive arguments with my girlfriend, the break-up card is *on* the motherfucking table. Why? Because I don't want to spend *one more day* arguing with you. Hence the nuclear option. Life is too short for me to spend my time doing anything but the most exalted thing I can pull off. Most people, they'd rather settle for mediocrity. For me, it's either the brightest moment possible—or nothing. ### 80 There was a schizophrenic woman named Crack Bitch with stringy gray hair, shit-stained gowns, she never spoke and she was tall, long arms, and every once in a while she'd go ballistic, knock her dinner tray off the table, send everyone's food flying. She'd stay in her room all day screaming and banging on the door. The street borderline coke addict—Winehouse—who herself you'd never want to fight, said to me one day while we were eating, after Crack Bitch threw her tray, Winehouse said: "I heard that bitch heard screaming in the walls. She was ripping through drywall to save the people she thought were trapped in there. That bitch has that crazy strength. She could fuck up anyone in here. You see those arms? One swipe and that bitch would have you *on the floor*. That's crazy strength, you know what I mean?" "Yeah." Winehouse punches me in the shoulder. "Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. I saw you fuck up that Mike kid the other day." "He was staring at the girls." "I know, I saw." "He was making them uncomfortable." "I know! He was creeping the fuck out of me." "I didn't like it. I hate people like that. He was fucking up the flow of the unit." "Well you fucked that motherfucker up." "Did I?" "Oh yeah." "I don't remember. I was tranced out." "It looked like you were trying to *kill* him. You had your hands around his throat. You didn't throw a single punch. From *go*, you were trying to strangle that motherfucker." "I've never punched anyone in my life." "Really?" "Yeah, I was a straight-A student. Science fair and shit." "When did you go crazy?" "Tenth grade." "Well, I wouldn't want to fight you." "I wouldn't want to fight you either!" "For real?" "Yeah, you intimidated me for the first few days." "I thought you were stuck up," Winehouse says. "Everybody thinks that," I say. "Then I saw you sitting on the floor in the med line fucking rocking back and forth and shit, talking to that old lady. You remember I invited you to sit at our table." "Yeah. I needed that." "I wasn't sure you'd even remember, you looked *gone*." "The reason I sat down is because the meds they're giving me make my dick hard. I don't want to walk around Tyler 2 with my fucking dick sticking out. I know it's a fucking psych ward but Jesus." "Seriously?" "Yeah." "You think we could take her, the two of us?" Winehouse is looking at Crack Bitch, her stringy hair mostly covering her face. "Fuck no," I say. Winehouse laughs. I ask, "Do *you* think we could take her?" Winehouse leans forward. She uses a low voice. "That bitch should be in a *cell. I'm* afraid of that bitch and I ain't afraid of nobody." Winehouse drinks the rest of a milk. "Don't ever fuck with crazy people," she says, while still swallowing. "Because crazy people.." She puts the milk down. "..will fuck your ass up." "You don't seem crazy—you have borderline, right?" "That's the latest diagnosis." "Well you don't seem crazy to me. You just seem like..someone I'd like to hang out with." "Thanks. You're awesome." "Do I seem crazy to you?" Winehouse puts her hand on my hand. "I gotta be honest with you." "Ok." "I can tell you're smart—well not smart but I can tell you're a fucking genius, from your notebooks and the way you talk to people. You're a manipulator. But not the mean kind. I see how you work the staff, you get them to do exactly what you want. But you always have to be in control. You could prob'ly get any one of these motherfuckers fired if you wanted to." "I thought about it the other night. I was going to write a letter to the clinic director on this one health tech." "Why?" "He was glorifying guns and war." "Yeah, and that rubbed you the wrong way?" "Yes it did." "Did it make you angry?" "Extremely." "That's what I'm talking about. You're angry. You cut people off sometimes, don't you?" I nod. "You think of them as less than you if they cross a line you don't want them to cross." "I just don't like being disrespected." "But what are you willing to do to people who disrespect you?" I take my hand from under my fellow psych mate's. "Here is my problem," I say. "I shouldn't have had to deal with Mike. This place is crawling with techs and nurses and psychiatrists and of all those adults *no one* stood up for the women Mike was staring at, intimidating..*days* this was going on, *almost weeks*, and no one did a thing." "So you stepped up." "So I stepped up and I *restored order* and *safety* in a place where people need to feel safe so they can heal." "By strangling the person who was causing disorder." "I wasn't going to *kill* him, ok. It was a very controlled situation that was designed to send him to ALSA and give everyone—especially me—a break from that bullshit. I tricked him into attacking me first so he would go to ALSA and I would be viewed as the victim—" "And you would have the nurses fawning over you and giving you PRNs and checking your blood pressure and apologizing to you that he attacked you and guaranteeing you that he would be in ALSA for a week, so you could feel safe and not have to worry about being attacked. Yeah, I saw all that. I don't know if you remember but I was up early that morning and I was in here 'cause I couldn't sleep. I saw exactly what you were doing, even though you fooled just about everybody else in here. But I know your psychiatrist is Dr. Meggs, and I know she's prob'ly the only fuckin' ho in here as smart as you." I looked Winehouse in the eyes. She was looking back at me. I said, "In high school I had this girlfriend, Tuesday Walker. And once she said to me, 'Matthew, sometimes I don't know if you have absolutely no control..or entirely too much.' " Winehouse is nodding, picking up her dinner tray. She knows that I know what she's been talking about. "So you think I'm crazy." "Matthew, I love you. I'd hang out with you outside of here—I think we should do that. I think we should fuck—though I have a boyfriend so that has to be on the d/l. And I'd *love..*love love *love* to shoot coke with you. You seem like you'd be a lot of fun to do drugs with. But when it comes to crazy—straight up—I think you're the craziest person in here." ### 81 Those words were running through my head even after I got out of the Refuge. I was going to my stylist and all I could hear was Winehouse saying: *When it comes to crazy*—*straight up*—*I think you're the craziest person in here.* And then I would respond: "Yeah, well, if you think I'm crazy you should meet my family." Then Winehouse would say, again, *When it comes to crazy*—*straight up*—*I think you're the craziest person in here.* And I would think about that, and what it meant that she thought it, maybe even what it meant about me. I get out of the Refuge, shave my head (my hairstylist hates me for this, almost won't do it). "So what I've been up to?" she asks. "I've been going crazy," I say. "I'm a Refuge person, be scared." Etc. She shaves my head and is like, "Maybe we can do something fun with it next year," all pouty. I buy a Hermione Granger Time-Turner and some black-and-white checkered sunglasses. I'm sitting at Matt's food cart. He makes a burger to my specification and it's so beautiful he asks me if he can take a picture of it. "It's your burger, man—you made it." "But it's your idea—you're the creator behind the burger." Lol. We both take a picture with our phones. Then I eat the motherfucker, and it's so damn good..then look who shows up. I put my burger down, sourly, it's already ruined for me the moment I see Aaron step up from the sidewalk onto the concrete plate where Chris's food cart and this seating area have been arranged. "Do you two know each other?" "No." "Well this is Aaron, he's a quantum physicist." "Oh, nice." Aaron sits down. He and Matt are small talking. And it takes me a while to remember what had happened, when I saw him, because I was so drunk the night before..but eventually during this friendly conversation between him and me and the owner of the food cart, I remember that I had gone to Whit's and I was so drunk I didn't even remember that I'd blacked out, but I started to remember what this asshole had done to me, how he had treated me the night before. "Oh yeah," I say, stopping the conversation. "I remember now." I'm looking straight at Aaron. "I had a bit to drink to it took a while for it to come back to me but *I remember now*." Aaron is silent. Matt is silent. I tell Matt, "I was at a table with this asshole last night—at Whit's—and this condescending motherfucker was *telling me not to hit on girls he liked* in Whitman's, even when they were flirting back with me, saying *I was less than* him. Yeah. I remember now. If I hadn't seen you today I prob'ly would have never remembered that, because I had a lot to drink and I did black out—I'll be honest about my part—but, Aaron, what you said to me made me very angry. And thinking about it now it making me very, very angry and tell you one more thing and that is not only did you make me angry but you wronged me—as a human being—by indicating with your actions you thought I was less than you, and we're gonna work this out, right now. And now that I'm sober, I think you'll find me much *less* reasonable a person." Aaron gets up from his chair and walks away from the burger cart. I stand up. "Don't ever *treat* me that way again and don't let me ever *see* you ever again in Whit's I hope we're clear on that. I said I hope we're clear on that!" "We're clear," he says, and I just thirst for the day I get to beat a quantum physicist's skull in with my bare hands. Matt says, "I'm sorry for having him around. I didn't know he had offended you." "No, it's ok. Thank you but it's fine. I overreacted, I admit that—just 'cause a guy offends me doesn't mean I have to insert a poisonous caterpillar INSIDE HIS DICK!!! No, I'm sorry, you want peace at your burger stand and I want to be able to come here too so I'm going to leave—" "You don't have to." "No, I'm going to go calm down and when I come here in the future I will have processed my feelings about that little lying-ass vegan farm toad. Pot-smoking motherfucker. Fuck me if I see him around town again today. YO AARON: DON'T EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN AFTER THAT SHIT YOU SAID IN THE BAR." He was waiting to cross at the light and he gave a little head nod without looking me in the eyes. "GO BACK TO PERMACULTURE AND ORGANIC VEGETABLES." For his poor fucking sake the light will not turn green. I light a cig. "THAT GIRL IS NEVER GOING TO FUCK YOU BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE THE BRAIN. YOU'RE NOT A QUANTUM PHYSICIST AND YOU NEVER WILL BE. YOU'RE JUST A FUCKING POTHEAD. YOU WORK IN THE FIELDS. YOU'VE GOT DIRT ON YOUR HANDS FROM PULLING CARROTS OUT OF THE GROUND. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES YOU'VE BEEN AROUND THE BLOCK, BORN AND RAISED IN BRATTLEBORO? ABOUT ONCE. I'VE BEEN AROUND THE BLOCK ABOUT A HUNDRED TIMES MORE THAN YOU. DON'T EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN!! I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND HOW SERIOUS I AM ABOUT THIS AND I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND I HAVE THE CRAZY TO BACK THIS UP!!!" Fortunately the light changes. Then he comes back! The fucker walks back to the hamburger cart and stands there. I sit down and smoke my cigarette. "I *will* fuck that girl." "No you will not. You have a brain that will keep that girl interested for about five minutes. Whether I'm sitting at that table or not, you're never gonna fuck that girl. Know why? 'Cause you're an asshole. Girls don't like assholes, and neither do I. You know my friend Donald?" "Yeah, I beat his *ass* in chess the other day at Mocha Joe's." "No you did not. You know those two girls who were with Donald when you played him. Yeah. Well those two women are my housemates and when they got home the other day they reported straight off that you got your *ass kicked* by Donald. It doesn't matter whether you won or lost—what matters is you're lying all around town that you beat Donald. You're weak—that's why you lie. Now get the fuck out of here before I go ballistic on your organic produce asshole. I'm serious. Know your station. This is a table for me. You are a fucking mouse." You know what the crazy thing is? He turns out to be Gretchen's friend and Gretchen doesn't see anything wrong with him!!!!!! (Which indicates that..what, exactly?..is wrong with her?) And that asshole is so weak he didn't even deny anything I said about him..he just stood there with his head low and nodded at every insult I threw his way. I'd rather have someone argue back, even if they're trying to hurt me—at least they have a spine—I can work with that. But people who hit the ground when you're just starting to lace up your gloves..fuck..that's pitiful. But what do you expect—he's a fucking vegan. And you know what, Gretchen was vegan, too. That's prob'ly the only reason she liked him. If two vegans meet, and one is like a virgin church girl and the other one's Charlie Manson, they'll become soulmates because they're both vegan. That's all vegans care about, is if *you're* a vegan, too. If I handed a vegan a million dollars, they'd be like: *No, I can't accept this from a carnivore.* And I'd be like, *I eat vegetables, too, bitch—it's* omni*vore, not carnivore. I'm not a fucking* T. rex*.* ### 82 I called my dad. I asked him if he remembered the potty-training thing. He said, "That never happened. Bipolar people have something called fixed delusions." He said that I made it up. That the reason I thought it happened was because of my bipolar disorder. Now that I had a diagnosis, my dad had a whole new set of reasons to excuse his behavior, deny his behavior, say that his behavior was ok. And I thought: *Wow, this person really would use my bipolar illness against me, as an out so he didn't have to be honest with me, with himself, with future counselors, with the family, with anyone.* And that hurt. But he never was honest, even before he had my bipolar to use as an excuse, and I wonder how much his tendencies have affected me. How much am I a liar because of him? - - - - Remember when I wanted to apply to Cornell to study architecture?—a pipe dream since I'd never be able to afford it, nor was either parent offering me somewhere to stay between academic sessions. But I wanted the hope of just *applying*, and even though I was thirty-two at the time, Cornell still required tax information from both my parents. Mom gave me hers. The last thing I needed to complete this application was my dad's income. He wouldn't provide it for me. He wouldn't even reply to my emails or return my calls. Without him providing this little piece of information, I would never be able to even *apply* to go to school to learn something I was interested in. And my Dad wouldn't help me. But that's not the worst part. In order to induce him to call me back, I escalated the situation, cc'ing his sister Louise and my cousin Joel and asking them to put pressure on my dad to call me back, exposing his lack of support for me to his sister and my poor cousin just because they were related. I said in my email to them that I had called Dad a bunch of times and he hadn't called me back. You know what my dad said? He denied that I had called him *at all*. And his sister took his side, saying to me, "You better be careful what you say, we can check the phone records." And I was like: *Check the phone records bitch—your brother is a liar.* He went to all this fucking trouble not only to *not help me* apply for college but also to lie to his sister to make him look good and claim that I was lying, when in fact, he was lying. That shit is sick. That's the type of shit I want to have nothing to do with in my life. I should have just told that college my father was dead. So I told my on the phone, "I remembered you making me clean my shitty drawers as a kid with my hands during potty training." And he said, "Well, Matt, that never happened. It may be a fixed delusion of bipolar." Then I punched a hole in the vaulted ceiling and that's the last time I ever spoke to my dad of my own volition. (He visited my sister Leona's house while I was living there and we had minimal contact. Leona said she was worried about Dad's visit and I promised her I wouldn't say anything substantive or argumentative to him..a promise I kept *to the letter*. My dad was so rude and controlling with Leona and her husband that by the end of the trip they were literally *begging* me to tell him off. But I didn't, reminding Leona I had promised her her I wouldn't engage in any conflict with Dad while he was there. When he first arrived Dad and I hugged and Leona cried like it was some sort of reconciliation but based on his lack of communication since then, it was no reconciliation for him, and I can tell you that from my perspective it was just going through the motions..that hug didn't mean a thing to me.) I felt terrible and violent and hurt after having the conversation in the Refuge which revealed my dad's humiliation of me during potty training..and now that I confront him with it and said we have to deal with that and some other truths before we could have a real relationship, he denies it ever happened and says it's just a "fixed delusion" of bipolar disorder! "Dad," I say, sobbing, "I need help. I have a major mental illness that makes me want to *kill* myself." "Yes, bipolar disorder," he says. "Right," I say, "bipolar disorder!" Dad says, "Well, Eva and I looked up hospitals and one of the best mental hospitals in the world is right there in Brattleboro—it's called the Brattleboro Refuge—have you tried calling them?" "Dad. Have you been reading my emails? I've spent the last two *months* in the Brattleboro Refuge! How can you be this *out of touch* with your children? If you had read *a single email* I've sent you in the last two months, you would *know* that I've been in and out of the Brattleboro Refuge three or four times!" "Well, Matt, I get a lot of email." "But let's say you had a work colleague and they had been emailing you for two or three months about the same subject—I can't imagine you'd be able to do so well professionally if you spent as little time reading *work emails* as you do *reading email* from your children!" "I'm having tome technology issues on my end. I have this new iMac desktop, I think they call it, and my email's all screwed up—but this is a great system, have you heard of these..new..Mac..desktops?" "Yeah, iMacs are great. Did you get the email where I say I tried to kill myself?" "Matt, I've got a call on the other line. It's work. I've got to take this." "It's *eight o'clock at night*, Dad—do you really have to take it?" "Ok, Matt, night night. I'll tell Eva you said hi. Glad you're doing well. Gotta go now. And hey!—*Have a great time in Vermont!*" I call my dad on his potty training shit He denies that it ever happened *and* Blames it on bipolar delusions Then I punch a hole in the ceiling and start screaming and destroying stuff like I did in high school when I couldn't take my parents fighting anymore. I blame him and him alone for being in the position to make smooth the relationship between our two families, maybe not between Mom and Eva, but at least between everyone else, and him choosing instead to take his new wife and new child into the fold and *completely ignore* and abuse the rest of us. When it was his turn to watch Leona, he waited till my little sister was asleep, then left to go fuck his girlfriend at her house. Not his future wife, but someone he met through the personal ads in a local newspaper. So he's fucking tons of women that he met through personal ads *right after* he and Mom split as if he had been waiting to do this all along, as if he was only staying faithful to our mom out of rote—some rule learned through childhood religion. And the kicker: Dad denying his trips to Florida when Joanne and I were little, leaving Mom and us two kids in Dallas because he couldn't take it, couldn't take the fact that he had gotten married and had kids..the weight of it was too much for him. I learned about this only because I was going through Mom's boxes, at her request, scanning old photos and negatives and cards that friends had sent, family had sent, and I came upon this series of letters from Dad to Mom, as he was in Florida and she was in Dallas, revealing none of the content of what he was doing in Florida but they were outpourings of his admissions that he did not feel he could be a good father and that he did not want to be a father, how he felt this push/pull of loving my mother but not being able to be with her. He couldn't handle the emotional stress of being in a relationship. And when I confronted Dad on the phone about these trips and asked him what he was doing in Florida, he said it never happened. He had made an occasional business trip to Alabama maybe, but "I never left you children and your mother." I said, "Dad, I read many, many letters, five or ten, from multiple trips to Florida, in your handwriting, postmarked from cities in Florida, addressed to my childhood house in Dallas." He said I must be mistaken. I said how could I be mistaken, given what I've seen?? He didn't know, but he would never admit that he had written Mom letters from Florida, or ever left us to go on week-long trips there, which I had seen indisputable evidence of and had discussions with Mom about, so I think that lowers the chance of them being some wild delusion the likes of which I have no reason to believe I've ever had. I've asked Mom since then about us discussing those letters, me handing them to her when I found them, me reading them, and me making secret scans of them for my own later perusal. Those letters exist. I have to convince myself of it over and over, though, with the evidence, because of Dad's denial—his lying. - - - - When an authority figure lies to you, it makes you crazy. They call it crazy-making. Because how could your dad lie to you about such a thing? You take on the responsibility yourself: somehow it must be me that is wrong, even though all the evidence points the other way. It's like September 11th—you grow up expect you can trust your government but when the official story they tell you about what happened on that day *just doesn't make sense* with evidence agreed upon by tens of thousands of PhD scientists who are willing to risk their university careers by signing their names to petitions that say the government is lying, it's crazy-making. *Someone is lying*, and if it's between gobs of independent, educated, scientific researchers and a government who has every chance and history of lying, collusion, and breaking the law, then the only conclusion—which is brain-twistingly hard to come to to—is that your government really is lying to you. The one you grew up learning to trust—your government, your father—really is the one who's lying, and the only one you can trust is yourself. You have to come to strange conclusions like *my dad is either bald-faced lying or insane* and in the wider case, you have to admit ultimately that the government controls the media, that odds are even Rachel Maddow is bought and paid for by the CIA. You have to choose between the comfortable fantasy and the harsh reality and most people choose the first and it's understandable that they do. Because when you're holding a letter written in your dad's handwriting and the envelope is postmarked from Florida, and your father is telling you he's never even been to Florida..well..it's time to either comfort yourself with some extremely-hard-to-believe lies..or it's time to face what Marcellus Wallace might call "a hard motherfucking fact of life." And if Marcellus Wallace was here to further advise you, he might suggest that "it's a fact of life your ass is gonna have to get realistic about." ### 83 Then I'm in Vermont going to the ER in a cab vouchered by the Refuge who I called first. Them checking me for drugs and finding I was clean but hyper, making all kinds of jokes with the phlebotomist/admissions dude. And before that going downstairs and talking with the new first floor housemate (Krystal, the friendly whore) and me feeling like I'm tripping, on serotonin prescription drugs and mania. And when I told Krystal that I felt like I was tripping, she said she already knew. She could tell. And then the trippy part started to rub off on her! Then I told her in a minute I was going to the hospital and she was like *why* and I said I had bipolar disorder and she said she figured it was something like that. The call ends. I put the phone down. Then I started breaking things. I get so mad I punch a hole in the vaulted ceiling—freaking out and hitting the ceiling, throwing stuff around my apartment, as violent as I had been since that one time I was a kid and I destroyed my room. I was completely out of control, like a fucking mad dog. Hung up the phone and that's the last time I ever called him. Talking to him made me want to kill myself. On the camping trip we went on a few years earlier to smooth things over, on the last day I determined that if I was going to be in a relationship with this person, I would *have* to drink. I was screaming and yelling and breaking everything in sight and I remembered a time in tenth or eleventh grade when I did the same thing to my bedroom in my parents' house—ripped the mini-blinds off the windows, tore books in half, destroyed everything but my computer. My parents didn't know what to do with me—I wish they had sent me to the doctor. I'm only able to have this memory now that I have been re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder, this memory of ripping my room to shreds, tearing *The Once and Future King* in half, destroying the venetian blinds 'cause I was so irate with my parents' arguing. All my life, I've been trying to get my dad's attention..and even a suicide attempt didn't accomplish that. I escalated and escalated to get some positive attention (love) from him but nothing worked. And I gave up after that suicide attempt, because his reaction to that (discounting my childhood memories of potty training as fixed delusions of bipolar disorder) was enough to finally convince me that he doesn't care to have an authentic relationship with me. Apparently he feels good sending one email a year to his son. I read those letters for a while, but no more..I just archive them without reading them because they're all about him, how it's going with him..there has never been an "us" there. Remembering in conjunction with my dad's humiliating toilet training, my mom taking my temperature in my butt while I lay on my parents' bed—how it felt cool and straight and smooth going in. It wasn't sexual, it wasn't a violation, it was just easier than her getting me to hold a thermometer still in my mouth without biting it or moving it around such that she couldn't get a measurement. Thermometers had mercury in them back then.. Anyway after I punched the hole in my ceiling in the attic apartment in Brattleboro, I called the Refuge and the nurse took notes, then told me to go to the hospital. I called the Refuge and they asked me my symptoms. I lost it. Talking with the new housemate downstairs (Krystal—the whore?) and feeling like I'm tripping. I lost it. Like when I told her that I was feeling trippy and she said she was picking up on my trip energy. I went to the hospital in a cab with no money..but the Refuge called the driver so he can get a voucher. The hospital blood tested me for drugs, found none. Here's the check in nurse: "Are you psychotic?" (Laughing maniacally:) "How would *I* know?" I am laughing so hard it involves every muscle in my body. I point at the interviewer guy. "If I was psychotic.." (laughing) "..how could I possibly *know* if I was psychotic. Psychosis is a reality-testing problem. If I'm psychotic, I can't tell, to some degree, great or small, what is real and what isn't. So if I can't do that kind of testing, then how could I ever know for sure that I was or was not psychotic. I could think I was fine but that feeling of being fine might be a delusion..and a *delusion*..is something that you believe..that's false..that you continue to believe even once you've been presented with evidence to the opposite. I don't call that *delusion*, though—I call it *backbone*. You following me on this one?" "Yeah I'm following you." "So I think I'm gonna have to leave that call to you, on whether or not I'm psychotic, ok boss?" "Ten-four kemosabe." "Now you're speaking my language, Tonto." I shake my head. "I'm glad you're not a Native American or what I just said would *not* have been funny." "You think *Tonto* is racist?" "Have you *seen* the show? The whole fucking show is racist. This whole country is racist. I had a job—" I interrupt myself with laughter. My interviewer is looking at me, perplexed. "Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but I had a job." "Did you have to leave because of your bipolar disorder?" "I was *fired*. I don't know that it had anything to do with my *bipolar disorder*. Why would you say that?" "Just tell me about the job." "I forgot what I was going to say about it. My mind is like a glitterbox." "I think you were talking about racism." "Of course. Race-fucking-ism. The American pastime." "America's pastime is baseball, my friend." "No, America's pastime is racism, always has and always shall be. So I had this job. Are you going to argue me on the America's pastime point or can I continue my story?" This big guy shifts in his seat. "I think you should continue your story." "Ok, but you have to remind me what it was about." "Racism." "Right! It's a good thing we're here together 'cause I don't think I could carry this conversation on alone." "Did you get fired for your job for being racist or something?" "No. I got fired because my asshole boss asked me to pirate a copy of Photoshop and I first of all told him I wasn't going to do it and second of all I reported him to Adobe." "He fired you for that." "Yep." "That's wrongful termination, dude. You should get a lawyer." "I'm working on it." "Good. So where does racism come into it?" "Oh, just this guy I had to sit next to. Connecticut native. Lived in Bratt all his life. When it was just me and him in the office he *wouldn't shut up* about how when he moved here as a kid there were like eight black people in Brattleboro—which is a ridiculous statement, I mean *no one* knows how many black people there are in Brattleboro. Even the *census* doesn't know *exactly how many black people* are in Brattleboro—you know? What if a black person goes over to New Hampshire to buy some watermelon and fried chicken from the Walmart—*I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I was saying that ironically, trust me*, I've fucked Kenyan strippers, I've fucked other black girls, I *love* black pussy—but I'm *saying*, let's say a black person crosses the bridge into New Hampshire to go to the Walmart to buy..whatever..whatever a person of any color would buy, you know, fuckin' Slim Jims and shit..fuckin' 5-hour Energy to give them enough energy to get through the work day so they don't get that two o'clock feeling. Do you know how dangerous those drinks probably are?" "They must have gotten by the FDA." "The FDA. The FDA. Are you a nurse? "What do you mean?" "I mean like are you an LPN, RPN—" "RN—" "RN, LP, EP, EPA, I'm talking about..do you know..these experiments they do on people on mushrooms..people who eat hallucinogenic mushrooms..and, yes, the chemical in psilocybin mushrooms—or it's actually the chemical that your stomach turns psilocybin into, because psilocybin isn't what makes you trip, which is why you have to *eat* mushrooms..you can't smoke 'em or stick 'em up your butt or anything..you have to eat them so that the right chemical transaction takes place in your stomach and then you trip—and these scientists found that *while you're tripping on mushrooms*, yes, your brain does run a little bit slower overall, but in this one area of cognition or with this one type of cognition called leap-ahead association or multi-hop association or something..that's *increased* while you're tripping, and this kind of leap-ahead cognition is what allows you to, say I mention concept A, and concept A is related to concept B, and concept B is related to concept C. Well, when you're on mushrooms, if someone mentions concept A, you're more likely to make the association to concept C than someone who isn't tripping. So, on the one hand, that's psychotic thought, because non-tripping people are like *what the hell*? What the hell is this person talking about? But, on the other hand, it's *creative* thought and it's *inventive* thought. It's actually deeper and more complex than the thought being done by a non-psychotic person. The problem is, there are more non-psychotic people than psychotic people, so when someone says *A*, and you're the only person in the room who says *C*, when everyone else says *B*, everyone thinks you're crazy 'cause they didn't understand the leap you made. Which is an important lesson: which is..when you don't understand someone (or something), you can't logically conclude that it's because *the thing you're observing* doesn't make sense." I sit back in my chair. I'm sweating. My mouth is dry. I feel high as fuck. The colors are bright. The textures are crawling over the walls and the chair and the face of this admitting nurse. I say, "The only thing you can logically conclude, in a case like that, is that *you don't understand*." "So tell me about this theoretical black guy at the Walmart." "The one buying Slim Jims?" "Yeah." "Ok well here's what I propose." I lean forward again. "Let's have him put back the 5-hour Energy because that'll prob'ly give him a heart attack." "Alright." "And let's have him pick up some organic spinach and a shotgun." "Why?" "Because. I don't want this to be a typical black guy. I'm thinking organic spinach because it's a typically white item—people think of some rich bitch buying that shit, like my upstairs neighbor—well, my downstairs neighbor—but that's a different story, all I can say is don't you sometimes want to just go up to some strange woman and simultaneously put your hand down her skirt and inside her panties and play with her cunt while you kiss her on the mouth *and simultaneously* you take a hand and you stick that hand up her shirt and you touch that girl's nipple, I mean real nice, run your finger around it until that shit is hard as a diamond." "So that's the rich bitch that would stereotypically buy organic spinach." "Right. Are you with me?" "Yeah. Some of the details are a little fuzzy but mostly, yeah." "Good 'cause I'm working on my continuity. Is it improving?" "No." I laugh. "Well good luck to us both. I'll try to finish this up." "No worries. We've got time." "You're saying that because it's Thursday night in Brattleboro and there aren't any other patients and that's the reason you haven't kicked me out of your office yet?" "No, I'm gonna kick you out. We're waiting for the results of your drug test." "Oh. Is that what we're doing here?" The guy nods. "Do you remember me taking your blood a few minutes ago?" "That's was only a few minutes ago?" "About ten." "Jesus Effing Christ it feels like we've been here for hours." "Try to relax. You want to do some deep breaths with me?" "Yes." We do some. He breathes. I mirror him as much as I can. It's moments like this when I admit to myself that I have bipolar disorder. I'm manic. I've read the textbook symptom lists enough times to diagnose myself almost as well as my psychiatrist. There are tricky symptoms though. On the large scale: people who have bipolar disorder tend to disbelieve their diagnosis. Yeah. Bipolar affects some part of your brain in a way that makes bipolar people unlikely to accept that they are bipolar. That's diabolical, right there. And on the small scale: one of the symptoms of mania is that the person doesn't think they're manic. They deny being manic. That's insidious. But once you know this, once you've read about that symptom enough times, even your crazy manic brain has *a chance* of realizing, from within mania, that you're manic. I can't always realize it, but sometimes I can. It's kind of like realizing you're in a dream: very hard, but with practice you can do it more often. I exhale. I tell the nurse, in a much slower, much calmer voice: "The guy that sits next to me—who used to sit next to me, before I got fired—he used to say these ridiculous things like, 'When we moved here there were only eight black people in Brattleboro.' And that pisses me off from a couple of angles. First, I don't like fucking racists. I expect that shit in the south. I expect it from my uncle, my grandmother. But I guess I have unrealistic expectations—it's not rational for me to assume that because I'm in Vermont there won't be racists. I recognize that. One of my psychiatrists noticed that pattern in me maybe five, six years ago, and I've been doing it for a long time before then, I don't even know how long: I create an unrealistic expectation for someone, then I get mad at them when they don't satisfy my expectations. This guy who sits next to me, so what, he's a racist. But this is *at work*. It's a place I don't even want to be—the only reason I'm there is to make money so I can pay my rent and eat and not be homeless. We're not exactly saving the world. We make *trash cans*—actually that's not true. We—they—buy trash cans from *some people* and sell those trash cans to *other people*. So, I mean, we don't even *make* anything. We're just an unnecessary middleman. And I don't want to have this sales guy talking in my right ear about how when he moved here there were *eight black people* in town and now there are three-hundred and twenty-*six*. I mean, these are suppositions and guesses posing as facts and I know I'm the psychotic one but I don't like to hear *facts that couldn't possibly be true*. These are things that *cannot be known*. Yet this sales guy says them as though they are *bona fide* facts, exactly known, indisputable. It just messes with my sense of right and wrong." The door behind the nurse opens. A girl in scrubs hands the nurse a piece of paper and closes the door. My guy looks over the paper and sets it on his desk. "Your drug test is clean." I think about telling him off, or at least saying, "*I know.*" *I know* that I haven't done any drugs lately—*you don't*. So the purpose of this drug test is to tell *you* that I'm clean, not me. I already know that I'm clean, because I've been with myself this whole time. But I don't tell him this. He's just trying to be nice to me, and the fact that I knew what the results of my drug test would be, before they ever drew the blood, is not what's on his mind. He's just narrating his own discovery. He's not thinking about the situation from my point of view. And that's ok. He sat with me and let me talk a thousand miles a minute and he didn't get up and walk away, which he could have done. He could have put me in a room by myself when I had a desperate need to talk to someone. But he didn't. He listened to me create wild scenarios like the theoretical black man buying organic spinach and a shotgun from the Walmart in New Hampshire just to illustrate that my workmate's clairvoyant census of Brattleboro's black population was very likely inaccurate and therefore a waste of *my* motherfucking time. He did that for me, this nurse, and in doing so he helped me..and..also..he earned my respect. ### 84 I was looking at my texture pattern on the big, painted walls of Brattleboro Memorial. A crisis team member eventually came and cleared me as not a danger to anyone ("yourself or others"). I got a voucher-based cab ride paid for by the Refuge to Brattleboro General. They had a hard time understanding my behavior given I tested negative for alcohol or any other drugs—but they're not psych people..they don't understand bipolar disorder. I tell the nurse the story Dad told me, garbled now in my mind, of a bisexual he met at the sawmill when he skipped college for a year. Dad used to sing me *Edelweiss* as I was falling asleep or even say *The Lord's Prayer*, which at the time I didn't mind so much. But one night he told me the story of some interaction he'd had with a bisexual man who worked at the sawmill and I don't know if he told me details—I don't remember any details—but his conclusion, which I remember clearly, was that bisexual men were dangerous and to be kept away from, and that somehow God's law forbade it—though my dad certainly couldn't cite the appropriate chapter and verse. Nothing he said on this topic carried the seriousness for me that it did for him. Maybe he had a homosexual experience with this man—I'm not sure. I was five years old and sex wasn't a complete picture on my radar. It wasn't till much later that I was able to parse his story at all. But it was a terrible bedtime story, you have to admit. You're putting your kid to bed—this isn't confessional hour with your sex therapist. Stick to *Edelweiss*—which he sang beautifully and gently and caringly, and like it meant something to him at least—even say *The Lord's Prayer* if you absolutely have to. But Dad and I have been like that forever, from my childhood to the time he and Mom got divorced: he's the confessor and I'm his priest. I sit there and listen to everything that went wrong with him and Mom—heavily filtered through his lens, of course—when really he should have gotten counseling. But my dad is too afraid to go to counseling. He refused after three sessions to go to marriage counseling with my mom because telling the truth about his own faults is so painful to him that he will do *anything* to avoid it. I refuse to move on with him in a relationship until he and I have an honest conversation about some of the fucked-up shit he did to me as a child. But he won't have that conversation with me. Denies it ever happened. Blames my bipolar, says it's all a delusion—which is extremely manipulative and fucked-up in itself to use a bipolar person's mental illness against them, to try to convince them that the opposite of truth is true. But I know what happened. I understand, from hundreds of hours with psychiatrists, the nature and shape of my delusions and they're not that major. I need my dad to face the facts. But my dad is too weak to do that and odds are we'll go to our graves having said not a single word more to each other than we've said to this day. - - - - At the hospital, they put me in a white room with a video camera. I jumped around, I laughed, I hallucinated. I called my sister Joanne and told her my predicament. A Crisis Team worker released me after an interview in which I was determined to be not a danger to anyone, including myself. They called a cab and it was the same guy who drove me there. We talked: he used to be a programmer..moved here and couldn't find work..sound familiar? Being manic and going to the hospital. Going to the ER. The same cabbie on the way there and back. He used to be a programmer but moved and couldn't find work. I pay with a voucher both ways and apologize for leaving no tip. I go into the apartment feeling just as insane as when I left. Eve Fox calling me back on my home number from her home number: "I'm worried you're going to kill yourself." I must have left her a suicidal message earlier. "No, I'll be alright. I'm not going to kill myself tonight, I promise. I'm sorry I worried you." "And you'll go back to the Refuge tomorrow." "Yes, absolutely, those guys will take care of me. Really, Eve, I'm so sorry I worried you and I'm sorry for bothering you at home but I'm totally fine." Hallucinating my ass off. In a conversation where I think I have caused my housemate to begin hallucinating? Fielding voicemail from my therapist from a suicidal phone call I don't remember making? And you think I've lost my mind? I don't think you understand what that means. It's not a one-time deal. See, *e**ach day* I lose my mind, and at the end of the day I don't find it—I just lose it, and lose it, and lose it again. ### 85 The next day walking to Birches, I saw a yellow tree in snow. I went to my social work/group therapy thing but was immediately called to Dr. Sbarro's office. Dr. Sbarro, along with Ms. Irwin, the program nurse, did a few quick tests and diagnosed me with serotonin syndrome, then indicated my status was "grave" on his summary report. They sent me back to Tyler 2. I mean like they checked my pulse, tapped my knee, asked me a couple of questions and they were *sure* I had serotonin syndrome. Check in was more exciting than usual. This nubile physician's assistant did my check in with the usual guy present. It was a thrill to be touched by her and she had such a pretty face. She did the entire physical exam after the regular PA asked me if that was ok. I said yes, and at the end of the session I thanked them both and told the trainee I thought she was professional and caring—very appropriate in her interaction, asking me if it was ok for her to touch me here or there before actually doing so. I think that's a generational thing—young doctors don't assume, as older ones do, that they can just touch you wherever they want without asking. I like the new way. And even with some nubile trainee who I would allow to touch me anywhere because of my own sexual desire, I still like the new way. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (4)** > > Patient Admitted October 27, 2011—Discharged November 4, 2011 > > **Chief Complaint** > > Zha, as he prefers to be known, presented with a chief complaint "because I took a bunch of pills last night." *[I guess they must just copy and paste these forms—I only made one suicide attempt. Or maybe they just consider this event to be the crucial event at the center of my many hospital stays.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > The patient had been hospitalized inpatient here at the Brattleboro Refuge and went out, but was quite depressed as a consequence of bipolar affective disorder, and made a suicide attempt. He was readmitted and then transferred here *[the Birches Partial Hospitalization Program, an IOP or Intensive Outpatient Program]* after stabilization. He sees Eve Fox at the Brattleboro Counseling Center on an outpatient basis, and has had a number of episodes of bipolar affective disorder and three previous psychiatric admissions. > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > Zha was admitted to the partial hospitalization program and continued on Buspar 30 mg b.i.d. *[twice daily]*, Celexa 40 mg daily, clonidine 0.1 mg one or two daily as needed for anxiety or agitation, Lamictal 200 mg at h.s. *[Latin Hora Somni—at bedtime]*, Risperdal 3 mg at bedtime, and trazodone 50 mg at h.s. p.r.n. for sleep *[from Latin Pro Re Nata—as needed]*, with a repeat in 1 hour if necessary. Matthew had difficulty adjusting to the partial hospitalization program. On one prior occasion he was close to meeting the inpatient level of care, but we maintained him on an outpatient basis. However, on November 3rd, he was seen by this author and by Ms. Irwin, the program nurse, as a consequence of increasing confusion, muscle tremors, and maladies. At that time his blood pressure was elevated in the range of 140/108, and his pulse was 100 or more. He had brisk reflexes, 2 or 3+ bilaterally. His speech was slightly pressured. He reported his thoughts to be racing and confused. His ability to distinguish between a dream and reality was diminished, in his opinion. In view of these changes, it was felt that this might well represent a serotonin syndrome, and we discontinued his Buspar, Celexa, and trazodone. He was instructed to take only half his usual dose of Risperdal at night. He reported this morning, November 4th, for admission to inpatient for observation for serotonin syndrome. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar Affective Disorder, Most Recent Episode Depressed. Alcohol Dependence. Serotonin Syndrome. History of Cocaine Abuse. *[Everyone following this? This is not how your life is supposed to go.]* Renal Lithiasis *[yet another name for kidney stones]*. Severe (Health Issues [Serotonin Syndrome], Financial, Alcohol Issues, Living Arrangements). > **GAF on Discharge:** 28 *[In other words, after all this inpatient psychiatric care, outpatient programs, and medication, my GAF is the same now as when I first entered the hospital two months ago.]* > > **Condition on Discharge** > > Unstable, to be admitted to the inpatient level of care. > > **Prognosis:** Grave. So they sent me back to Tyler 2, and I went through the same admitting process as I had been through on three previous questions. Interview from the physician's assistant and his nubile trainee. Same guy I saw every time I went through that gauntlet except this time with a fucking cherub (but a skinny cherub) at his side. Questions about hallucinations, delusions, diet, bowel movements. Questions about drug use. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Orientation questions, like *What year is it?* and *Who is the President? Where are you right now?* "The Brattleboro Refuge." "What town are we in?" "It's a borough, and it's Brattleboro. Did you know that in the late eighteen-hundreds the Postmaster General declared that all location names ending in "borough" would be changed to "boro"—b-o-r-o—*to save ink?!*" The physician's assistant said, "Is that true?" "Well, it wasn't just to save ink, but yes, it was to save time and money in general and yes it's true." "So did Brattleboro used to be spelled Brattleboro-u-g-h?" "I don't know," I laugh. The physician's assistant says, "I'm gonna give you three words to remember—" "Cat ball string," I say. "I'll remember 'em in ten minutes when you ask me and I remember 'em from *the last time* you asked me. They're always the same—cat ball string. Why don't you give me a string of numbers and letters—upper and lowercase—about nine or ten digits long, and ask me *that* next time I see you." "How do you know there's going to *be* a next time?" I shrug and make an *Obviously there's going to be a next time* face. (It looks exactly like my *Am I a fucking idiot?* face.) "Can you really do that?" the young PA asks. "Letters and numbers—upper and lowercase—" the older PA begins. "For about a week, up to about ten characters, yes, but it'll probably be more than a week before I see you again—" "Only if your luck changes," says my normal PA. I love this fucking guy. If I was Joe Pesci from *Goodfellas* I'd shoot him in his fucking face. "Matthew, why are you here today?" "Well. *Ostensibly*, I'm here because Dr. Sbarro says I have serotonin syndrome. But you know *and I know* that I don't have serotonin syndrome." "I don't know that," the physician's assistant says. "Well *I do* know that." "How do you know that?" "Because *I've read* the diagnostic criteria for serotonin syndrome and based on the physical tests Dr. Sbarro and Nurse Irwin just administered to me fifteen minutes ago *I don't meet* the diagnostic criteria for serotonin syndrome." "You're saying Dr. Sbarro is wrong?" "I'm saying this is a *you see what you want to see*-type situation. My pulse ranges and twitch measurements were *high*, but they weren't within the range *needed to diagnose* serotonin syndrome. And he flubbed some of the numbers." The physician's assistant leans back in his chair, folds his arms behind his head. "Are you seriously saying Dr. Sbarro flubbed the numbers on your pulse, your twitch count? Are you recommending that I write that down in my interview notes." "No, my friend, I am *not* suggesting you write that down." "But is it *true*?" "Absolutely. He fiddled the numbers a little bit to fit me into the criteria for serotonin syndrome." "I'm under a moral oath to write down the entirety of what you say." "Then write it down. *I'm* not going to lose *my* job over this." "But you know *I* could. Are you playing a game with me?" "No. I'm telling you the verbatim truth as my senses report it. Take that with a grain of salt." "I do." "I do find it kind of suspicious that Birches keeps switching their psychiatrists." "What do they do?" "Every week you go up there, the program psychiatrist is a different doc. It's a rotating position for some reason." "And you find that suspicious?" "Well what's the utility? What's the positive reason they're doing it for?" "To give many psychiatrists a taste of the position? I don't know." "Let me tell you a story. Cat ball string. I'll make it quick. See if you can remember those words for me because at the end of this story I'm gonna ask you what they were. So. Five years ago. First time I was diagnosed bipolar. I stayed up for a week, drank potato vodka, programmed *the shit* out of some kick-ass cellular automata systems. Learning systems. AI. Artificial intelligence. Finds patterns in seemingly meaningless data." "You do." "*I* find patterns in seemingly meaningless data. Haha. Very funny. How come you're only a physician's *assistant* anyway—why are there two of you, both physician's *assistants*, but not a physician to be found? You're not assisting a physician. You work autonomously—" "Can we get back to your story?" "You think it's easy being psychotic around you people? Well it's *not*. Now go home and get your fuckin' shine box." "*Goodfellas*, good flick." "It's not a *good flick*, it's one of the *greatest movies* of all time. So I have this manic experience—or what I later come to believe is a manic experience. No sleep. Watching *The Truman Show* on a loop." The young PA is typing furiously. "I call *a suicide hotline*. They tell me to call 911. Then two *cops*—at least we're all meant to *think* they're cops—" "Why don't you think they were real cops?" "Because I forgot to tell you the most important part of the story. *Before* I call the suicide hotline, I call the NSA." "The National Security Agency?" "Yeah. I gave a talk there a long time ago and I knew a guy who worked there and I thought he might be interested in this new technology—" "This cellular automata stuff?" "This CA-like stuff, yeah." "To do what?" "To do what *everyone* wants to do, post-911—*to catch terrorists*, naturally." "Naturally." "You better go and get your fuckin' shine box." "So, what, you think these cops were really NSA agents *dressed* as cops and..what?..they put you in a psych hospital, give you a fake diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and use National Security Letters to keep you committed long enough for the NSA tech guys to sneak into your apartment and steal whatever's on your computer?" Now I lean back in *my* chair. "That's sounds like a paranoid theory spawned from the mind a truly delusional psychotic. I would *not* advise writing down in your notes that you came up with that." "*You* came up with it!" the PA says. "No, I didn't say any of that shit. But given a few details, *that shit* is—I won't say a logical conclusion, because that would make it seem like I was crazy—" "We'd hate to leave anyone with that impression." "I'm not saying *that's what happened*. I'm saying *if you don't ask the question: Is that what happened?* then you're not thinking enough in the *big picture*." "What were those three words?" "Cat. Ball. String. I'm not psychotic. I'm just inventive. People used to pay me good money to be inventive." "What happened?" "I guess I got too inventive. Can I go now?" "No. I have to check your tattoos—or, she does. We have to do the physical exam." "You *know* my tattoos, baby!" "Yeah but I always forget the English translation." "He conquers, who conquers himself." "You doing that right now?" "No, I'm pretty far afield from that one lately. But I did stop drinking." "Congratulations," the PA smiles. "Thanks, yeah. That's a tough one for me." "Are you hiding anything up your ass?" "Whoah, my man, major party foul. One, it's a complete non-sequitur. Two, it's like saying to your wife: *Have you thought about shooting me in the face with the shotgun while I sleep?* The bitch ain't never *thought* of that before. But *she's thinking it now*, I can guarantee you." Then the nubile PA completed my physical exam and it was like being touched by an angel. At first I was afraid of being aroused but *this wasn't like that*. It was elevated. I swear—it was like two holy beings communing in the most respectful way. Did I say holy already because this shit was fucking holy. We were actually emanating white light and there were some other things too but if I tell you you'll just classify it as a hallucination..so..I'll just keep that stuff to myself. ### 86 "I don't think you have serotonin syndrome." "Nor do I." "Uh—what is your diagnosis based on?" "I've read the literature." "What do you mean, 'You've read the literature?' " "I've read the diagnostic criteria for serotonin syndrome. I mean who hasn't—" "Since when did you become the psychiatrist in this relationship?" "Hey, anyone can become a psychiatrist these days. It's all on YouTube. iTunes. Princeton has their classes online now. You can piece together degree-level knowledge in three, four weeks internet time. There's eight-year-old kids know this stuff now. Not as well as you," I say. "Thank you. Now let me be the doctor, please?" "Ok. I'm sorry." "No, it's ok. I think you're right. I don't think you have serotonin syndrome but I am discontinuing all serotonergic medicines as suggested by the referring psychiatrist." "Even my antidepressant?" "Yes," she said gravely. "I—" "No, I understand. You have to based on Dr. Sbarro's diagnosis." "*Don't worry*, ok. You'll be here. You'll be safe. *I'll* be here with you." "Ok, I trust you." Dr. Meggs looks over her shoulder. "I wish I could say that trust was justified," she says. That's all she says. Then she leaves. - - - - The weekend comes and goes. I feel the effects of losing my antidepressant. Within a day I'm teary, defenses down psychologically. A week later, the next Monday, Dr. Meggs have the closest thing to a fight that we'll ever have. We sit opposite each other in the sunroom. "This was supposed to be just for the weekend but I've been up here..I don't know..five or seven days..or no..maybe nine days. Dr. Meggs, please when agreed to this, Dr. Sbarro said this was supposed to be just a med change—weekend trip—*that's* what was said when Dr. Sbarro put me here." "No," she stops me. "He put you here under my care and it is my job to make sure you are ok before I let you go." I'm crying when I say, "Yeah, that makes sense. It's just frustrating when one doctor says I have serotonin syndrome and it was supposed to be just for the weekend but I ended up back here for I don't even know how long..a week? It just seems like there's—if I may suggest a process improvement—there's a lack of continuity of care between Birches and here, I mean do you guys even communicate with each other?" "I read your discharge report from Birches. That's how we communicate." "Ok, ok, I respect that. When Dr. Sbarro put me here, he put me under your care and it's your job to make sure I'm ok before you let me go. I mean, yeah, that makes sense." I was happy to see Dr. Meggs as always. But for the first time, the sheen of going inpatient had worn off and I was irritated to be there. "I checked in for a *medicine change*. Dr. Sbarro told me it was going to be *over the weekend*. Now I'm on another Tyler 2 odyssey." "We have to do what we do regardless of Dr. Sbarro's intentions. We have a responsibility to do that." "I understand. I understand. It's just hard." The doctor put her hand on my knee. "I'm going to put you back on a low dose of Celexa." I sniffle and look at her, as she has stood up by now. "Thank you," I cry. - - - - We had some sensible conversations later. "One day I got out of the Refuge on a Friday. My bank account had two-thousand dollars in it. By Monday, when you and I spoke, my bank account was empty. I didn't even remember what I had spent it on!" "Yeah, well that's a bipolar trait." "Fantastic! What do I do about my two-thousand dollars?" "When was this?" "Weeks ago, but I just mean in general, how do I address this problem?" Skip ahead. "Now what's this thing about the spoons?" "Spoons?" "It's listed in your admissions report..thinks NSA is poisoning spoons—" "No it's the CIA that's poisoning spoons. Why would the NSA be poisoning spoons?" "Ok, tell me about what you think the CIA is doing." "I don't think they're doing anything! Not necessarily. But the *possibility* exists that they have created a model of the parts of my brain necessary to predict which spoon I will pick out of a drawer of spoons—like the drawer of spoons in the snack room—so that they can poison me in plain sight! Poison *just that one spoon* and then I pick it up and die and no one would ever think it's possible that it could have been a targeted crime *because how could they have known* which spoon I was going to pick? So I have so pick an unusual spoon every time I pick a spoon so I can surprise their algorithm. I have to determine which one they thought I was most likely to pick, then *out-think them* and pick a spoon they never would have guessed that I would pick." Dr. Meggs says, "Ok, that's a psychotic thought. What else comes to mind, along these lines?" "Just this childhood memory of Dad correcting me on how to fold the towels. I had gone out of my way to fold and put away the clean laundry, and instead of accepting the way I did it and thanking me, he took me to the towel closet and said this is almost right..but not quite. Then he proceeded to instruct me on how to tri-fold the towels instead of bi-fold them so that they would fit better in the shelf at the bottom of the stairs to the third-floor bedroom. They fit *just fine* my way. You could select any towel you wanted, take it, and go. The towels weren't bunched together. They weren't spread apart. But there was no way that was good enough *to fold the goddamn bath towels* unless it was my dad's way." "That's ridiculous," Dr. Meggs says. "My dad used to scold me for leaving a little orange juice in the pitcher after what I had done was pour exactly the amount I needed for my glass, then left the pitcher the way it was. In my mind, then, that was the proper thing to do. If the next person needed more than what was left, they could get a frozen orange juice container from the freezer and make more. To my dad's way of seeing it, leaving a little bit of orange juice in the pitcher wasn't forward-thinking enough—it was the job of the person who would otherwise have left less than a glass worth of OJ in the pitcher to make the next pitcher of juice. It's like the lint filter on a clothes dryer—" "How is it like that?" "Is it the job of the *next* person who uses it to clean out the lint caught by the *last* person's load of clothes, or is it the job of the person who *just washed clothes* to empty *their own lint* so that it's clean for the next person before they use the dryer? At this point in my life, I do some of those procedures differently than I did as a child. And we can debate and talk and improve on those processes all day long. But that's not the point. The point is I grew up with a dad who, for everything I did, he always had a correction. Nothing I did was good enough for him to simply say, 'Thank you,' or, 'Good job.' And I have learned that I can infer, from his behavior, that his mind has a drill sergeant in it, telling *him he's* not good enough..a constant voice in his head, learned from childhood, that tortures him with the idea that he will never be ok, that he can never let things go, that he can never be done working. My dad has a list, and he runs his life and the lives of everyone around him by that list. He is driven by tasks, and not in a fun way. In a way like slavery. The list is his master; he is the slave. He would say he just likes 'to keep busy.' I would call that *never facing reality*, *always distracting yourself* from what's really important. One time my sister Leona and I were at Dad's house for Thanksgiving—the year he didn't even *invite* my other sister Joanne. Leona and I really wanted to have an important conversation with our dad, and we asked him if he could spare ten minutes to talk some stuff over with us. He declined—he was too busy preparing the Thanksgiving feast with his new wife Eva, so that all the food would be ready for the guests they had invited over. He turned down an opportunity to talk with his kids so that the goddamn *buffet* could be ready for his and Eva's random friends. Leona and I had asked repeatedly what we could do to help with the dinner preparations—nothing, my dad said, everything was under control. Exactly. *He* was in control, he didn't want the *chaos* of letting his kids help prepare the meal, and he certainly didn't want the chaos of us having a serious conversation with him about how we all related since childhood. So Dad never talked with me and Leona about what we wanted to talk about, that day or any day. The food was ready for his friends. He and Eva 'entertained' their guests successfully. But let me tell you buddy—let me tell you, Dad—that ten minutes you could have spent with your son and daughter, talking about stuff that mattered *to us*, maybe having a group hug afterward..*that* was your life. And you missed it." I lean back. "Maybe you didn't come here for a medication adjustment. Maybe you came here to get that off your chest. What else bothers you?" "You wanna know what bothers me?" "Yeah." "When people misread the situation with me." "How do they misread it?" "They think they can push me, when actually, when it comes to the real power balance, *I* am the one who can push *them*—though I don't ever want to." The doctor listened. - - - - I don't like to be pushed, and I'm not scared of anyone. Nothing embarrasses me, and I don't respond to psychological threats. In high school, the year after I played Mr Frank in *The Diary of Anne Frank*, I played Uncle Arvide in the musical *Guys and Dolls*. I was slated to sing a song, but the director (the theatre teacher) neglected to schedule me for a single rehearsal with the vocal coach, neglected to give me sheet music or a recording of the song, and I kept waiting and waiting for the director to come to me to help prepare me for the singing part of this role. I learned my lines, and in a rehearsal when we got to my song the director asked why I wasn't singing. I told him I had never been rehearsed. He said *What?? Have you ever seen the movie?* No, I said. He scheduled me for an hour with the singing coach and it was clear that there wasn't enough time to prepare me to sing the song. The singing coach was disappointed. I reported back to the director and he seemed satisfied that I had been properly rehearsed. I told him I was not properly rehearsed after one hour of coaching and that I wouldn't sing the song during the performance so I suggested he instruct the orchestra not to play the music and we just skip to the scene that happened after the song. The director was so pissed that he threw his six-inch Subway sandwich into a metal trashcan with such force that the trashcan fell over. The veins in his head were popping out, he was pointing at me, yelling: "You *will* sing that song!!" I calmly reminded him that I had already told him what I would and would not be doing and the choices left to him had nothing to do with me, but with whether he would tell the orchestra to play the music or skip to the next scene. He was so fucking pissed that the co-star of his last year's success, *The Diary of Anne Frank*, was telling *him* that I wouldn't sing the song because he never scheduled me for rehearsals, that he left the room. He called my bluff (a terrible, terrible thing to do). The scene ran. The conductor lifted her baton. The music for my song played. The orchestra did a beautiful job. And during that song's music, I strolled around the stage of Colonel White High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, under hot white lights, in front of a packed house, and I thought about things that interested me, I accepted the possible consequence that my friends who were also in this musical might not be my friends anymore, I tried to imagine what my family (parents and sisters), who had come to watch the play that night, might be thinking, and I laughed—to myself—and I replayed that theatre teacher throwing his uneaten Subway sandwich into the trash can, storming out of the theatre classroom so pissed that *I* was telling *him* how it was going down, and I imagined him standing somewhere in the back of the theatre watching me stroll around the stage to that beautiful music, not singing a note, and I unemotionally hoped that the reality of *who was in control* was sinking into his stunted brain. In subsequent performances, the orchestra skipped the song and the show (as shows do) went on. Some fellow students hated me for what I did. My best friend, especially, hated me for what I did—but he got to know me better. And some people, a little vampire girl a grade younger than me, especially, respected my conscience, understood the situation, and invited me to her house when her parents weren't home and rewarded me for my stoicism with her affections. When my parents drove me and my sisters home that night, they talked about the music, the acting, the show in general. When they asked me what was supposed to happen during my orchestral stroll around the stage, I told them there was supposed to be a song there but the director never scheduled me for rehearsals, so I was unable to sing the song. There was no further questioning. No one argued with me—I think by that point they had learned not to. - - - - I had a boss once, Bruce McLaughlin. His lackey, Ray, liked to insult me. Ray thought it was funny to make jokes at my expense, laughing that anything that went wrong with our software was my fault, even when I hadn't even touched that piece of software. I was the youngest employee—I was eighteen or nineteen. Ray pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. I told Jim about these jokes. I said I understood that they were meant as friendly ribbing but that I thought they were in bad taste, inappropriate in a work environment, and that I would stop working with his company if the jokes continued. Two years later, after Ray continued to poke me and prod me and push me with his ignorance, his idiocy, his lack of a realistic grasp on the situation that existed between him and I..and after periodic phone calls made by me to the owner of the company saying: *Jim, if Ray continues this juvenile and disrespectful behavior, I will eventually quit working with your company*..one day Ray made one of his super funny, incredibly clever jokes blaming some failed release of our software on me, I went to the front desk where our secretary, Tina, sat, and I said: "Tina, it's been nice knowing you." And she was like: "Really?!?!?!?!?!" (She knew this day was coming.) And I said, "Yes," shook her hand, and walked out the door of that piddly little company. Jim calls me later that day, super calm, super executive, professional as hell. "So I hear some trouble happened between you and Ray today." "I've been telling you for two years, Jim, that if Ray didn't stop with the stupid jokes that I would quit. Today he made another one of his stupid jokes. I quit. End of story." Jim acted surprised—he was like, "I just didn't see this coming." And I said, "Jim, I've been telling you since week two that this was a problem. I told you it was a show-stopper. You allowed the problem to continue. And now we're done." He tried to get me to stay. He said that Ray didn't mean it, that being an asshole was just part of Ray's personality. I was his star programmer—I could program rings around Ray or anybody else who worked there. But I don't abide being treated disrespectfully. And I don't abide working for a boss who doesn't heed my warnings. And that was the end of my providing services to Softronics, Inc. Like I said: *Don't call my bluff*. "Why don't you want people to call your bluff?" "Because I'm not bluffing." ### 87 This admission there was a schizophrenic woman named Sarah who I thought I had met before around town—she looked incredibly familiar and I had déjà vu about a conversation with her—but she insisted it must have been her twin sister (I never knew if she had a twin sister or if that was one of her delusions). Sitting in a group with her everyone was saying all these normal things and then suddenly she says to me: "You like to hurt people, don't you?" Or maybe something even worse—I don't remember the exact wording. It disturbed me and everyone in the group and I got up and left the circle, and she kept saying things like that to others, and to me when I'd pass by, really disturbing me psychologically. I asked a staff member if they could keep her away from me. They put her in ALSA for a night and the next day we ate breakfast with each other and she said, "I'm really sorry if I said anything that made you uncomfortable. I was off my medication and was in danger of losing my personality." I didn't trouble her with what she had said. I moved on. We became friends and I liked her when she was on her medication. But schizophrenics can be very hard to deal with when they're in a reality that is highly different than your own. She would say things like, "What did you just say?" when I hadn't said anything, then she'd tell me what she thought I said and it was some horrible cruel offensive thing. *"You like to hurt people, don't you?"* When she said that, it was so out of place in the conversation we were having that everyone was shocked. But she had her finger halfway on the pulse of a truth about me. What allowed us to be such fast friends after this was that she was on her antipsychotics (which I was also taking). And I know now that I am the same way, that I publicize semi-private truths about people in an impolite, antisocial way. Why do you think I have so few friends and family who are still willing to talk to me? It seems funny to me, but the truth from their point of view is probably something like *I am too dangerous psychologically for them to be around*. Though I doubt many of them could admit to that aloud. In the morning when she apologized and told me she went off her medicine and that's why she was back in the Refuge and that she was in danger of losing her personality, I didn't understand what she meant about the last part and still it was a scary idea. I had yet another schizophrenic friend from Tyler 2 who I always made laugh—she was large with blond hair and her name was Karen—she says she's gonna miss me because I always cracked her up. It surprises me that anyone would be laughing at what I do, but since she did, it made me glad. She said she missed her kids and I said yeah, and she says do you have any kids and I joke about not having any because I don't want to change their diapers. "Oh, you wouldn't mind if they were yours," she says. And I say, "No, you don't understand, I hate shit. I hate it." "Why do you hate..shit..so much?" "I don't know." "Are you kidding with me," says my schizophrenic friend. "Sadly, no." "You really wouldn't have kids just because you wouldn't want to change their diapers?" "Well I have no way to support them, I guess that's the larger issue. I've always known I couldn't reliably keep a job. But, yes, cleaning up after other people's shit isn't something I'd relish." "What if your wife did it?" "I wouldn't want her to have to do it, either." "You're really not kidding, are you?" "No, Karen, I'm not kidding." Sometimes after I take a shit I wipe my butt so many times it's raw. You know when you keep getting that tiny brown spot and no amount of wiping will get you a clean tissue? I hate that. I keep going. I can't stop until I get a completely clean tissue. I'm crazy for clean tissue. - - - - On that admission, too, I saw the security guard who I told about the pills—who I handed my suicide pill bottle to—on the inside of the Refuge..he works as a mental health worker now. I managed to check my iPad out of the contraband closet from some tech who didn't know the rules. This security guard-*cum*-mental health tech walks by my room like an eagle—one of these paramilitary types. "Does that have a camera on it?" I take out one of my earbuds. I'm listening to glorious Mozart, and it is transforming the psych ward into pure freedom, pure lightness. The guy is right next to me, touching my iPad camera with his grody finger. "I have to take that away. No electronics with a camera are allowed on the ward." I wanted to tell him off but I make a point not to argue with people who have saved my life, so I just handed it to him and he said: "I'm sorry." And I didn't say anything or give him any foul looks about it. When I saw him at the nurses' station he said, "I'm sorry, man." And I just said, "It's ok. It's ok. Please don't worry about it." What worse could I say to the man who had called 911 when I overdosed on pills? Even though he had robbed me of the freedom of music which transformed my consciousness from bleak psych ward to glorious Mozart—a serious crime—I could not bring down any hammer on this man. I can't even say I like him, but I thank him, and I will give him any leeway in the world. I just said, "May I please have a sound machine?" And that particular guy leapt at the opportunity to get it for me. From that point on I was always soothing myself with the sound machine which I carried everywhere. I checked one out every morning and checked the same one in the next morning, checking out a new, charged one for the new day. I learned from the Refuge that music is my "coping skill"—actually it's the most powerful drug I can imagine and I use it all the time now like the sickest addict in the barest abandoned building—I mainline it to alter my state and without it I would die in this stale, stale world. ### 88 I'm doing laundry and I think of Schizophrenic Mike—who I incited the fight with? I'm flashing back. I'm saying all these reality-bending things about not touching my laundry and *You touched my laundry* and *Don't touch the dryer* and *I saw you touch the dryer* and *I'm gonna kill you if you touch my laundry*..just shit like that. Poor fucking schizophrenic, prob'ly has no idea what's going on anyway and I'm fucking with him saying all this contradictory shit like *I love you but I'll stop loving you if you touch my laundry* and talking about his mother and how she used to do the laundry and asking him *Where is your mother now? I don't see her. She must have left you here, you fucktard, and she's never coming back. Why do you think she left you in a psycho ward? Do you think your mother knows you're psycho? Do you think your mother made you psycho? I hear if a mother doesn't breastfeed her baby he can turn out to be a lifelong fucking schizophrenic like you, Mike. Did your mother feed you with her tits?* Just simple, evil, fucked-up shit like that designed to rile the motherfucker up, to *make* him attack me. And it worked. I pushed and pushed and pushed. I never looked away. I kept my eyes on his eyes so that if *he* looked away, when he looked back, *I* would be there. He was stuck in that laundry room and I set up the paradigm for him: he was the prisoner, I was the guard, and he had to take me down to escape the cell. What I did was evil. I mean, yes, it was manipulative, it was tormenting, taunting..it was *provoking* as the nurses wrote in my chart ("patient has a history of provoking other patients")..but it was evil. I mean let's call a spade a spade, even if that spade is me. To intentionally fuck with a mentally ill person, to make him attack me so that he would end up in ALSA and I would be viewed as the victim (my psychiatrist soothed me later and told me Mike had a history of attacking other patients, that it wasn't my fault, that I shouldn't blame myself, and I wondered for a second if I didn't really know what happened, if I hadn't, in my own ill mind, done anything to provoke him at all, and this really was just something *Mike* would have done to me anyway)..but then I knew that even if Mike did have a history of attacking other patients, that he never would have attacked me if I hadn't provoked him. It was a sick thing to do, especially if I had more presence of mind than him—which was probably the case, as psychotic as I may be. It was a horrible thing to do, and to this day, I feel no remorse about it, because Mike, whether he was doing it on purpose or not, was making the women in the unit feel uncomfortable by standing over them, staring at them. He was creating disorder, none of the mental health techs or nurses were responding to the female patients' complaints, and in a vacuum of power, I take over. I might not have run the ward, but I *could* run Mike, and I ran him out of the unit, into ALSA, for a week—a week during which no man was making all the women around me uncomfortable, a week during which no creepy schizophrenic was gonna fuck up the calm of *my* psych unit!! (Hear the irony, please.) Hear the irony of a drug-addicted suicidal alcoholic bipolar obsessive-compulsive disordered mental patient committed by the state to a locked psychiatric ward (that's me) who thinks it's his job *to bring order* to the unit. They say controlling people—people who attempt to overly exert *control* over their external environments, to bring order to *that which is outside*—are people whose internal environments (their minds) are chaos. All I have to say to that is that I've tried to control a lot of people who aren't me. And it hasn't done me a lick of good. - - - - I am best friends with chaos, but I think in some situations there needs to be order. And while my stepping in to fill a void of order, and imposing my order uninvited, is part of my illness..in some contexts it works. My sets in film school, for example. Now, there's an arena in which I was the designated leader—the director—so it wasn't like I was stepping in to fill a void. But my sets were quiet, my sets were orderly, organized, efficient, safe. And that safety came from establishing rules and enforcing them. No one but me was allowed to talk to the actors—this helped them establish the illusion that they were still doing exactly what we did in rehearsal, rather than have to face the fact that they were now in a soundstage surrounded by sets and lights and the camera and thirty strangers doing various jobs. One of the grips was found sleeping behind the set instead of doing his job. I asked my producer to wake him and escort him off the set—*one* strike and you're out—that's how I roll. We weren't mean about it, but the producer and I set a tone that everyone else paid notice to: we're here to excellently, respectfully, and quietly do our job. If you fail to do your job, you will not be on this set. The obvious result is that it sets an example that others learn not to repeat. The more subtle effect is that it creates *safety* in the form of expectation—we calmly set a pattern for how things would go on this set. That creates safety because people are operating in an environment where they know what to expect, not an environment that is or could become chaotic. So, as always, my weakness is my strength—they always are. Whether it's a gift or a liability largely depends on context. And—call me a narcissist if you like—but usually when I suggest an idea to someone, they hate it, then they eventually try it, then they come to me and tell me how great it is. I'm not saying I have all the good ideas or a psychological need to—I don't. I'm quite impersonal and cooperative in group settings. It doesn't offend me when people don't use my ideas (unless over a period of years my ideas are *never* used). It doesn't hurt me when someone comes up with a better idea than mine—it excites me. But on a film set, if I tell my cinematographer—who was usually Mike—to loosen the screws on the head of the tripod and let the camera drift a little for every shot in the film, his first reaction will be to think I'm crazy and resist like hell. But then he'll do it anyway, because every time I told him to do something before, it always worked out. And months later we'll be sitting in the theater in the Los Angeles Film School, and our directing teacher, Salvador Carasco, will say, "Wow, I love that fluid shaky movement you used. It works with the split screen and gives your film an edgy feel that works with the script." And Mike and I will look at each other and smile. And even though everyone will assume that was the cinematographer's decision, Mike will speak up and say, "Yeah, that was actually Matthew's idea. When he first suggested it, I was like, *'Whaaat?'*—I honestly didn't think it was going to work. But it works really well. He's a good director." And I'll compliment him in front of the whole class, and all will be well. And years will pass, and I will become a further irony—my sister Joanne says I have Midas' touch, that every project I touch turns to gold—and yet, I am thirty-eight, living with my mother, lying on the floor writing something like my thirteenth book, never having directed a film, my software career very likely over. When I was twenty-three, my cousin said I was the most employable person he knew. It was true at the time. He couldn't find a job as a baker and I was making amazing money for my age, programming computers for Mead Research. Now my cousin is a professor at Columbia University and I am an unemployed writer, disabled to the point that I can't live on my own, am banned by my psychiatrist from driving, can hardly pour a cup of coffee without spilling—and, after some pretty amazing years that came before, this has been *hands down* the greatest year of my life—because I am writing. - - - - Walking, on a trip outside the ward, I took pictures in my mind of that one tree with the circular bench around it and yellow leaves all around the base of the tree in a circle..wanting to never forget it, it's so beautiful. I stood there and burned it into my mind. And I never have forgotten it, to this day. And I was trapped, by a loop, something someone said twice, and thrown into a well of memory that made me think perhaps I did belong on Tyler 2, and not just for the weekend. It was this social worker who was on her last day of work at the Refuge before she moved to Austin and I guess she felt like doing her job because she pulled me aside and sat me in the sunroom and gave me a really nice and piercing speech on "emotional honesty" and I felt so good that she had spent some of her time talking to me, saying something specifically designed to help me, based on her observation of me and reading of my charts. I thanked her warmly, wished her well in Austin, and she left the sunroom. Five minutes later I hear her saying, to some other patient, "I think if you'll just be bold enough to have some *emotional honesty* around why you're here.." Giving *the exact same speech* using the *same exact phrases* to some other patient who had completely different issues and was in a completely different situation than me. And I was back talking to Daniel. And nothing made sense 'cause Stripes was there, too. Then a miracle happened. Well, it was a miracle within the context of Tyler 2. The autistic man, Daniel, opened up to me after all he ever did was yell at his doctor unintelligibly about the patients' bill of rights and ignored everyone else. I was sitting across from him doing a crossword puzzle, in a dream. Daniel, the severe autistic man, who only talked with me..he decided I was safe..after a long while..and one day around a square table we talked up a storm. When I told Stripes about it she said, "He trusts you." Then there was a picture of a girl I met on the internet with a tarantula on her back. Which is weird because I didn't meet her till five years later. But weird things can happen in the psych ward. Sometimes it's the medicine. Sometimes it's your mind. And sometimes, if you have psychosis, you just never know. I'm gonna restore you to peace now. When I count to three, you'll wake up and all will be normal. Are you ready? Ok. One.. two.. three. ### 89 You're gonna love this next one. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (5)** > > Patient Admitted November 4, 2011—Discharged November 10, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This was the third Brattleboro Refuge and fourth lifetime admission for this 33-year-old, single white male *[I think it's my fifth Brattleboro Refuge admission and sixth lifetime admission—but whatever—I mean you all do know that these records are used in courts and stuff, right?]* The patient's occupation is an unemployed computer software engineer, he was fired in August *[Whoever wrote this clearly has some logic and writing problems.]* The patient is also a writer. The patient lives alone in Brattleboro, Vermont. His mother lives close by *[If you consider Allentown, Pennsylvania to be close to Brattleboro, Vermont, then yes, she lives very close.]* > > **Chief Complaint** > > "Dr. Sbarro says I have serotonin syndrome, unless they have other motivations for wanting to hospitalize me." *[Lol](#)*—*this is* not *the type of thing you want to say to the admitting nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Hahahahaha*—*oh shit.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > This 33-year-old, single, white male presents on discharge from Birches Program for increasingly disorganized thinking. He also is having physical symptoms of muscle twitching, sweats, diarrhea, elevated blood pressure, restlessness and agitation. He reports that he went to a local Emergency Room a day or two ago for extreme anger and had his blood drawn but was medically cleared, although he does not recall specifically why. Symptoms started in Tyler 2 but then got better and then worsened a day or two ago. Current symptoms include chaotic thought process, increased paranoia, and increased anxiety but patient denies suicidal or homicidal ideation. The patient is having paranoid thoughts about the CIA poisoning milk and spoons, obsessing about being less predictable so that the CIA cannot poison him. He will not eat red or green Skittles together *[I would not eat red]* and *green Skittles together because they reminded me of Christmas, a time of screaming and tension and pain—actually I still will not eat red and green Skittles together and I do not think this indicates any mental illness at all. If color is there, and you do not pay attention to it, then* you *are the one who is missing part of life—if it is healthy to view color as meaningless, then why is it there at all?]*. The computer programming he was doing has been transferred to his brain. A lot of thoughts about the NSA profiling him. He reports having been there and working for them *[I said I went there and made a]* presentation *to them, not that I worked there]*. He feels like this is all a chess game and he wants to review his chart to see what others are saying. Reports that the NSA is messing up his life *[they very well might be—prove to me, in the age of National Security Letters, that any of us know if our interactions with a potential employer, for example, have not been tampered with by the NSA or an organization like them—you can't]*. Prior to admission to Tyler 2, the patient's trazodone and Celexa and Buspar were discontinued. His Risperdal was decreased, all of this in response to the notion that the patient was suffering from serotonin syndrome *[Read: I disagree with the referring psychiatrist's diagnosis of serotonin syndrome and taking this patient off half his meds was highly irresponsible.]* > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > The patient was put back on the Risperdal although we continued to keep him from using the trazodone, Celexa, and Buspar. The patient reports that he was also continuing to have some visual disturbance until the Sunday prior to admission. Throughout the course of his admission this time, he denied any visual disturbances. He also denied any symptoms of diarrhea, hallucinations, increased body temperature, loss of coordination, nausea, overactive reflexes, changes in blood pressure, vomiting *[Read: Referring psychiatrist, you fucking idiot, my patient does not now nor did he ever have serotonin syndrome.]* He did note some agitation and he was involved with an altercation with another patient which was not physical. The patient had accosted another patient about how loudly he was speaking and complained that the patient had awakened him *[This sentence hardly captures the essence of what went down. I wake up at four or five in the morning because some thick-neck, football-jersey-wearing, protein-shake-drinking, backwards-cap-sporting]* a-hole *is posted up by the nurses' station TALKING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS. Nurses present—no one doing* shit*. I walked up the hallway in my PJs and looked around as if to say, Are any of you fatherfucking* mother*fuckers aware that it's* five in the goddamn morning??!! *Finally this jersey-wearing asshole catches on that I'm standing there, looking straight at him, and he says, "What's your problem?" The nurses behind the desk stand up, on guard. I say, "*No*, it's* your *problem. It's five in the goddamn morning and if you don't* lower your voice *or better yet* shut your football-jersey-wearing mouth completely*, you're gonna find out that we have a hierarchy of crazy around here and since* you *just got here,* you're *on the bottom rung."*—*"Is this guy* threatening *me?"*—*"Call it what you want, just* shut your fucking mouth*." The guy stands up. The nurses tell me to go back to my room. I go back to my room, every step hoping that big motherfucker comes after me*—*I'm so keyed up I'd go straight for his eyes. He doesn't follow me, though. I stand in the hallway facing the nurses' station, my room light illuminating me. Come after me, fucker*—*come, after, me. One of the nurses suggests that I go back inside my room and close the door, as my waiting in the hallway waiting for that thick-neck loud-talking motherfucker is me being extremely aggressive. We want to* diffuse *the situation, the nurse says, not* escalate *it. But I'm thinking: Do we? Just now I looked up "altercation" in the* Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus*. One of the synonyms was "shitstorm." Now all I can think is: Matthew Temple, turning altercations into shitstorms since 1978. If you've been paying attention reading this book*—*and I've certainly been paying attention writing it*—*you'll notice a theme: I don't like to exist in a power vacuum. When control is absent, when the adults, the people who are supposed to be in charge, are doing nothing, I tend to step in to fill that void. So far the results of that strategy have been a dangerous and costly mix]*. Notes from staff suggest that the patient has a history of provoking other patients. The patient, himself, reported to me that he felt very threatened by the other patient and upset by him. In the afternoon following the incident the patient was able to acknowledge he had overreacted and he did ultimately apologize to the other patient *[Again, this hardly summarizes what went down: me and that thick-neck asshole were crying in each other's arms saying, "I love you man," and admitting our sicknesses to each other, fucking giving each other our favorite shirts as a sign of our new-found friendship, etc.]*—*We didn't just "apologize."*—*That fucker and I were like five steps away from a formula for* world peace—fuck*]*. The patient reports he has spent a considerable amount of time meditating and this has helped him to put the episode in perspective *[And let me say something else about this. At some point where I was causing or loving chaos, maybe when I provoked that schizo guy into a fight..or maybe later when I was standing in the hall outside my room looking to pick a fight with that dude who was yelling and cursing at like 5am..I remember a time in an AA meeting in Tucson, years ago, when I shared my realization that I wasn't addicted to the drugs—I was addicted to chaos. I wouldn't know what to do inside a normal life. Some of that's my actions, some of it's having bipolar disorder, some of it's the way I was raised]*. The patient noted that his OCD symptoms were returning, especially with respect to oddities in his writing and worrying about the number 178 now that he is no longer on the clomipramine. The patient also reported having vivid, intense dreams but was sleeping ok. There's really more I need to say about my tendency to taunt other patients..it's a thing I do in my family with my non-functional uncle as well..when there's no parental order, I instill it. Like this time we're gonna get to in a class at the Refuge where that young kid was being disruptive and the teacher just let him keep disrupting the class for all of us..*I* instilled order. I told the kid to get the fuck out. Same with the schizo kid who was disturbing all the girls..I'm not going to sit by and let someone make all the girls uncomfortable, so I did something about the situation. Same with the guy acting like he was the boss of the place, talking loud at night insinuating that dominating the sound environment of the ward was his right. I let that motherfucker know he was not in charge of this rathole. It reminds me of the bridge scene in *Apocalypse Now*. Climbing through piss and shit..muddy bunker with bombs exploding in the background..Martin Sheen finds a living soldier and asks: "Who's the commanding officer here?" Panicked, the guy says: "Ain't you?" Moments later, meeting a sure-shot zen motherfucking killing machine named Roach who's blowing up gooks with a grenade launcher, Sheen again asks: "Hey soldier, do you know who's in command here?" And this zen motherfucker says, "Yeah," and then walks off without saying anything—which I always interpreted to mean that there was no one in command, that Chaos, the Enemy, that *Nothing* was in command. Eventually Sydney Poitier asks Sheen, "Did you find the CO, Captain?" And Sheen says, "There's no fucking CO here." That bridge scene, with one soldier on LSD, the Americans building up the bridge every night and Charlie blowing it up every morning—with no commanding officer present—something about that reminded me of the ward. There was never any lasting peace, just a revolving door of psychopaths like me, each one of us primed to use this otherwise neutral space as a stage where we would act out our sicknesses, masquerading them as powers, reigning them on other patients' heads, on staff heads, in an idiotic display of something we thought was strength but was just foolishness—no real power there, no real manhood or womanhood, just faces with the skin half torn off. And that last guy, he was big, he could have killed me with his bare hands, but I remembered when I got beat up in the tenth grade by four guys..and I remembered sometime later when someone had suggested to someone else (and I overheard) the idea that if someone is going to kick your ass, you start acting like a crazy person, saying insane shit and say you have AIDS and you'll bite them and you've got shit in your pants already waiting and you'll shove it in their mouth and eyes, just start flailing around wildly spitting and shit..and I used some of that tactic with big boy who thought he was mob boss of the psych ward. I remember this movie I watched when I was in Africa, between the fourth grade and fifth grade, and I've never been able to find it since. I was in Liberia between civil wars and I sat in this missionary kid's living room and watched a movie where these four American hunters cross over the line into Russia to chase a deer and they end up in a Russian prison for years..and one of them turns into kind of the leader of the prisoners, he's insane, he can beat anyone at chess, he can win physical competitions because he's crazy enough to do things other people won't—like bite your fucking ears off. I always related to that prison guy. His life was wasted but he found some sort of meaning for himself in being the most insane prisoner of all the insane prisoners. Even in the fourth grade, that archetype appealed to me. It resonated with me. If I had been wiser, I would have known at the time that I resonated with him because he was like me. > During the course of the hospitalization, the Risperdal was increased as the patient continued to have some overtly psychotic ideation and presented me with many notes which confirmed his psychotic thought process. However, once the Risperdal was increased, the patient began to again have what he called "solid" mood but did note that his depression had increased slightly since having began taken off the Celexa and he requested a restart of that antidepressant. In the event, we agreed to a trial of Lexapro secondary to complaints of hyperhidrosis *[excessive sweating]* on citalopram *[actually I can't cum on Celexa but I can on Lexapro]*—*I have no idea whether I told my doctor this]*. The patient denied suicidal or homicidal ideation, denied auditory or visual hallucinations and was not deemed an imminent threat to self or others. There were no symptoms of serotonin syndrome on discharge. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar Disorder Not Otherwise Specified with psychotic features. Alcohol Dependence. Cocaine Abuse. Recurring Kidney Stones. Unemployed. Chronic Suicidality. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 35 *[This falls in the same range as the 40 I had before: impairment in reality testing (that's psychosis)..impairment in communication..speech is illogical, obscure, irrelevant..major impairment in work, school, family relations, judgment, thinking, or mood..avoids friends, neglects family, is unable to work—true, all true.]* > > **Condition on Discharge** > > The patient was well groomed, in casual clothing with good hygiene. Cooperative with interview, making good contact. No psychomotor agitation or retardation noted. Affect was constricted. Mood was described as "comfortable with this discharge plan." Thought process, quality and quantity of speech were within normal limits. Speech was not pressured. There was no evidence of poverty of speech, no thought blocking, no flight of ideas, no loosening of associations. No tangentiality. No circumstantiality, no echolalia, no neologisms, no clanging, no perseveration, and at this time he was denying ideas of reference *[Did you get all that? I didn't. Times likes these are when I'm glad my psychiatrist knows more than me. Ok. Pressured speech is a symptom of mania]*—*it's when you can't stop talking even when you want to! But it's more than that, it's rapid and frenzied speech, urgent for some unknown reason. You can't interrupt the person. You can't understand what they're talking about. Next: poverty of speech. In a normal conversation, when you say something and I respond, I address what you said and add additional, unprompted content. Poverty of speech is when a person doesn't add this additional, unprompted content. It's a blankness. It's like they're talking, but there's nothing there. So I didn't have that*—*that's good. Poverty of speech is common in people with schizophrenia. The fact that my doctor includes this in my discharge notes indicates to me that the "psychotic thought process" and "increasingly disorganized thinking" she has observed in me led her to consider a diagnosis of schizophrenia but that she is ruling this out. Same for the next one: thought blocking. Thought blocking is where you stop speaking in the middle of a sentence. It's a sign of schizophrenia. I don't have it*—*that's good. Next: flight of ideas. A symptom of mania. Rapid thought flow, accelerated speech, abrupt changes from topic to topic that are difficult or impossible to follow. Didn't have that. Loosening of associations is when your thoughts (and therefore your speech) consists of unrelated or only remotely related ideas. It's a sign of mania or schizophrenia. Tangentiality, as you can probably guess, is when you digress from the topic under discussion to another topic which is suggested by associations you have to the original topic. I may not have been doing that then but I certainly do it now*—*frequently my mom asks me, "What does this have to do with what we were talking about?" It's a symptom of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Circumstantiality is discourse based on a non-linear thought pattern. The person includes a lot of unnecessary detail but eventually gets back to the original point. It's what I speculate Mamet might call "taking the long way home." Echolalia is repeating someone else's words. Neologisms are made-up words. In clanging, what you say isn't based on concepts, it's based on sounds*—*compulsive rhyming or alliteration with no discernible logical connection between words. Perseveration is when you can't stop doing or saying the same thing over and over. Ideas of reference are when you find deep personal significance in events that have nothing to do with you. You attribute meaning to things that are meaningless. You think everything you experience is part of a master plan designed specifically around you. It's a symptom of schizophrenia and also occurs during bipolar mania. Let's move on]*. Denied auditory or visual hallucinations. There was no evidence of delusions. Paranoia was significantly diminished from intake. He was alert and oriented by 3 *[I know who I am, where I am, the date and time, but not necessarily the events that have occurred recently.]* Insight was fair and judgment was considered fair. > > **Prognosis** > > Fair, depending on patient's ability to maintain his medications and refrain from use of drugs or alcohol. > > **Patient Strengths** > > The patient has a supportive sister and supportive mother. Also is able to make use of therapeutic interventions *[I've often wondered what Dr. Meggs meant by this—did she mean that she knew that there was a highly conscious way in which I was]* using *the hospital, even to the level of causing myself to be admitted? I'll never know]*. > > **Arrangements for Aftercare Services** > > The patient is discharged back to Birches Program *[like a fucking tennis ball—every time I go to Birches, they admit me to Tyler 2; every time I'm discharged from Tyler 2, they send me back to Birches.]* > > **Recommendations for Discharge** > > Resume regular diet and activity and follow up with outpatient providers as arranged by social work. It is recommended that the patient have an appointment with an optometrist to evaluate his eyesight. It is recommended that the patient have a head CT to rule out any space-occupying lesions or other abnormalities that could lend themselves to psychotic processes and/or visual changes. I may not have had serotonin syndrome, but I was definitely angry. While I was in there, I reprimanded this redhead crackhead so hard that he requested a transfer to another floor. I sat there in the low rocking chair which was the coveted chair but was specifically given to me this class by my fellow patients because I was obviously on edge. I sat through listening to that asshole interrupt and contradict every share by everyone in the group, saying the stupidest things (including the interchange about how he always says that he'll smoke crack today and quit tomorrow and I say that will never work because if you say that every day then you'll be smoking crack every day..you've got to stop *today*, because every day is like *today*..your whole life is made up of days like *today*, not days like tomorrow, because there's no such thing as tomorrow, you're always living in *today*) but most of all what I couldn't stand is him being mean to my friends, the other patients. And then I said to myself, the next time that redhead crackhead says a *word*, I'm going to interrupt *him* and give him a talking to like he hasn't heard since he was a little kid. And I did. And the spineless substance abuse counsellor and the senile old guest he had invited in to tell us some dumb-ass inspirational story (about some trivial business he started..like he used to be an addict and then he started reading a book a day and now he has a Lamborghini..shit like that). So this crackhead finally says one too many words—he finally speaks after the point at which I'd decided to shred him. He interrupts someone in the class while they're speaking and from the coveted low-rider rocking chair I say, and look, and point at this guy: "SHUT. THE FUCK. UP." Matt the spineless substance abuse counsellor looks at me. And I say to him: "Where is your moral compass for thinking this was a speaker who would be valuable for us to hear?" And then I say to this invited speaker: "How is it that you read five-thousand books and the biggest it stretched your mind is that you wanted to buy a Lamborghini? Were they all self-help books from the 1950s or did you read anything by Eckhart Tolle or Pema Chödrön, for example—because if you had, then I don't think you would be deriving a major part of your self-worth from bragging to a bunch of mental patients about owning a two-hundred thousand dollar car. That's just my opinion." This guy was a cheat, abusing his power with a government office—he's the guy who bought up a bunch of solar panel patents before himself serving on the board who voted to offer Vermonters huge solar panel subsidies and he made millions..and he calls this *spiritual success*, somehow, just because he used to have a drinking problem. *This* is his definition of turning his life around, or healing substance problems? I'm thinking *What class am I* in? And the whole time I'm telling this faggot to shut up, everyone in the room is dead silent, the crackhead, the spineless substance abuse counselor, Faith, everyone. When I'm done the guest speaker continues his story. Faith whispers, *Are you ok?* and I shake my head and rock furiously in the chair, trying to control my breathing. I should have grabbed that old man by the shoulders and dragged him to the elevator. Motherfucker. When this no-morals, no-storytelling ability storyteller is done exhaling all the wind in his old-ass bag, Matt, the spineless substance abuse counsellor, suggests that we talk about my outburst. I inform him I've already said all I have to say, but that I'll listen if anyone else has something to say. Basically the whole group, person after person, says, *Maybe Matthew shouldn't have reacted the way he did, but redhead crackhead has been disrespectful and disruptive in every group and I agree with what Matthew said—though not necessarily in the way he said it—and I think one of you, the teachers, the leaders, the nurses, the doctors..somebody should have said something to redhead crackhead so that we didn't have to handle the situation ourselves.* "Good job, Matthew," Olivia says. "Yeah, I don't like his dumb ass either." "Faith, let's try to be constructive." "I *am* being constructive. I'm calling a dumb ass a dumb ass—that's highly constructive where I come from." And the dude—the redhead crackhead—leaves. He sees that *everyone* is against him, and he walks out, goes straight to the nurses' station, and requests a transfer downstairs to Tyler 1. Good for him. Good for us. Fuck that uppity redhead crackhead. Earlier, in response to my *shut the fuck up*, he was like: "Excuse me, I get to talk here—" "No you don't. You get to shut your fucking mouth." "But—" "Just SHUT IT. *I'm* done listening to you, so *you're* done talking. Do you understand what I just said to you?" "All I was saying was—" "All you need to do is stop talking. Am I a problem for you?" "I think you're a problem for everyone." "Am I a problem to *you*?" "Given that you won't let me share my opinions—" "Then all you have to do..is *shut*..the *fuck*..up. Then I will cease to be a problem for you. Ok?" Redhead crackhead is quiet. He gets up and walks out. Problem solved. But Matt the spineless substance abuse counsellor insists on reminding us (me) that: "We have a have a set of group guidelines for this ward. And one of those guidelines is a non-violence policy. And the way you speak to people is sometimes violent, Matthew. The way you spoke to redhead crackhead certainly was. I don't know if you can hear, but he's out there requesting a transfer downstairs, to Tyler 1." "He belongs in Tyler 1," Olivia says. "Not up here with a bunch of people who have legitimate psychiatric disorders." "Well the Brattleboro Refuge considers addiction to be a psychiatric disorder." "But what I'm saying," Olivia says, "is that redhead crackhead needs to detox off of crack and *then* maybe he can come up here if he has depression or schizophrenia—which I don't think he has. Matthew—ok, Matthew, I'm not defending what you said or how you said it just now—but Matthew obviously has emotional problems separate from addiction..which, I don't even know if you're an addict—" "I am." "And no offense, but I don't think anyone should ever be spoken to that way—" "No offense taken." "But you, Matt," she says to our teacher, "need to handle things like redhead crackhead before they get to the point that a *patient* feels the need to speak out against it." "Olivia, that's just not how we do things here. We believe that patients learn more when they work things out among themselves." Olivia huffs, shakes her head, stands up. She walks right next to me and says, "I'm glad you said something. I don't blame you, ok." "Ok," I say. "And I'm sorry I said it the way I did. That guy just names me mad." "I know," she says, and she pats me on the knee. Then she walks out. And that pretty much ends Mr Bob Dobalina's inspirational speech. There is no formal closure to the class. Everyone just walks out in twos and threes and by themselves and someone turns the TV on and I get up and walk out the door and even though our spineless substance counsellor starts calling, "Matthew! Matthew!" I just ignore him. I go to the nurses' desk where Michelle is checking out redhead crackhead to transfer to Tyler 1 *immediately*. Michelle looks at me—I'm sure she heard the whole incident—and she rolls her eyes. She doesn't smile at me—that would be inappropriate—but she doesn't give me a dirty look, either. It's like, in her mind, this was an inevitability—like she's seen this so many times between different versions of me and different versions of redhead crackhead, that it doesn't even make the headlines anymore. I stand a few feet away from redhead crackhead, filling out my preferences for the next meal. I don't look at him at all. I fill in for an extra hamburger. I'm done with redhead crackhead. I put in for chocolate milk instead of regular milk. Redhead crackhead has gone through my meat-grinding facility, and come out soggy and wet and dripping dead blood. There's nothing more that I can do with him—*he requested a transfer off the ward!!* I am happy. Not because I "won." No. Fuck winning. I'm happy because he'll be *gone*..and I won't have to *listen to his voice* anymore. I don't wish any ill on him—I hope things work out great on Tyler 1, he stops smoking crack, and has a wonderful life. It's just that he was disturbing my environment, so that fucker had to go. ### 90 See, there's something that happens to you when a psychiatrist looks at your notebooks and your notes to her and she determines that they indicate a "psychotic process"—when those notebooks make perfect sense. Now you might say, who am I to know whether I'm psychotic or not (because if I'm psychotic I might not be able to know that). Well, excellent point. But hear this: When I went home, I used some of those notes to write a program which I think simulates one theory (of mine) about what I call manic, sleeping, awake, or depressed states (those don't mean exactly what you might think they mean based on general usage). So my notes were coherent in the sense that they corresponded to a computer program I wrote using them as a guide. The program has been run by me and at least one other person on two different computers. Its output shows the neural state of a simple organism that goes through these various states, which I think correspond to states in bipolar mentality. How is that psychotic? Just because you don't understand it doesn't make it psychotic. My psychiatrists' handwriting is psychotic—so much so that the pharmacy fills the wrong drugs and I have to correct them and say, no, I need Flexeril, not fluoxetine. I already take Lexapro, if I take fluoxetine on top of that, it could induce mania, I could end up in the hospital. Is my doctor psychotic just because the pharmacy can't make sense of her handwriting? Or does she just have messy handwriting? You know what I'm saying. It's one of my classic arguments, and almost no one agrees with me. But let's say you're a teacher giving a test, and a student gives you a Scantron that works out as an F. And let's say you look at the answers the student put down, and they just don't make sense—in fact they look random. You might conclude that this student was bored or discouraged or despondent and instead of taking the test, just filled in a random circle for each of the questions. You could conclude that. But, my argument (which no one ever agrees with) is this: that student might be doing something extremely ordered, which only appears random *to you*—for instance, the student might have used the Scantron to write an encoded message which, when decoded, says, "This test is boring," over and over. Encoded in the digital form, it would look like the student was just fucking around, when in fact they were doing something completely sensible, non-psychotic, albeit unexpected. The warning in this is that when someone does something *you don't understand*, it doesn't mean it's senseless, it just means it's senseless *to you*. Ok, so most students taking tests and people in psych ward interviews are not doing things like this. They are not intentionally coding meaningful behavior into random-looking activity for their own entertainment. Most people aren't that *on top of* a conversation that they're talking (as Prince would say) "in, around, through." They're not even aware of what they're saying—just as most of us are not hyper-aware of what we're saying in a conversation. It's like skiing or skating or walking or driving—you're not thinking about every little move you make, it happens automatically. But while my psychiatrist probably has correctly diagnosed me as psychotic, I disagree with her using my notes as evidence for this "psychotic process." My notes are highly unusual, irregular, sometimes written in a language my psychiatrist can't read because I made it up and no one can read it but me—but that doesn't mean I'm psychotic. That just makes me weird. Psychosis is delusions and hallucinations. What part of a beyond-creatively written note indicates a delusion or a hallucination? It certainly doesn't indicate a hallucination—how does me doing something you didn't expect conclude in *me hallucinating*? It doesn't—it just doesn't. Where, then, is the delusion—the false belief that even when a person is shown contradictory evidence, they continue to believe? Where in my strange note is an indicator that I am deluded in any way? There *is* no indication—there just isn't. And like I was saying before, there is something that happens to me when someone—well, when my doctor—looks at my wildly creative behavior and slaps the label "psychotic" on it. And what it is that happens is that I start not to care if people understand me. Why not talk in nonsense all the time? Why not express myself exactly how I feel, ignoring social rules, knowing it will turn off most people..but *why would I care*, if I am psychotic, if I am medically determined not to make complete sense anyway, to be clouded by delusions and hallucinations (which I am), then why even *try* to behave normally—why even *fit* into the box? Do you hear my anger? You're right, it's there. Maybe if I was of average intelligence or below average intelligence I could care less about being branded psychotic. But now I find myself in a position where I can think circles around my psychiatrist—she sometimes suggests things I've never thought of, but I can keep tabs on and categorize and analyze and remember everything she says and *I can ask her* questions she never thought of and doesn't have the answers to. I'm not actually angry with my psychiatrist, so that's a bad example. But there have been bosses, coworkers, friends, and my dad, who at some point decided that I was crazy—and they were right—but they never were able to see the full me (as, even though I was the crazy one, their view of me was narrower than my view of them) so they dismissed *all* of me when only part of me was functioning less lucidly than them, and most of me (even though I was crazy) was functioning *more* lucidly than them. So in business situations, even though I was "Crazy Matt," I consistently came up with totally unorthodox, totally appropriate, mindstompingly simple solutions to problems that *teams* of programmers hadn't solved in years. In the large corporations, my solutions were implemented, they solved long-standing problems and ultimately saved money, which was the whole point. I have a maddening way of solving problems by *not solving them*—by reframing them as something else and then solving *that*. I'm a superlative problem solver—I am, it's no brag, it's just the truth—but often, especially in the small corporations, people don't really want suggestions *that work* from people "under them" on the org chart. Consistently coming up with ideas that show up your boss is your ticket to hell in a small company, because small companies haven't figured out that *ego* isn't an asset—that's why they're still small companies..and why they always will be. Any suggestion you make that might help them to become a medium-sized or someday a *large* company, is met with resistance from the boss, from everyone who works there. They're scared of change, they're scared of growth. Deep down, they *want* to be a small company (forever). Anyway, fuck small companies—I'm off track. All I really have to say is it's a weird and strangely fun position to be in, to be branded disabled partially due to psychosis when, from my perspective, I make a lot more sense (or at least have a a lot more capability) than my abled, non-psychotic human friends. - - - - When I was in film school, I called my sister Joanne one day, from outside the building, in front of the school. And I said: "Everyone is cutting me off, Joanne. My friends here are dropping like flies. At the beginning everybody was buddy buddy and we were all dumb film students trying to learn something *together* about how to make a movie. Now I'm making films that *consistently* the teachers compliment and nobody wants to work with me!! They won't even talk with me!" I exhaled. My head was leaned against the stone of the front of the building. And Joanne said: "Well, bro, I'm sure you're familiar with this dynamic from other schools before. Once you start to stand out, people feel threatened. Their only recourse is *the recourse of the pack*—the pack mentality. They have to stick together against you *to survive*. But you survive *on your own*, my bro. You always have. And, if you'll allow me to say one more thing.." "Yes, Joanne, this is just what I need." "Ok, well, I'm not sure I'm using this phase right, but I think you'll know the sense in which I mean it, even though this isn't the sense..it's not the way it's normally defined." "What is it?" I can hear Joanne chewing on the other end of the phone—an apple, or granola. And my sister, my loving, genius sister, said, "Well, this is a little coarse, and I don't mean to insult your fellow classmates." "No, go ahead, insult them." "Bro," she chews, "the proof is in the pudding. You know. *They* can gossip, they can shut you out socially—*that's* their skill. But you can make films that your professors like. And that's why you went there, right?—to make films. And you're doing that. And not everyone can do that. So I say, ignore those mofos and get back to making films." And that's what I did—of course that's what I did. And that's the sense in which I use that phrase when I say it (which is usually to myself): *The proof is in the pudding.* Meaning: you can call me crazy, you can diagnose me psychotic, you can dismiss me because sometimes bipolar people are delusional, but *the proof is in the pudding*, bro. You can talk crap. Or you can diagnose. But I can write books (I've written twelve—I think). I can program computers like somebody who's been programming computers since he was a *kid* (because I *have* been programming computers since I was a kid—I learned to program before I learned *long division*). I've invented some artificial intelligence algorithms—I presented one of them to the NSA when I was like nineteen years old. I've discovered many new types of one-dimensional cellular automata (a type of logic system). I've sold paintings for thousands of dollars. I'm a prodigy at group leadership—like in a camp counsellor role—I can create trust among a group and *inspire* that group when at the beginning they were all disruptive and ho-hum and not interested. I get down on myself about my relationships but Joanne reminds me that I'm *excellent* at relationships (when I want to be). - - - - I was talking to one of my bosses one time—basically about how I didn't fit into the company—and he said: "You're one of the smartest people I've ever met." (This guy graduated at the top of his class at MIT.) And I said, "I'm good at one or two things." And he said, "No, you're *really good* at a lot of things." I said, "Ok, five." He said, "No, ten." And we laughed together about how my broadness and my depth of knowledge was what was making me not fit in well in his company. Smh. So basically if I was dumber I would fit in better, be a better employee? Basically, yes. I've had *two* company owners say almost this exact same thing to me, which was: "I'm not sure what type of environment you'd fit well in [but it's not this one.]” I'm telling you, corporate America, even though they say they do, *do not want to hire* the smartest people they can find. The smartest people they can find will cause them extreme pain *every day* and that is not who they want to hire. They want to hire consistent, dumb, recent college graduates who program at a level I would plainly call incompetent *and who will never get better over the course of their careers*. I know I'm smart. I know that corporate America will never hire me again, after calling my references. And now I know that I wasn't just weird from birth onward—I have, through genetics and experience, been given obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and (as a permanent side effect of a bipolar medication) tardive dyskinesia. I am constantly in pain (and do not take pain medication because I'm an addict); cannot take care of myself independently; spend twenty-three hours a day lying down (to lessen the clenching); have suicidal and expansive swings of mood, speed, capability, and energy; and am, yes, psychotic. I recognize my delusions after the fact (sometimes, that I know of). I have a constant visual hallucination of a moving pattern on the walls and other hallucinations when I'm manic. So, yeah, I'm crazy. But when my doctor says I'm psychotic, I think: why even play by the rules anymore? I can do more than than most people who aren't psychotic—*the proof is in the pudding*. I can bake my pudding—can you? The proof is in the pudding, bro—can you bake a pudding? I have no way to ever succeed at the job, the career, the house, the wife—and I've always known I never would. I just never imagined that for myself—some basic intuition knew that would never be my life. And it's freeing, being on the outside. Oh, it has its downsides—mainly the lack of funds. I won't be buying a BMW anytime soon. But the upside is exactly *that I am psychotic*. I'm psychotic?—I can say whatever I want! No one's going to take me seriously anyway—I'm psychotic! Might as well say what I really feel, Tweet what I really want, retweet things that if they were ever seen on my desk at work they would get me fired. I've been doing this to some degree all along—and all along it's been a problem. The more I blogged, the harder it became to survive a job interview. People were spending more and more time asking me about my poetry than my programming skills. Once I had written books that were readable online, it was almost impossible to get a job. Now that I have a six-year gap in employment, a major mental illness, and 11 inpatient psychiatric stays, I'm unhirable. But you know what? I was never really having fun in those jobs. I never felt alive then in the way that I do now. Now, I can write whatever I want. Now, I can program whatever I want. *No one can ever fire me.* And with the little disability I get, I can pay half the rent and split the grocery bill with my mom. The rest goes to health insurance. And this might sound mean, but along with the *no one can ever fire me* part, goes the *I don't have to work with idiots* part. I looked unfavorably on most of the people I've ever worked with (some more than others, of course). And really the nicest way I can put this is: *I never have to work with you motherfuckers ever again*. You treated me unfairly, you paid me less than I was worth, you generally played the fool, and worst of all, you wasted my time. I actually wanted to do something; you were content to go nowhere. And—look!—we both got what we wanted. ### 91 On the outside, seeing Stripes on the sidewalk and being like: "You lookin' fine, woman!" Some kind of animal-print pants, tight as fuck, mini jacket, smoking a cigarette. She says I look good too. "Nice to see you on the outside!" "Likewise!" We're on Elliot Street. It's the first time I've seen her since I saw her on the inside. She's smoking her brand and I'm smoking Kamel Reds. We're both in street clothes and she is looking fine. I mean I like her dressed in her Refuge clothes, no doubt, but a tight pair of leopard skin pants and us saying what's up like real live human being. "I've been meaning to ask you something, not sure I had the guts on the inside," she says. "What is it?" "Tell me about your love history." I give her a brief breakdown. She says, "Sounds like a lot of heartbreak." And I have to admit she's right, and I fear that my lack of ability at relationships makes me less attractive to her. But I gotta tell the truth. - - - - We talk outside her bar at a cigarette break. She asks me for one of mine. I give it to her, light it, and she says: "Are you suicidal." And I say, "Yes." And she says, "You have to go back. Promise me. You have to promise me you will go back." "Ok, I promise," I say, my tears freezing on my face. "Good. Good. Go team. I might have to go back too. I want them to detox me off my pain meds. I'm addicted to them now." I nod. Then a snowball hits me in the chest. Then one hits Stripes in the back! Drinkers at Whit's are attacking drinkers at the hippie bar on our smoke break! There is only one recourse!! I run the little distance down the hill and I'm throwing snowballs at the guy who work at the bike, at Thomas, at Justine's boyfriend. Then Justine tackles me, throws me down in the snow right next to a fire hydrant. She's wearing a snowsuit and we're rolling in the snow—the night before Thanksgiving and her hot breath in my face—feeling her whole body press against mine, her on top, and the two of us looking at each other, our faces so close and she said, "I like you," And I said, "I like you too. You should come over to my house sometime." "Why? Are you gonna make me dinner?" "No. I'm gonna make you scream." Our eyes were darting back and forth. My cock was getting hard and I knew Justine could feel it through the snowsuit she was wearing 'cause she pressed back, her pubic mound absorbing me. "I'm gonna take you up on that," she said. And the moment was over, reeled back like a fishing lure, gone. Justine got up and the snowball fight had never stopped around us, and we went back to throwing snow in each other's faces and smoking and going back inside. After that I developed a fetish for women in snowsuits, imagining that all they had on underneath were some kinky panties or maybe nothing. For a while there I wanted to fuck every girl I saw in a snowsuit. And for a while there everything was wonderful..was that the high moment of the second act? With Justine's hot breath in my ear and Stripes asking for one of *my* cigarettes to smoke—I think it was. I think it rose to that point, peaked for about three minutes, and then I think from there, for me, it was the way down. - - - - Vermont in general is losing young people. Young people tend to move out of Vermont because it's full of podunk towns and icy mountains and these young people prefer to live in neighborhoods with hot nightclubs and Lamborghinis and better drugs and better jobs and the ability to "have a life." So they move to the most expensive part of New York or LA they can afford—which is like Harlem or Koreatown, which are dangerous neighborhoods to live in, even by my standards. And anyway, "having a life" is something that means one thing when you're young..but as you age it sort of isn't a thing..because anything you do, well, that's your life =) Opposite the trend of youth draining from Vermont into cities with more of a scene, there are young people staying in Vermont, moving to Vermont, and making themselves a hell of a scene in Vermont. Specifically in Brattleboro. There may be only fifty really cool twenty- and thirty-somethings in B-boro, but those are some of the coolest people in all the world—according to me. Everyone's a character. Everyone's an artist. Everyone's a pro. I mean Stripes—one of the best chefs in New York—lives in Brattleboro. Or me, a premier programmer who helped build one of the internet's first large databases at Mead Research, inventor of many new types of 1-dimensional cellular automata (a math/computer thing), and author of a couple handfuls of novels—Brattleboro. My point is there are a lot of little boroughs across the US, and to find one as cool as Brattleboro, in terms of the people who live there..well..the only place you could find anything close would be in Arizona. Let's dwell on Justine, her perfect Brattleboro-ness, and the high-point of that snowy moment, full of spirits from two bars, playing in the snow with a bunch of young adults..just as free and wild and innocent and pure and fun as snow play as a kid except, with these kids, if you found a partner, you could unzip their snow suit..pulling Justine out of her plush full-body cover and running my finger underneath her panties where the lips of her vagina took my touch and salivated, their moisture wetting her panties, and us both taking them off together, Justine's hand gripping my hard cock and me laying her silently back on the bed in the attic apartment, both of us knowing what was coming next. Nothing would be more Brattleboro than her snug little twenty-one-year-old pussy and my hard cock inside it. ### 92 But that was all fantasy. I left the bar soon after rolling around in the snow pressing genitals with Justine and staring into her eyes and her face being so close. When she said what she said to me, she quickly stood up and her boyfriend was watching her and she went with him back into Whit's and—as much as I would love to fuck Justine—all was right with in jungle, with Justine and her man sitting at the bar, him flirting with Jill and Justine sitting next to him, drinking shots along with helping him out with his pitchers and pitchers of beer. That night I didn't share a drink, as was customary, at the Whitman's bar with Justine and her boyfriend. I liked the guy genuinely but it would have been even more awkward than usual after Justine and I had spoken and pressed ourselves to each other in the snow. All was right in the jungle with me walking up the winding streets to my apartment, jerking off, going to sleep, and waking up to the internet being off. (Months of non-payment will result in termination of services.) Early in the morning, Thanksgiving, no one out, I take my iPad right down in front of Whit's and use their internet to make a call to my mom. I say, "I might be suicidal." She says, "Do you need to the hospital?" I say, "I don't know but I think I'm just going to go to some AA meetings and Thanksgiving celebrations and take it slow and see what happens." She says, "I'll call you back." And I say my phone is out of minutes, internets off at the house, so I'll call you. She says, "*You call me.*" "I will." There were early AA meetings on Thanksgiving for people like me with no family in the area and I went down to the Methodists' getting there in the middle of a meeting. I drank maybe five cups of coffee because I had discovered that on Risperdal caffeine didn't have it's usual effect of wigging me out. Some people theorize that caffeine is supposed to be not good for bipolar people, which spawns a theory in me that Risperdal is a good drug for me since on Risperdal I seem to be able to drink coffee like a normal person. This backwards-ass AA group says the Lord's Prayer at the conclusion of their meeting and I don't even care. I seeing Sadie at this early group and am impressed because every AA meeting I go to, Sadie is there. But I never a chance to talk with her. During the sectarian prayer I did not speak or listen, but thought instead about how, the day before, in light of the flood, the town had come together to fundraise for one of its richest citizens, the owner of a bar that flooded. They raised untold tens of thousands of dollars for a rich business owner while I'm begging for food at churches—they were doing welfare for the millionaire business owners instead of the penniless hungry—typical America. *For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.* It reminded me of what my dad said when, after film school, jobless, I was unable to pay the first installment on the school loan my dad had cosigned with me. He said, very concerned, "This is going to affect my credit." I don't know what I said in response, but what I was thinking was: *That's a luxury problem, dude. You're going to take a hit on your credit?? I'm about to be homeless!!* He never took a hit on his credit—he used money he inherited from his dad to pay the $80,000 loan in full. No real trouble befell him. But I did become homeless, and my dad did not help me, did not want to talk to me, did not support me emotionally, and does not support me emotionally to this day. That's the world he lives in: a world where *problem* is defined as a potential drop in your credit score. This is the world I live in: *problem* is defined as being homeless and possibly dying. When I talk to those two guys who are homeless, camping on this little green triangle in town under the pretense that they are part of the Occupy movement, they tell me a long story about how that land isn't owned by the city, it's owned by the Methodist church, so the city can't kick them off. "And the Methodists, they serve food on Thursdays, so they're not going to kick us off their land." I tell them I've been to those Thursday meals at the Methodist church. Dagny Taggart's spirit is with them. See, *Atlas Shrugged* has become a sign that people who are still deluding themselves about capitalism use to recognize each other. I used to believe in capitalism. I had a copy of *Atlas Shrugged* on my desk at SXG and my office mate said, "Oh, you've read *Atlas Shrugged*!" and then we had some meaningless conversation about how most people don't believe in hard work and it's amazing how *people like us* understand that everyone could be rich if they wanted to, if they *really wanted to*, ignoring the obvious fact that working at SXG would never make either of us rich—we'd always be the underlings, working for a handful of millionaires, paid just enough to make it hard to quit the job, which is what every last person in that company wanted to do. We believed we were sound monitored at work, so at work everyone spoke as if working at SXG was the greatest job in the world, working with the smartest group of people ever assembled. But get three or four of those same guys in a cab after a holiday party, and the only topic of conversation there ever was, was whether the three of four of us could get together enough technology and capital and bravado to start our own hedge fund. The subtext to all this was that any five people who worked in that company could have started that company—we just didn't. The owners spent their time on yachts and in helicopters and playing with their kids in huge backyards. And at company parties, the owners were the ones drinking straight vodka, warm, while the rest of us were content with beer or wine—those motherfuckers had something to drink about. If your company is responsible for eighty percent of the options trading volume in the market, does that sound like a jubilee of firms and individuals going head-to-head in an open marketplace where everyone has a chance at a piece of the pie?—Or does it sound more like anyone who isn't SXG is walking into an ambush. Dagny Taggart would have hated SXG—but Dagny Taggart didn't know a thing about US capitalism. Dagny thought the government would take power away from the corporations, pass laws to control them, steal their innovations in the name of eminent domain. But what she learned hanging around me is that it was actually the other way around: the corporations of billionaires bought every decision made by every representative and every senator and every President, stripping the government of its ability to protect the rights of the People as provided by the Constitution. Dagny was worried about takeover of innovators by the ignorant voting masses..in reality a handful of people took away the money and rights of three-hundred million Citizens—economically, everyone was a slave. I'll tell you one thing: I hate this system. I used to believe in Ayn Rand and building companies and all that bullshit—just because that's what they teach you when you're little. But when one thing goes wrong, when you're unable to work, especially with a mental illness (since fewer people understand that yet), well suddenly the system doesn't work for you anymore because it has no need for you anymore. I've worked for companies that provided long-term disability, fifty percent of your pay or whatever..but with a mental illness, what are the chances they won't have already fired you first? They're gonna fire me for my bipolar symptoms long before either of us knows I *have* bipolar disorder—it's not like they have a doctor on hand who says: "This man is mentally disabled, you owe him his long-term disability." No. I'll behave erratically, no one will understand why, and I'll get fucking fired. I've heard of a golden age, when my grandparents lived, when you could work for the same company your whole life, when your work for the company meant they took care of you. But I've never seen it in my lifetime. - - - - I was making phone calls from in front of Whit's and some AA guy drove by in a truck and saw me in the cold and invited me to the atrium for a free public Thanksgiving: "Are you gonna be there with us?" And I just said, "Yeah!" to get him off my shoulders because he looked like a do-gooder who was going to try to rescue me from the cold and the supposed temptation of taking a drink on one of these dangerous holidays. I went to Gretchen and Tom's place for Thanksgiving even though this felt like defeat and me giving in Gretchen's and my (and Tom's) sick relationship but they were friendly and the three of us ate Gretchen's food and I cuddled with Gretchen, watching a movie while Tom slept in the chair. Gretchen put her head on my shoulder and our arms and fingers autonomously flirted with each other. When the movie ends, I leave, and when that happens, my sanity fails. I'm not *inside on the Thanksgiving track*. I'm *outside in limbo*. I'm still hungry after Gretchen's vegan Thanksgiving delights and I'm overcome with thoughts of the Bowmanstown diner..of living there with Mom and their burgers..and how I want another one or two of those someday. If I visit Mom there, it's a must. They were those east coast burgers with the right beef-to-bread ratio, coming out of this tiny boxcar diner, the servers the realest motherfuckers *on this planet*, and my routine of eating burgers and a Coke as the ultimate dalliance while I was getting sober one of the many times I got sober back then. One of the calls I make standing in the Whit's doorway using their internet is to Mom. "I'm suicidal again..or maybe still, I don't know." She says, "Call the ER." And I say, "I have a mental health crisis line." So I call them and the woman is like, "Are you *really* suicidal or are you just having a bad day?" I say, "I don't know but I think I'm suicidal because I've felt this way before and I tried to kill myself." This total idiot of a crisis line worker tries to talk me out of going to a psych ward, saying, "You sound like you're well spoken, probably come from money, right? What do you have to be suicidal about? Give me three reasons." I hang up on the bitch, call my mom back, tell her what happened. She says, "I'm *this close* to coming up there and wringing someone's neck. Don't they understand? Did you tell them about your previous attempt?" "Yes." "And she said *what*?" Etc. I tell my mom I'll walk to the ER. I promise her this, so she won't worry, and I feel terrible for bothering my mom about my petty issues but I'm broken down and I felt I at least needed to talk to someone. She says, "You did the right thing in calling me—you can call me any time, ok?" I'm about to go to the ER or maybe just secretly go home but Stripes calls me right then. "You didn't go to the hospital did you?" "No," I say. "Well you're coming with me to breakfast tomorrow." I accept, spirit raised, and go home to an apartment with no internet. I connect to Tooler's internet, downstairs, which isn't password protected, feeling bad because I had password protected mine after they were already using it and Tooler and I had a big talk about where she said I was being underhanded by quietly cutting off their access to my internet—which I was, selfish and underhanded and mean-spirited: I would have never even noticed their usage on my internet account if I had let them continue to use it. I was just mad and acting irrationally. I was hurt, really, and trying to tell them that. - - - - I woke up and Googled, "what to do if you're about to become homeless." I meet Stripes for breakfast. She pays, luckily, since it was her invitation and also I have no money. She ate a fruit plate, I ate a meal. "So what are you gonna do now that you lost your job?" "I don't know. Probably sink and die." After breakfast, Stripes and I ran across Sadie outside the Backside Cafe. I introduced the two of them, thinking about which girl I was more appropriately *with*, wishing I could be with both, but thinking Stripes was more appropriate for me. Afterward she buys us both coffees and she reminds me we live like a block from each other. "You want to come over and draw?" I say. "Yeah," she says, nodding like she was just waiting for me to ask the question. We go upstairs and the best I can do is set us up a place on the floor of my bare apartment and get us paper and pastels and pencils. We draw and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes in the apartment and I draw all over her drawing, adding even more detail to her detailed strokes..it's the best I can do as I can't muster the courage to kiss or fuck her. It's hard, when you're worried you might be homeless tomorrow, and also you want to kill yourself, to flirt with a girl or fuck her. But that's what I should have done—I know it. Striped goes to my laptop to put some music on and sees the page on the browser, search results and tabs titled *What to do if you're about to become homeless*. She politely opens a new tab and plays her music there—never saying a word about the search results I had up. "I have to go set up the bar soon." "Can I hang out with you and write?" "Yeah, I was hoping you would." We were like little kids—helping each other—but what we're helping each other not do is act out suicide. I hung out with Stripes at her work..me writing, playing darts. Really it was just me pathetically hanging around Stripes for her entire shift while she worked and I played darts and wrote. Gretchen shows up and I tell her to leave. She totally cock blocks me with Stripes, so fucking needy she must have searched every bar on Elliot Street to find me in this one. Cock blocked me so much that Stripes said, "Are you and Gretchen together?" "No! I have a stalker situation going on here!" Psychologically, Gretchen was driving me crazy by being too close, too up in my business, never giving me time alone even when I said, "I need time alone and I'm going now." She fucking sniffed me out at the hippie bar, came in, stood close like lovers stand, hugged me tight like lovers do, and totally fucked up the idea in Stripes' mind that I might actually be single. "You know, if you want to be with her," Stripes says, "that's fine." And I'm like, "*We're not together.* She just follows me everywhere I go!" And truly, even though I spent my last night in Brattleboro in Gretchen's bed, Gretchen is one of the main reasons I left Brattleboro—the town is just too small, and I didn't know how to communicate with Gretchen that *I need time alone*. You can't just show up next to me on every bar stool on Elliot Street. I need to be with other people, I need to be home, writing, without your needy calls and this stupid half-affair, half-friendship where I got the worst part of each. If I had been my strong self, I would have told her not to follow me, not to be around me anymore *at all*. But I was in a weak position. I was in and out of hospitals. I wanted to kill myself! Gretchen offered codependence, and I was weak enough to accept it. I wasn't healthy enough to have a reasonable relationship. I had had them in the past, numerous times, but at that time I was so sick that the person I attracted, more than any other, was the second-sickest person in town. - - - - While Stripes and I are smoking on one of her breaks, some dude walks up the hill carrying an AK-47 right in from of the hippie bar. I said, "Nice gun." Stripes says, "Does that freak you out?" "Yeah." "You get used to it," she says. "Gimme another Red." I offer her the cigarette. "I took all my pain medicine last night," she says. "All of it. At once. And I'm gonna be coming down from it soon. I'm going to the ER when my shift is done. Are you still suicidal?" "Yes." "That's no good, you can't live like that, you have to go back to the hospital, get your meds straight. Promise me you'll go to the hospital tonight or first thing tomorrow morning." "Ok. You promise too." She nods. "I promise. I'm going to tell my boyfriend right after my shift ends. I'm probably going to cab it to the hospital—things aren't right between him and me and I don't want him driving me." She didn't need to tell me for me to know that there was a similarity between her boyfriend for her and Gretchen for me. Totally different relationships, but similar in the sense that sometimes what makes your world intolerable, as a crazy person, are some of the sane people around you. Why do you think they call it a *Refuge*? Her boyfriend got there and the three us finally had a drink together (OJ for me), the three of us with Stripes in the middle, all sorts of tension, but we're civilized, it's 2011, polyamory is old news. Stripes looks at my juice and says, "I don't know how to take this whole no-drinking thing of yours, so I'm just going to sort of roll with it and you let me know if you're ever uncomfortable or I do anything wrong." "You're doing everything right, Stripes." We all have a cigarette, then the two of them go off together to fuck while I am left with nothing. Stripes turning around and making the sign for *call* but but it wasn't *call me* it was *call the hospital*. As the two of them walked up the hill and out of sight while I stood there and smoked, I had the distinct feeling that Stripes wasn't going to the hospital that night, that she'd lose her nerve and never tell her boyfriend and maybe I was the sick one and she was the well one and they were going to have a nice life together rubbing genitals while I would be the only one of us three to actually kill themselves or return to a psych ward. But that was just my sick mind thinking. Earlier I wrote: > Both these recent days I have looked at that #90 Rx of 0.2mg clonidines and wondered if taking the whole bottle would kill me. Maybe if I place that bottle on my doctor's desk and say I'm not safe with these, that would be a decent transformation into what would happen next. I don't want to get into the psych ward game, where I'm going there because I want to, exactly, but—as I was telling myself the other day in my manic Birches treatment journal—You can't imagine it away..and you can't imagine it there, either. Thoughts of suicide aren't pretend. I almost puked over the fence when Megan and her boyfriend walked off together. Then I ran into one of the mental health workers from the Refuge who was drinking and smoking at the bar. "What are you up to, tonight?" I say. He says, "Do you recognize me?" I say, "Yeah, Brett, you're a mental health tech. I know who you are." "Ok, cool. 'Cause we're not supposed to act like we recognize you if we see you outside the Refuge." "It's cool. I don't care. What you doing tonight?" "I'm supposed to be meeting my friend to go hook up with some hookers." "Awesome." "What about you?" "Was just hanging out with a friend and I'm about to go home." "Cool." Then his friend gets there and they're slapping each other and breathing steam from their mouths and saying shit like: "I wanna find me a goth hooker who's like twelve years old." And then the other one, my mental health tech, says, "These hookers won't *disappoint*, man—you're gonna bust in like three seconds with these little girls." "Ok, but the lowest I'll go is twelve. I have standards." "Ok," says the tech, "but you might have to go eleven if the goth thing is still a requirement!" "Oh, it is, bro! It is!!!" And they head off down the hill. ### 93 The next day, extremely depressed, extremely lonely, I decided I wanted to talk to my dad. I had unemployment money I used to put minutes on my pre-paid phone. I called him. "Hi, this is Van." "Hi, this is your son." Then he just hung up. Didn't say a word. Just fucking hung up. I thought maybe it was an accident, like he doesn't know how to use his phone 'cause he's old. I called back. "Hello, this is Van." "Hi, it's Matthew. You just hung up on me. Was that an accident, or..what happened there?" Silence. "Dad, I need help. I'm in trouble..mentally." "Well, Matt, I can't talk right now. I'm looking at homes and I'm waiting for a call back from my real estate agent." Then he hung up again. My whole body turned cold. My stomach had shivers like I was standing in the middle of a frozen lake in just a t-shirt. *It is difficult for me to live knowing that my dad has such priorities, and that I am so low on the list.* I was even more ready to kill myself than ever before. I don't like living, knowing that I am a piece of shit to my own father. I don't see why he went about the trouble of having children. When I was homeless, he never comforted me, he never encouraged me. I didn't want money—I wanted a kind word. I want a father who is emotionally *there*. I opened my email and drafted a simple note to my immediate family: > **From:** Matthew > > **To:** Sharon, Joanne, Leona > > **Bcc:** Van > > **Subject:** I just called Dad and he hung up on me > > It is colossally difficult to live knowing that my own father doesn't have the time of day for me. > > Just fyi. > > And this is before I even said anything to the guy..this was at the "hi this is your son" part of the conversation. Wow, Dad; wow. I pressed send. But, really, that note was a bit too subtle and not immediate enough to reflect the situation going on inside my head. So I wrote another one: > **From:** Matthew > > **To:** Sharon, Joanne, Leona > > **Bcc:** Van > > **Subject:** Fyi > > I can't deal with this. This is not a family, it's a collection of individuals. > > I need my dad to love me. Otherwise, what was the point of him having me? > > I am going to kill myself. > > Goodbye. And Dad: fuck you. To be fair, I stole that idea about our family being a collection of individuals from my sister Joanne. How fucked up is that—I plagiarized my own sister in my suicide note. I pressed send. I ran a bath and took my one cooking knife with me. It wasn't serrated but it was really sharp. I sat in the hot water and tried to understand all the angles on this thing—what it meant, who it would affect, whether I had another option. I shaved first—I like the feel of a clean face. I felt something like a pressure on my brain, like how heavy my head was. The electricity was off in my apartment—the only light was what was coming through the windows. The bathroom was in shadows. I thought that probably no one would care if I died. I didn't feel to close to anyone. None of us talked that much so in my mind we didn't really have real relationships anymore. Even further down that path, I thought that I was more an inconvenience than a benefit to anyone I knew, even my family. I failed to see what value I was providing to them—they didn't need me. I basically feel like I'm an inconvenience to everyone I know. I feel like my family would be better off without me. It's not true, but when you're suicidal, you believe these types of things. They seem true, and there's no way to think your way around them. Your mind is telling you to kill yourself, and giving you the very good reason that you will be doing a favor for the people you love the most. I was just way out here in Vermont with no friends, no girlfriend, no job, soon I would be homeless and it gets cold in Vermont, really cold. I had written five books at that point—publishers had no interest. I had no car. When the snow came, that cut down my job options to zero. And I didn't want to go back to the Refuge. I preferred the privacy of dying alone, and I'd planned this for ten years—when I was twenty-three I knew that the way I wanted to go was in a bathtub..because I love baths. I pretty much knew that I was going to kill myself since I was twenty-three—since Rebecca died. Her mother asked me at the time if I was suicidal, and I said, yes, I was. I think Rebecca's mother was, too. She's an alcoholic, like me. In fact I might have known even sooner that I was going to kill myself..right around the tenth grade, when life turned horrible. - - - - And that note, included above—that's the exact note I sent to my family. I pulled it from my email account which I was using from before I moved to Vermont to now. Mom and I argue, to this day, over whether that was a threat. I say it wasn't—it was a notification. A threat would be if I said, *Give me one-million dollars or I'll kill myself.* I wasn't threatening anything. I was notifying them about what was about to happen. Mom says *I'm going to kill myself* is the same as *I'm threatening to kill myself.* I say I guess you could consider it a threat if you think something valuable is about to be lost—but I didn't consider myself that way, as something valuable that I would be taking away from them. I hardly thought of their reactions at all, and the only thought I did have about them was that they would be better off without me. I hated myself so much and valued myself so little that I actually thought my family would be happy if I died, as a person is happy when a heavy and useless burden is lifted. I imagined them forgetting about me instantly, moving on with their lives, and being all the better for me not being there. Depression is insidious. You think you'll be ending your own pain, yes, but you also hold the unshakable belief that killing yourself will be doing your family a favor. - - - - Somewhere in there—and this was before I ever drank, before I ever did drugs—the world became intolerable to me, so heavy that I would break down in class crying and when my classmates asked me what I was sad about, I didn't know. I just knew that I felt the world, and I felt its hurt, and it was so much pressure that I had to escape. But I couldn't escape. Nothing I tried worked. I had the knife in my hand. I was ready for the pain. I thought back to the time I had cut off my own wart from my right-hand finger, and I was pretty sure this pain would be comparable. I planned to cut with the wrist, not across it, so the tendons wouldn't keep me from cutting deeply enough. This was a *for real* suicide. And then I thought: *Well, it's a nice enough day. Why don't I take a bike ride*—*a really long one*—*and get the endorphins flowing, you know, try to make myself feel better. Then, after the bike ride, if I still feel like killing myself, I'll kill myself. If not, I'll live another day.* It was a simple thought, a lucky thought, really a coin toss of probability within my brain is all that kept me from slicing myself up right then. I got out of the tub. Then I went for a bike ride to clear my head. I want down the hill, all the way through town, past the Refuge, along this empty highway with hills on both sides and a shallow river with the most striking rocks. I got off my bike and went down to the river, seeing how beautiful this stretch of Earth was, with its wet/dry stones and its patches of grass and the sound of water running. I said, well, at least this bike ride is making my body feel better. I went as far as I thought I could go and still have energy for the way back home, then I turned around, crossing the highway, and everything was uphill from there to my apartment. - - - - When I got home there was a cop talking with someone in the car repair place parking garage and it only took me a split second to know that he was there for me. He looked away from my neighbor and said, "Are you Matthew Temple?" "Yes." "I got a call from your sister, Matthew." "Oh yeah, what did she say?" "She said she got a disturbing email." "I suppose, if you consider that disturbing. "Well I'm just here to check on things, make sure you're doing alright. Mind if we talk in private?" he said mostly for the neighbor's sake. The officer stood close to me. "Your sister is worried about you..that you might..do something to hurt yourself. I see you took a bike ride." "Yeah, I was trying to see if a bike ride would make me feel better." "Physical exercise—great idea! I work out, myself." Then he shows me a picture of his home gym with him flexing his biceps or triceps or whatever—I don't know bodybuilder shit. "I just want you to know that I care about you, Matthew. This isn't just a job for me. And I was about to break down your door to see if you were in there. And if you weren't there, I was prepared to stay here all night and all day tomorrow to meet up with you. So I have to ask you something. Are you still feeling like hurting yourself?" I look at this guy. Genuine guy like this really should have picked a different job. "Well, I'm not going to lie to you. And I'm not exactly jazzed about what the consequences will be of answering your question honestly. But I'm not gonna lie—that's just not how I do business. So I have to say that yes I *am* still feeling like hurting myself." "Well, Matthew, I appreciate your honesty. And it sounds like you've been through this before so you prob'ly know that I have to ask you to come with me to the hospital." "Yeah, I know that. Do you mind if I lock my bike up?" "Go right ahead." "Ok, thanks. I'll be right here. I'm just going right inside the front door and I'll be right back. Do you want to come with me?" "No, I trust you. I'll meet you back here." So I lock my bike up. A second patrol car shows up—it's this guy's boss. The cop gave me his card and went up to his superior officer and said, "Do you mind if I let him sit up front with me?" And the superior officer said, "If you're comfortable with it, it's fine with me." Only in fucking Brattleboro. So I sat in the front with this police officer on the way to the ER of Brattleboro Memorial. I'm stuck in the ER all afternoon. The cop says he'll stay with me until the ambulance comes to pick me up—and he does. I feel terrible for inconveniencing him but he assures me it's his job. I still have his card. I kept it because one day I was going to send him a thank you note but this paragraph is going to have to do. That man was David Cerreto, Patrol Officer for the Brattleboro Police Department. These days police are most famous for murdering unarmed civilians, but Officer Cerreto will always be famous to me for responding to the worried call he got from my sister Leona, and saying he would have broken down my door or waited there all night at my apartment or done anything to find me. He did a good thing for me, he treated me with respect, he did his job, and I will always remember him for that. - - - - Late afternoon, early evening, I'm finally in an ambulance taking me to the Windham Center, whatever the fuck that is, when the EMT who was taking care of me in the back of the ambulance was like, "Do you remember me?" And I'm like, *Jesus fuck this is a small motherfucking town!* But what came out was, "Uh..yeah?" "We were drinking at the Metropolis like six weeks ago!" Oh. Now his face does form into something I know and I remember the position we were in at the bar. "I don't remember much of our conversation," I said. "Neither do I," he says. "But I remember you're a writer and you were telling me about your books." "I must have been really drunk, then." "You were! Don't worry, we all were. You had that girl Gretchen, and she was telling everyone how great your book is." "Well she's lying. She has no taste anyway. How would she know what a good book is." "She seemed really excited about you." I wince. "Like you were gonna be famous someday." "I doubt it, man. I think.." (I indicate the captive body in the stretcher.) "..you're lookin' at it." "Nah, you'd be surprised, who you see on this job." "Isn't there something you can give me, back here, that will kill me?" "Nope, can't do that." "Can't you just put a bubble in a syringe..won't that kill me?" "You won't always feel this way," he says—and I hate it when people say that to me because I know (just, logically) that they're probably right. ### 94 I didn't have much at the Windham Center but at least I had my ChapStick comfort object—checking to see if it was still in my pocket is probably something I developed after to the move to Philadelphia, as a kid. That move, that culture shock, was anxiety inducing. Sometimes, at the Refuge, they would let me keep my ChapStick. Sometimes they'd put it in contraband because it was "medicated"—it said that on the side of the package and we weren't allowed to bring *medicine* onto the ward. What was bullshit to me is sometimes I was allowed to keep it, sometimes I wasn't. The inconsistency with which the rule was applied be bothered me more than the rule itself. Other than that, the Windham Center sucked. They sent me there and I assumed Stripes went to the Refuge or didn't go at all. Winds had a sub-par admissions process—nothing like the Refuge. I sat in the hallway and wrote: > At the Windham Center—some guy is playing ESPN on the TV at 7 in the morning—moral of the storydon't ever tell anyone what you're doing, and have as much and the best sex possible before you dieI had a dream last night about fucking some tight-pussy girlI am so missing sexfix my teeth, get my body in shape, make a ton of money, and generally become someone women will drop their panties forit would take me getting this depressed, this disenfranchised, to set this as a goal—but I'm sick of going without company of all kindsI should be the one having fun, enjoying the basic pleasures of life before I dieinstead of suffering and lonely being forced to listen to mindless TV in some mental wardAnd don't feel guilty about anythingmy wants are kingif I want to fuck, or to marry, say, Faith, then do it (if she's willing)forget, forget completely, what the fuck I think anyone else thinks > > And in this dream this girl was so tight, but she loved me so much, and she wanted me inside her so bad, that she was encouraging me, telling me to keep going, pulling me a little deeper and a little deeper, until tightly I was all the way in, until tightly we were all the way together, and then rubbing along the little bit of movement we could get given how tight we fit togetherAnd it was a kind of love*dream of red walls, a bathroom opening to a shared hall, picking out a subset of clothing whose colors perfectly matched the last twelve months' covers of Omni magazineand the sexiness of getting the magazine together to do it under the steam and the hot water with the door open to the shower in the stairwell hallwayAnd the hot dog shop outside with the pretty girl I used to work withwith Beautifuland who I want to hide fromAnd when it's all set up inside and she comes in just when I was starting doing it(short story) > > Dreams of giant treeand once you climb up a ways, there's a plateau, a field in the sky, with other treesHearing the general news about how effed-up the country is, how falling-apart we all are politically, makes me feel better about being down right nowmaybe it's a good time to be out of the worldat least it's a pointer that I'm not the only person having trouble—which makes me feel better about being messed up myselfjust go inward, in lifego into my thoughts, which are a vast place and a comfortable place and a deep place of programs and fonts, environments and systems, stories and characters and worlds11-15-11I don't know if it's the meds or if I'm actually learning how to live, but today I managed to choose a moderate responseG. bringing me clothes, called to ask if she could copy my key for future such eventsI said noand I didn't flip out, or majorly reactand I don't think I'm going toI can choose a rational, moderate response and simply leave it at that The other ten or so patients are in the TV room chitting and chatting and there's nothing shy about me—I am an extrovert—but I don't feel like meeting a new set of people at a new hospital I'm likely never coming back to, so I write more. > Breathing of a neck, broadlyof a neck and a draintry to out-shift a grave-diggery..try to out-shift a molesheets tiny aching mole of a sleevethat's one tiny aching mole of a sleeveok todaytry to out-sit an owlyou'll die of fidgetingfingerprints don't ever play games with a game player, dearI should have hiked and when I won't let you;;you'll only do the same to another idea of a road mousedeathtrap of a cowboysilence gameof some kind of brilliant handwritingalternating black and reda glassicy glass aching of a penpatience is the only monitormetronome I finally fucking allowed someone to visit me in the hospital for the first time in my life. Gretchen brought me Skittles and Kamel Reds. As usual we were both just using each other. I didn't want her there. She didn't want to buy me cigarettes. But she wanted to feel important and needed and so she did what she had to do to be that for me. She sat all close and interleaved our knees. When she left, all the other patients were like *Wow, that's your wife?* I always think I'm about five years old so I thought the question was ludicrous. They thought Gretchen was sexy—I thought she was a too-skinny waif skeleton. I was like *No, she's not my wife.* They said *That's your girlfriend?* I was like *No!* They were like *Damn, boy, that girl* likes *you.* Gretchen visited me every single day. I told her it was a waste of time but she came anyway. I sat in bed listening to my flamboyantly gay roommate describing his future after Windham..some long-term rehab facility where he was basically going to live for years. We both had mixed feelings about that, but I felt for him, and he was kind to me about my snoring, which I always appreciate in someone who's sleeping near me. Really the only thing of note about the Windham Center is they had homemade food and it was good. Every other aspect of that psych ward sucked camel testicles. They just didn't know what they were doing. I bummed a ride home with Gretchen. I would have rather ridden the bus. We were quiet the whole way home. She had assumed she would drive me. I thought that sort of thing had to be specifically arranged—not assumed—and I could feel the tight lips of rejection on that girl's face. This experience hadn't brought us closer, and looking back, I wish I had never invited her to visit me, so I could have kept my clean record of never having had anyone visit me at a psych ward. I felt marred. As we're driving down the highway through the hills back to B-boro, I'm not thinking of the married woman driving me home..no..right here a tiny flashback to the night that had come about a week before with me and Stripes standing in front of her bar and this, at the end of this chapter, in between the words of these sentences, is where I remember the last moments I spent with one of the coolest people I've ever met..and here and only here is where I reveal that that night was the last time I ever saw Stripes (outside of my imagination). We talked about going to the hospital. "So I'll see you in there," she said. And I said, "You will." But that was the last time I ever saw that girl. ### 95 I'm sitting out front of the Food Co-op eating food stamp purchases in the freezing cold, remembering the looks some cashiers and shoppers gave me when I bought salmon cuttings and beet juice. Like if you're on food stamps you're supposed to be holed up in your kitchen stirring a giant cauldron of rice, you know? Just 'cause I'm poor doesn't mean I know how to cook. I got there early for the 7am meeting at its new location after we got kicked out of community center whose building got sold to get made into a Chinese restaurant. By this time they had moved the community center to a strip mall up the hallway..most of the people who use the community center can't drive or don't have cars, so I imagined its classrooms empty of all but the most high-functioning drunks and drug addicts..the ones driving Mercedes-Benz's and Range Rovers. But the drunks and drug addicts in the house across from the old community center will have a Chinese restaurant two steps away for late-night munching—score! I had some large drawing notebooks with me and everyone at the morning meeting wanted to peek inside them—I said *after the meeting!* I wanted to respect the purpose we were there for. I made three shares that meeting—yeah, I *triple*-dipped—just to show up my pussy-mongering former sponsor and demonstrate that I could reach Sadie on a level that he never could, that had nothing to do with sex, that had nothing to do with vulturism, that had nothing to do with using AA seniority to get in bed with a twenty-five year old. I showed everybody in there that the most fucked-up person in the room can also be the person with the most wisdom in the room. All you have to do is pay attention to your fucked-up life, and spend your life contemplating it, then *automatically* you'll have the most wisdom in the room. Wisdom is not a thing of pretense—it's what you learn from getting *fucked*, and fucked, and fucked, and learning from the experience. And after the meeting I showed my drawings to those who wanted to see them. My ex-sponsor Mark was all about the pussy, b-lining for Sadie after the meeting, making sure he was in position to hold her hand during our final prayer—the guy was a maniac for fucking sober pussy. Some people from the Refuge sober house showed up at that meeting and Mark spoke *only* with the female members, touching their hands, shoulders, heads—whatever he could get away with. I honestly wanted to shout: YO, OLD TIMERS, IS THIS AN AA MEETING OR AN ORGY TO YOU, YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS, but (as with 90% of my thought) I kept it to myself and endured the obvious snobbishness of virtually everyone around me. My sponsor was the R. Kelly of addiction..see where everybody else is in it at least partially for the recovery, my sponsor was always only in it so he could piss on some little girl's face. You could just tell by everything he did that my sponsor was only there for the pussy—always had been—the fucker prob'ly wasn't even an alcoholic. He's hitting on Sadie obviously during and after the meeting, mentioning her in his share, sitting real close to her in the circle. The whole thing disgusted me and that's the last AA meeting I went to for three or four years. Here's how fake this motherfucker was: he offered to bring me food at the Refuge—I was going inpatient that morning. I said great. Told him when the visiting hours were. He asked me what kind of food I wanted—made a big show out of it so Sadie could hear how nice he was being to me. I told him my favorite carry-outs. He said great, then—making sure Sadie heard him—I'll see you on Sunday. Never heard from his ass again. Never saw him again. He was just doing all that to impress this 25-year-old woman, who was in early recovery, so he could make this bitch his wife. I told you, the guy isn't in AA for the recovery—he's in it for the pussy. - - - - Like a responsible bipolar drug addict, I overdosed on BuSpar in a Refuge bathroom to amp up my mania to help me get admitted to the hospital. (BuSpar is an anti-anxiety med but for some reason it makes me physically shake and talk like I'm a stutterer on crack.) I was completely crazy on it in our morning check in. It was someone's birthday and I was wearing a birthday hat and the medicine was making my dick hard. I managed to make a few notes in spite of all this: > ?? November 2011 *[at least I got the year right]* Call SSI[phone number] Ask Dad to come for family meeting (?) LOL Ask social worker to call Dad That LOL is my favorite part. My social worker is asking me to get my dad to come to Vermont for a family meeting? See they understand that I'm in a really serious situation—a life-threatening situation—but they don't understand there's no way my dad would take off a few days' work to come to Vermont to visit with me and my care team for a family meeting! The logical result of that would be *my dad helping me* in some way—perhaps just psychologically. But something I've learned about Van Temple, over the years, is that he is either incapable or unwilling to function as my dad. The thought of him showing up at a family meeting to support me is truly laughable, even though this Refuge understands family support to be essential to patient success. "So. Matthew. What I'd like you to do is see if you can get your dad—since he's the closest family nearby—to come to the Refuge for a family meeting with you and I and the rest of your care team." Long pause. Then I let out a laugh roughly on the level of Robert de Niro in *Cape Fear*, when he's smoking a cigar in the movie theater?—yeah, that's me. My dad coming to a family meeting?!? There's a better chance of Stephen Hawking winning the Olympic high jump and I am working with Stephen Hawking every day to improve his chances of achieving this goal. Totally high on BuSpar and life, I beginning a counseling session with my social worker's multi-PhD intern. She says she thinks we'll be particularly well matched. But we only had a partial session because I was routed back to inpatient, whisked away to Tyler 2, shoo shoo shoo. Some therapy like that could have helped me, but I could never take advantage of it because I didn't have my basic needs taken care of (a place to live in Brattleboro, where I wasn't getting kicked out, money to live on, any employer who would hire me). Without that basic continuity, counseling with the multi-PhD counselor was never going to be possible. My social yanked me out of counseling, took me back to group, and then walked me down the hall to talk to the Birches psychiatrist who had one of the RNs take me down to be admitted. In my brief moment in the social work group, someone says something like, "The same thing happened to my friend, only it was an overdose of lithium, and she felt all embarrassed after all these people in her therapy group saw her acting all weird on meds," and this woman comforted me. "Don't feel embarrassed." I told her straight out, "I'm not embarrassed." Never crossed my mind to be embarrassed. To feel insecure because of what others were thinking about me? It just never occurred to me to frame the situation in that way. I get called out of group. Talked to psychiatrist Dr. Le with my notecards which I had brought with me because my mind was like glitterbox, essentially, and I was having trouble maintaining continuity without an index of references. I was twitching and flinching and flipping from card to card to help me assemble a coherent conversation and Dr. Le said: "Are you manic?" And I said, "Manic is such a slippery term. I mean, it's kind of like asking someone if they're 'cool.' It's really best to ask other people the question and not the person themself, don't you think?" "Can you maintain safety outside of the Refuge?" "No," I said. "I think I have to answer that one 'no.' " "He's going in," she says to my social worker. And that was the end of that discussion. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (6)** > > Patient Admitted November 21, 2011—Discharged November 28, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > Patient is a 33-year-old Caucasian male who has had multiple inpatient hospitalizations here at the Refuge and recently was just readmitted to the partial *[hospitalization]* program after an inpatient admission at Windham Center for four days. He is single, unemployed, and lives in Brattleboro, Vermont by himself. > > **Chief Complaint** > > "I want to finish the program. I think the structure is helpful for me. It's good for me to be around other people, to be watched." > > **History of Present Illness** > > Patient was in Partial Hospitalization Program but then hospitalized at Windham Center for four days, secondary to suicidal ideation with a plan. He reportedly had had an argument with his father on the phone and emailed his family, indicating he was going to kill himself by cutting himself in the bathtub. While inpatient, his medications were kept the same. After he was felt to be stable, he was discharged and readmitted to the Partial Hospitalization Program. When psychiatrist Dr. Le interviewed me upon readmittance to the Birches PHP, she said: "You went to Windham Center for suicidal ideation with a plan and they let you go after only four days?" I looked across the desk at this Asian woman—petite—it was a different psychiatrist every time I came to Birches. There *are* dumb psychiatrists, but none of them work at the Brattleboro Refuge. I said to Dr. Le, "The Windham Center is not equipped to help me at this time." "What does that mean?" "Well, that means that the Windham Center is distasteful to me in every way. They're a rinky-dink setup and I didn't want to be there so I talked my way out." "Didn't you see a psychiatrist there?" "Yes, I saw one every day." "Was he aware that you were suicidal with a plan?" "Yes." Dr. Le leans forward and looks straight into my eyes. "Then *how* did you get out of there in four days?" I looked right back into Dr. Le's eyes. She was exciting, intense, and talking to her made me feel alive. I said, "Their head psychiatrist—" "Yes I know him," she interrupts. "He has a weak mind," I say. "And?" she says. "And I made him release me." And right then Dr. Le made up her mind double-damn sure to admit me back to Tyler 2. But I knew she was going to do that—that's why I brought my drawing notebooks with me that day. I had them at the AA meeting—remember? I knew Tyler 2 only had copy paper and crayons, so I brought my own art supplies with me. I wasn't manipulating Dr. Le into admitting me—she's a fucking *psychiatrist*, I'm a psychotic *miscreant*, I can't convince her of *shit*—but at the same time, just like in fifth grade, I could mark my own test. I knew every time I would get an answer *right*, and every time I would get an answer *wrong*. I had done Dr. Le's diagnosis for her, before she did, and I knew what it was going to be. > **Course of Hospitalization** > > Patient was resumed on Lamictal 200 mg at bedtime and Risperdal 1 mg q.a.m. *[every morning]* and 3 mg q.h.s. *[every night at bedtime]*. Patient was also continued on the prazosin 2 mg at bedtime, clonidine 0.1 mg daily at 6pm, 0.2 mg three times a day as needed, and citalopram 20 mg once daily. However, a couple of days later, he was noted to be a bit manic. He reported racing thoughts, some visual and auditory hallucinations. At that time it was recommended that his Risperdal be increased to 1 mg in the morning and 4 mg at bedtime and for him to discontinue the Celexa. This was prior to the Thanksgiving holiday. After the long holiday weekend, he did not appear to be doing very well. He reported not having slept for three days, with racing thoughts and visual hallucinations. He did not feel that he could maintain safety at home. It was felt that it would be best for him to be admitted inpatient for medication adjustment in a safe and contained environment. Patient was agreeable to this. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar I Disorder, Most Recent Episode Manic. Alcohol Dependence in Early Remission. Cocaine Abuse in Remission. History of Kidney Stones. Possible History of Serotonin Syndrome. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 25 *[my lowest GAF yet]* > > **Condition on Discharge** > > Patient appeared to be manic, with racing thoughts and visual hallucinations. He denied any suicidal or homicidal ideations, plan, or intent. He was agreeable to inpatient admission. > > **Prognosis:** Poor without inpatient hospitalization. > > **Patient Strengths** > > Patient is pleasant, cooperative, able to have some insight. Access to resources *[What resources are you talking about? Is there a Swiss account number I'm supposed to decode by finding patterns in the newspapers lying around Tyler 2? Sorry—schizophrenia joke—not funny. Especially since some of my cohorts in Tyler 2 were actually trying to do this.]* > > **Arrangements for Aftercare Services:** Patient was admitted to inpatient. ### 96 At the time of this discharge from Birches to Tyler 2, I was down to only four psych meds. I think at one point I was on ten. Even when I did street drugs, my friends and I held the general concept that you don't do that to your body. You do *one* drug—*maybe* two—at a time. Any more than that and you're asking for trouble. - - - - Let's skip all the psycho mumbo jumbo, meditation, meal plans, Chad, Rainbow, and everyone else and let's just talk about this one kid I met this admission. We will call him The Kid Disrupting Substance Abuse Class and keep in mind that I had been inpatient enough times and the substance abuse class was held often enough that I had been to this same exact class *many, many* times but even though I had memorized the curricular materials and even though I had a low opinion of the Matt (the spineless substance abuse teacher), I still believed that if one goes to a class, should sit quietly and listen to the teacher teach. That is a belief I do have. And this flew in the face of Keith, this little teenager who should have been in the children's ward. Keith's objective was to talk when the teacher talked (and at a louder volume), to run and jump onto the couches and tables in the classroom, and to straight-up cuss at our spineless teacher. I found this teacher spineless and generally a useless human being but strangely I found myself defending him against Keith, asking Keith to: "Please be quiet until class is through." Keith took this firm but polite request as an invitation to up his antics, which I took as an invitation to tell him off in grand style, then I complained at Matt the spineless substance abuse counsellor for not acting as an authority figure and making the class accessible to those of us who were not disrupting it, to which he had some spineless Christian answer, to which I told *him* off. Then, to my total surprise, something opened up within me and left the room and sat against a wall in the short hallway, crying endlessly with multiple techs leaning over me, sitting next to me, giving me advice about making a tissue box of things to give up to god and I thought of how someday I would put Gretchen in there and then I gave her the keys to my apartment when I was inpatient and I imagined her fishing through the tissue box that said "I give this problem to god"—or something like that—and finding her name in it. Somehow, by the design of the devil herself, I ended up in my bedroom with Matt, the spineless substance abuse counsellor, sitting with me in my room as I wailed my anger and said I wanted to kick doors and he said, "I really hope you won't do that," And I said, "Well what about punching a pillow?" And even that he thought might injure me and put the Refuge in an insurance liability situation. Fuck. All insurance has ever done for me is take my money and then refuse me not only the treatment the doctor recommends but my right to punch a goddamn *pillow*. When the doctor says, "If Matthew doesn't take four of these a day, he might end up back in the hospital," the insurance company says, "We'll pay for *three*." Fuck. You. I'm required to pay you money so you can sit in your mansion and watch *the Surgery Channel* while I'm lying on my floor, writhing in pain because you refuse to use some of the money that went into your mansion to buy me that extra *one* pill per day that I need to be well. I want to go that person's door, ring the doorbell, and when the CEO of BlueCross BlueShield opens the door, I want to say: "*You* wouldn't cover my medicine." And then blow my head off. - - - - Anyway I'm having a freak out crying spell after asking some young kid to be quiet during group when the teacher was just letting him disrupt the class. Sitting in the hallway just around the corner from the main room, wailing, bawling my eyes and my soul out of my body, three staff members standing over me giving me advice (and comfort?) while I just fall..the fuck..apart. And saying, "I realize it has nothing to do with that kid it's just the dad power vacuum thing and the Mom's dad power vacuum thing." I was so angry and they had the spineless (but caring) substance abuse counsellor stay with me in my room and he sat in a chair while I told him I wanted to hit things even my pillow and he asked me not to because I might hurt myself. Idiot. Looking back I guess they had me on one-on-ones after my accosting of that young kid and Matt said he would listen if I wanted to talk but I politely told him no—which just bottled it up even more inside of me—and I realized in that moment that all the incredible anger and sadness that I had shown that day was just *the tip of the iceberg*. I didn't just have to work through a few things and leave the Refuge, recovered. I was standing on top of a mountain of rage, trying to excavate it with a shovel. The next day that kid, Keith, who was disrupting the fuck out of substance abuse class, was eating breakfast near me and I said I was sorry. He said, "No, that was my fault." And I was like, "No, my freak out had nothing to do with you. That's just my own issues coming out and you don't deserve to have them vented on you." But he said, "No, that's why I'm in here. What I was doing in that class. I do that everywhere." And his admission touched him deep, because Keith started crying right then, and *his* cry turned into a wail, and he cried—no lie—for two days, until they could transfer him to the youth ward, and nothing I or anyone else did would console him. I felt bad. I just think of my own problems, figuring everyone else has it together. The Reverend John Watson suggested to *Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle* Things can be especially touchy in a psych ward: one who plays the antagonist is often a house of cards—I present myself as an example. Me and Keith are more alike than we are different, even though that might be especially hard for him or me to see. That's why they train Refuge staff to only intervene in patient conflicts when absolutely necessary. Keith and I fit together perfectly: his disruption catalyzed my release of anger about chaos permitted by nonparticipating or irresponsible adults from my past. My oversensitivity and overreaction and general meltdown showed him that his disruption affects people's emotions, hurts them, and when he saw that in me, it touched a nerve in him that none of us, staff or patient, had guessed was there. ### 97 When I got home from the Refuge, sometimes I didn't feel like Indian food or Whit's. I wanted to stay under the radar, you know, not make a big deal of going to Whit's—and going to Whit's was always a big deal for me. I mean I couldn't make a five-minute trip into Whitman's. I'd order food to go and pretty soon Thomas and I would be buying Billy Joel songs on the jukebox, he'd be telling me New York stories, Walsh would show up and I'd be buying *her* drinks trying to get inside her pants again—even though she had *no* intention of letting me do that and was just using me for the drinks..and I *liked* being used by her, at least it was *some* form of relationship! But eventually I got tired of all that. I even got tired of alcohol—yeah. Even *this* alcoholic, for whom alcohol was such a big part of my life almost every day for the last decade, got tired of alcohol. I think it was part of my depression—you know how depression makes you lose interest in activities you used to enjoy? Well, I was too depressed to drink. That's pretty fucking depressed for me. So instead of making a social outing to Whitman's, I just went on the Domino's website and ordered the most ridiculous pizza possible. I added so many toppings that the site told me I couldn't add anymore—I had reached an internal limit set by some committee at Domino's Corporate, implemented by a web programmer who still had a job. But I didn't let that stop me. I just ordered two pizzas, spread the out-of-bounds topping across the second pizza, and scraped them all onto one pizza once I got it back inside my apartment. I ordered Cokes, chips, sides of sour cream—if it was on the menu, I ordered at least one. When the delivery guy came, he had three, four bags of crap in addition to the two extra-large pizzas, and my poorly-thought-out attempt to stay below the radar was undermined by my inescapable character—as everywhere, at Domino's I acted so extravagantly and charismatically that the delivery drivers fought to deliver my goods. Not just to collect my twenty-dollar tips, but *to meet the guy* who would order such a smorgasbord—did I just use that word? *Yes I did*—such a smorgasbord. "So are you having a party?" this teenage kid is asking me. "No." "All of this is for you?" "Yep." I offer him a cigarette. We're on the porch. "So..what—if you don't mind my asking—what do you *do*?" "Most of the time?—I spend inpatient at the Refuge." "Oh. Why?" I exhale some Kamel cigarette smoke. For the next three minutes I'm a celebrity. "I have bipolar disorder with psychotic features so it's like..suicidal and homicidal impulses." "Homicidal?" "Yeah. I'd like to kill my former boss. Well, all of them, plus my father. Basically all of the shitty male role models in my life." "You're not gonna kill me, are you?" he jokes. "What's your name again?" "Brent." "Brent, you've never done anything to make me angry, so why would I kill you?" I smile. "But like if your pizza was late, would you get angry then?" I ash. "No. I only get angry about psychological neglect and abuse. Fortunately, you and I don't have that complicated a relationship, so I would never have any reason to get mad at you." The kid is like starstruck—my pizza delivery man standing on the steps talking to me in the headlights of his car, which is parked half on the sidewalk, half on the street. "Do you have a *job*?" "No. I write." "Are you published?" "Yeah, I'm self-published and I make about five dollars a year selling books." "How many books have you written?" "I think..five? Mostly I live off my unemployment, Brent." "Seriously?" "Yep." "Are you looking for a job?" "No! Why would I want to do that? Every job I've had has been a disaster. Did you know that the Domino's website will only let you put a certain number of toppings on a single pizza?" "Yeah, that's because with too many toppings the pizza doesn't cook right." I scratch my forehead. "I hope you know I'm not saying this is your fault, Brett." "Brent." "Brent, I'm fully aware that you had nothing to do with this decision. But—here's an extra twenty." "For what?" "For extra tip." "Th-thank you." "No problem. All I'm saying is—are you sure you don't want a cigarette? Kamels—the best!" "No, I don't smoke." "That's prob'ly good because I hear it causes cancer, which increases death by *like a thousand percent*. That's not an actual figure but it's something like that. Anyway I know the topping limit isn't your fault but *you have a manager, yes*?" "Yes." "And *he* has a manager, yes?" "*She.* But yes." "Well maybe you can like *run it up the flagpole* and let the Committee on Topping Limits know that there *is no* theoretical limit to the number of toppings you can put on a pizza." "But with too many toppings, it's too heavy for the crust." "Then fortify the crust." "What?" "Fortify the crust." "How?" "I don't want to get into *hows* right now, Brent. I'm just saying, if a customer wants to put ten, twenty, *fifty* toppings on an extra-large Brooklyn-style crust, then they should be able *to do* that." "I'll talk to my manager." "That's all I'm asking. I just want to be represented in your customer profile. *Crazy people* order pizza, too, and we don't want just *two toppings*. We want *no limits* on the pizza app. Tell them that, please, as one former web programmer to another former web programmer, you know, you're limiting *the whole country* on kind of a key issue." Brent laughs. "You want a Coke?" "No thanks, I don't drink caffeine." "What, are you on the track team or something?" "No." "Do you have to get back and deliver more pizzas?" "We're dead tonight." "Well I gotta eat this while it's hot, I don't have a microwave. Tell your boss she rocks and from now on *only you* are to deliver to this address. Here's another twenty." "I can't—" "Take the fucking money, Brent. Don't *make* me angry." That was basically my life. Overeating while watching *Girl, Interrupted* on repeat—I especially related to Angelina Jolie's sociopath character. AA people say you're trying to fill a God-sized hole with alcohol. Yeah, well I'll try to fill that fucker with a Domino's pizza with like twenty-five toppings on it, just as well. And just like alcohol, it's great in the moment but the next morning you feel like shit. I hate fucking pizza leftovers—all dry and stale, like a dead animal. But yeah, fuck, maybe I *do* have a God-sized hole. Then again, *fuck God*—I'm an atheist. I gotta go eat this pizza. ### 98 Traveling on foot through intense rain with no umbrella and just a hood to an NA meeting at the Refuge. It was the one with cute heroin addict so I didn't want to miss it. I had a crush on that girl since I first saw her at this very NA meeting. She sat too close and she touched my hand and she gave me Skittles and I was attracted to the fact that she was a heroin addict. I saw her later at the Refuge when she was detoxing. She just made me want to be a girl who did heroin..it was so much cooler than a guy doing it. Her last name is hard to guess so I will tell you her real first name was Rose. God, I wanted to be or be with this girl heroin addict I kept seeing at meetings who always sat next to me held my hand too hard and too tight with her hot little fingers. But as I tromped through the rain, a car made a u-turn and pulled up beside me. Walsh. She picked me up and I had no complaint because it was raining, hard, so hard I was thinking of turning around but Walsh rescued me. We went to some convenience store in New Hampshire where cigarettes were cheaper and then we went by her place of work to visit the children. She works at a school if you don't remember. I got the chance to see Walsh in a new environment—one that wasn't a bar. She picks up some kid. "Yeah, he's too adorable to get upset with." Then another kid. "He's just so happy to be awake and alive." "Yeah," I say, "it's a nice reminder of the good parts of life." Back in her car, both of us smoking, Walsh said: "I'm sorry I let the whole sex thing drop. I mean I wasn't intending that to be a one-time thing but then I got raped and things got weird and it felt weird to have you over right after that." "It's ok, Walsh. I'm sorry you got raped." "Where were you going in the rain anyway?" "I have bipolar disorder and I have to go to the Refuge sometimes." A little pause. "My dad is like a big-time doctor there." "Oh yeah?" "Yeah, it's like a big deal. Do you want to go to the Refuge now, I'll take you." "Nah, I missed that meeting by now. Hanging out with you is better than going to an NA meeting anyway." "I'm sorry about..I'm not usually that passive and boring in bed—" "You weren't boring." "I wasn't boring by virtue of having a vagina—" "I'm not looking for a performance," I say. "I'm just apologizing, ok? Let me apologize?" I let it drop. "You know I'm inviting you to have sex with me again? You hear that in what I'm saying, right?" "I hear what you're saying, Walsh. I'm too fucked up to think about sex right now." "Wouldn't it help? Don't you want to cum in me again?" "I never came in you the first time. The only time." "I thought you did." "No, I couldn't." "What was wrong? Was I bad?" "Walsh, you were fine. I think it was just.." "Are you too crazy to fuck?" I laugh. "No. I fuck more when I'm crazy. I think it was just that you were too slippery with your period blood so I couldn't get enough traction to get off inside you but believe me, I have every sick desire to fuck you in every hole imaginable and use you to make me cum." "Ok, that's a little TMI." "I like you, Walsh. I think you're a cool girl. As friend. As a lover or a fuck buddy or even something more. But—look I'm a mental patient so I'm not going to hold back—" "Please don't." "You don't seem all that interested in me. Remember that day we walked around the street fair. You had all these people you had to talk to—everyone except me. In relationships I've been in—and I'm not saying this is a relationship—but that could have been a, you know, like a romantic walk around the street fair, for us, with *us* talking to each other about things that matter to us, or making fun of people, or you telling me you had some coke you wanted to do together and inviting me over to your house all mysterious and making me wonder if we were gonna just do drugs or if you were gonna let me take your clothes off again. You know what the best part of our sex was for me?" "What?" "It was right after I took off your pants and it was me in my boxers and your in your panties and we knew *for certain* that we were gonna fuck—that a new dick was going to be in your pussy and my dick was going to be inside a pussy it had never been inside before. Just..*knowing*..that you're about to have that feeling of going inside..or I guess in your case of something going inside." "I liked that, too." "Then let's fuck again sometime." "Maybe," she says. And I say, "Then it's no, if it's maybe. If it's maybe it's no. I don't think you even really like me." "What does that have to do with anything." "I guess I at least like to be friends with someone I'm fucking. But for you it's just the free drinks and the occasional cocaine and..I don't even think we ever would have fucked if I hadn't dyed my hair orange." "I have to let you off up here." "That's fine." "Are you mad?" "Absolutely not, Walsh. I'm not trying to force you into anything. It's just..I *like* you. Like genuinely like you. I'm not about to start buying you flowers or anything but I have *some* genuine feelings for you." "That scares me." "I know it does." "Can we still be friends?" "Of *course*!" "Is it gonna be awkward?" "It's not gonna be awkward for me!" "What about the free drink deal—does that still stand?" "Walsh, a promise is a promise. As long as you and me are drinking in the same bar, the drinks are on me." Walsh smiles. We hug. "Day drinkers for lyfe," she says. We bump fists. "Do you even drink anymore?" she asks. "No," I say. And I get out of the car. - - - - My sick Tooler fantasies. You would think they would have died off after things went south with Tooler once I moved to the third floor, but no. We made up with a hug as she's off to a party she invites me to. She's getting beer and then walking to some house. We hug and she hopes I'll be ok [with my mental illness, implied] with everything. She walks up High Street and out of the light of a streetlamp and that's the last time I ever see her. She invited me to the party. "I'm waiting for this pizza." My fantasy was of licking Tooler's pussy on her and Issa's bed and Tooler pulling me up to fuck her. And I didn't want to have sex with her because her genderqueer-ness was kinkified in my mind—I wanted to have sex with her because I liked her from the first day we met, to the night just she and I finished a bottle of wine in the kitchen while Issa stayed in their room. I loved Tooler the day I heard her cum from Issa's mouth and fingers or whatever—I'll never know. But it made me want to love her and specifically love her pussy with my mouth and just be with her anyway she wanted because I thought she was the bomb. She picked me to live with them even though I was a guy..she never made it an issue. That might not seem like a thing, but having a woman treat you, as a man, like you're not a predator is special. To be allowed, after investigation, to be considered safe by a woman, these days, is unheard of. It was so refreshing it affects me to this day—just being treated fairly by a woman. And five years later I still fantasize about Tooler and I pulling off each other's clothes in her and Issa's bed and her telling me she identifies as genderqueer but she loves pussy and she loves cock too. Then she pulls down my boxers and holds my cock and licks it and sucks it till it's hard. She lies back on the bed and shuffles off her jeans, and she lets me pull down her panties..simple white with a pink bow at the top. When we fuck, we look in each other's eyes and everything that was unspoken is said. We know that the reason we argued and the reasons we hurt each other's feelings are that we liked each other from the beginning. I just wanted to hear her beautiful voice while she came. But that was all a fantasy. The last time I saw Tooler I was sitting on the front porch smoking waiting for a pizza. Neither of us had cars. She was walking to pick up beers and then to a party. She invited me but I said no. She asked if we could hug. We hugged and she walked up the street and that's the last time I ever saw her. I love Tooler. In fact I love almost everyone. But Tooler, her pale white skin and her pink features. I love how white and soft she was and when I saw her face I knew what her pussy would look like, its pale outsides and pink insides. She tells me, right before I put myself inside her, that she hasn't been with a boy since high school and that she's very, very tight. ### 99 I know things are really starting to fall apart when my unemployment check gets cut off. Calling to check on it with Gretchen at the atrium. "Just stay calm and check the facts." "Well. The facts are that I'm out of money and I'm scared I won't get any more!" Gretchen, calm and logical, helped me navigate the maze-like automated voice prompts that seemed so convoluted to me. I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I couldn't think straight. And things are really falling apart when I'm staying up all night, manic, watching *The Matrix* over and over and over waiting to get back into the Brattleboro Refuge, remembering watching *The Truman Show* over and over in Los Angeles, years ago, right before my first admission to a psych hospital. I watched and re-watched *Inception* the same way, the year before I moved to Vermont. I love *Alice in Wonderland* to an unnatural degree. Someone lost in a dream world. Trying to wake up. That's me. It might be all of us. I stayed up all night manic and texted Gretchen in the morning early said you want to go on a hike. Of course she said yes to anything I wanted to do, it was so rare that I initiated contact with her. At the end of the river trail, we hugged and said, "I love you," then spent time in the coffeehouse together and she was so worried to leave me alone but she eventually went to work. - - - - And that Monday, sneaking antidepressant pills into the hospital in my ass so I could manipulate my high..taking a BuSpar overdose to increase my mania and force myself into the hospital. I woke up, put antidepressants in a condom and pushed the condom up my ass while lying on my back in bed, walking to the Refuge for a day at the Birches program, knowing they would put me in Tyler 2. This was my last hospitalization I think. They put me in Tyler 1 first because there were no beds in Tyler 2. I was unable to shit in Tyler 1. I asked the nurse for a laxative and finally shit out the medicine in Tyler 2. When it came out, dry and clean in its rubber compartment, I had this rush of feeling really smart for getting past the full-body underwear-only search upon entry to the hospital. Just the idea that I was secretly in control of the situation that the staff of the Refuge thought they controlled. I can't relate to that feeling now in a visceral way but I remember thinking I was like "smarter than Hannibal Lecter" and things like that, like I was smarter than everyone—which is prob'ly just mania. I took the medicine to boost my mania as it had in the past but this time I felt no effect, probably because I was already manic! I told Dr. Meggs I smuggled something contraband onto the unit but that it wasn't dangerous but I wouldn't tell her what. She asked why I did it and I said it was: "To illustrate that I can manipulate others because I'm operating on a different level than them." No doubt what she included in her notes included a reference to grandiosity, that typical bipolar symptom of expansiveness and superiority that feels so, so good when you're having it but seems so, so ridiculous from the outside. - - - - Let's talk about the hiding antidepressants up my butt thing, getting a laxative from the Tyler 1 nurse because the condom had shifted, hiding the pills in my room, abusing BuSpar prior to entering the hospital—that deserves discussion. Of course it contains an element of attention seeking. I would abuse BuSpar on a schedule that would maximize its effects right at the start of the Birches program day, so that in the group therapy meeting run by my social worker, the symptoms would be visible to all. On at least one occasion, these symptoms contributed to my inpatient hospitalization. When I abused antidepressants in the locked ward, I would take them in my room and then go sit on the floor in front of the nurses station. Inevitably Michelle would look over the desk and see me, then come around and say to me: "Feeling a little manic, are we?" And shakingly, hyperactively, I would say, "Y-ee-sseeess." At the beginning of that last hospitalization, when I managed to shit out the condom containing a baggie containing another condom, all wrapped up neatly and twisted to ensure the medicine inside did not mix with my feces, when I unwrapped that package in my room and separated out the clean Celexa pills from the shit-smelling condoms, and just barely managed to clear the antidepressants from the plastic that had been up my butt, and I saw the medicine was untouched—the operation complete—I felt such a rush of power, an uncontrollable thrill. I thought it somehow reflected on me a great genius. Specifically, I remember identifying with Hannibal Lecter, thinking this little bit of pointless trickery put me on or above the level of Lecter in terms of intelligence. That *the staff had no idea what was going on with me (even my psychiatrist)* made me giddy—no, euphoric. I felt I was in control, that my illness wasn't real, that I had been controlling it all this time by manipulating my symptoms with medicine. *But it's way more complex than that.* Most of the time, I hadn't been manipulating my symptoms by attempting to abuse psych meds. The psych meds I was taking aren't manipulable recreationally. In fact, a manic reaction to antidepressants is literally a textbook diagnosis of bipolar disorder—only people with bipolar disorder have a manic reaction to antidepressants, so while I thought I was simulating bipolar mania in myself while thinking that my doctors' diagnoses were wrong—that I didn't have bipolar disorder at all, never had—I was proving all along that my illness was real. See that's part of my sickness: I think I'm controlling things when I'm not. I think somehow *I'm* the one making up certain shit, when I'm not. I am not in control; I am not the one telling the story, I am what is being told. And though I didn't know it as clearly as I do know, even back then, during my last hospitalization, my own realizations combined with Dr. Meggs's suggestion to me that "What we're dealing with here is way beyond bipolar mixed with a little psychosis," started unraveling my own illusions of the context under which I had been making all these inpatient visits to Tyler 2. Somehow, before, I thought I was in control of the doctors, that nothing they said was real. I have never believed I had bipolar disorder. It's difficult for me to believe it now. I've read that I'm not alone in this, that part of what is broken in the brain of a bipolar person is the same part that would allow me to accept my illness. From within the existing medical paradigms, I am the disordered one, my behavior is unusual and dangerous—but I have never believed those paradigms, and when I have it's only for a second. I grew up inside *me*, inside this brain and this bipolar mind. To me, I'm normal, and all of you are weird. I don't view bipolar as a disorder, even with all the pain, the suicide it causes its sufferers, even with all the destruction and inconvenience it causes our families and lovers and employers. I don't think I should have to adjust to them—I think *they* should have to adjust to *me*. And here's an even stronger point: I *can't* adjust to them—they can adjust to me. Therefore, who should do the adjusting? *Them*—the normal people, the healthy people—they should make their world friendlier to *me*. But all that is philosophy. What I'm talking about is me, during my final hospitalization at the Brattleboro Refuge, talking with my doctor about depersonalization and finally after months of talking to her and being in this hospital in its various forms, dual suns descended on me: One sun, the sun of humbling realization, informed me through my doctor's words that I was psychotic, that I was unable to one-hundred percent properly do reality testing, that my line between what is real and what is imagined is slightly blurry. That sun is kind of like your morning vitamins, the first pills of the day, without which you won't even get out of bed. It is the word "go." I have to accept and learn to wrangle it like the lion in the cage if I'm to exist at all. I have to learn to doubt the reality of some of my thoughts. And I'm extremely lucky. Because some people can't do this at all. But I have enough "meta," enough parallelism in my brain that *sometimes* I can recognize a psychotic thought on my own. And for the rest, I have to trust a few people to bounce thoughts off of, and trust that they will tell me the truth—and it is trust of the ultimate kind, truly blind trust, because by definition I will never know if they are telling me the truth or if they are manipulating me. This is a huge vulnerability in me, and maybe it's part of why I have such a reptilian *hate* for manipulative people. That's the first sun of two, the morning medicine, the first pill. The second sun is that this will never be resolved for me. I will live the rest of my life *not really knowing* if I have bipolar disorder, if I am really psychotic. I live with an untangleable knot where reality and fiction are mixed up in a way that they'll never be unmixed. I have a tentative relationship with reality. But if you want to know my deepest thought, it's this: I think being diagnosed psychotic is an advantage. Because reality for everyone is tenuous. The constructs we use to understand the world—science, medicine, religion, philosophy—are always changing, and changing in a way that what was agreed upon as "truth" yesterday is today discarded as silliness. So no one really has a solid relationship with the truth. It is common for people to say that the more experience they gain, the less they know. The smartest among us are the ones who best understand the importance of doubt. Basically, what I'm saying is that *no one knows* "the truth." The world is not made up of people who know the truth and people who don't. It's made up of people who incorrectly *think they know the truth*, and those who correctly know that they don't. - - - - "One thing I've noticed about you," Dr. Meggs says, "is that you are preoccupied with *status* and *class*, perhaps based on your humiliation experiences with your father when you were very young." The first time I met her when I told her about the potty-training experience, she said, "I'm so sorry that that happened," and she made the call, right then, that it sounded humiliating, which I never thought of before she suggested it. She's right about me and class, though. I'm so pretentious I would never do cocaine off the cover of a laptop unless it was an Apple. Or white wine: even though I'm an alcoholic I would never drink white wine, no matter how desperate I was. "Why not?" "I'm way more of a classist than I am a drunk. If it isn't red, it isn't wine. White wine is low class. I guess you're right, I'm fixated on class." (This thing about not drinking white wine even when I'm desperate is false—I know that now. I didn't know it at the time.) "I sometimes play the humiliator because I learned to do that from my father. I get that now. The game is humiliator/humiliated. But now that we've started to talk about this, I understand that the counterpart to that game, which I've also learned to play, and play more and more consciously, is the cheerleader/teammate game..I have discovered in life that in addition to being a great humiliator of others, I am also a great cheerer-on of others..as they write their first book..as they go through mental problems. I was talking with my Mom on the phone. She says hers used to be to kill (a victim) and now it's to heal (the broken). But I see both of those in her still, and I know I still play my primary game as well. I see, though, that it's possible to change your game, to change your primary mode of relating to people..that's fucking *deep* to me." "It's deep to me too." *"*Dr. Meggs, what do you think is the difference between *brilliance* and *greatness?*" "I don't know, but try not to let it consume you all night, ok?" - - - - Before I went into the hospital this last time, my landlord Abby got mad at me for leaving all the windows open and the heater on in the winter. I hadn't meant any harm, I just like the fresh air with the heat. Maybe that's a bipolar mania thing—enthusiasm over judgment. Or maybe I just don't think about things sensibly. And leaving my apartment for the last time, with my bags of stuff I was keeping set on one side of the stairway leading down from the apartment..and an apartment full of stuff I left behind: Playstation, roller skates, books, DVDs, jackets, kitchen utensils and devices. I walked out of my life. I couldn't keep it. And leaving a key for Gretchen on the windowsill outside the door in case I needed Gretchen to pick up my stuff I was keeping (which I did). And then going into the hospital for the last time. There were bins of clean clothes that I would never wear again, an exercise bicycle in the bathroom. And before they forced me into Tyler 2, I sitting on the floor in a Birches facilitator's office asking her to (and she did) print off a several-hundred-page document that at the time I felt I needed to give to my psychiatrist in Tyler 2 so she would understand my hallucination, how it was based on a computer program I wrote right before my first manic trip right before I was first admitted to a psych hospital in California and diagnosed as bipolar. When you have a delusion, it feels real. It doesn't seem crazy to you—it feels crazy to everyone else. To you it feels like you know something everyone else doesn't, like your vision is larger than the common vision and eventually everyone else will come around to your way of thinking. The weird thing is..sometimes they do. ### 100 Before I went up to Tyler 2 the last time, the one day I stayed on Tyler 1 with the detoxers, a mental health worker named Jack told me the difference between Tyler 1 and Tyler 2. We were standing in the main hallway. He said, "Tyler 1 is people who when they stop using are basically ok." At the time, we were watching the Tyler 1 patients dance a giant caterpillar-shaped animal made out of their bodies..they were coming down the hall with their art therapist, walking in these huge funny steps, holding onto each other's bodies. And they were all happy and silly. And I realizing, even before hearing the second half of what Jack was going to say, that I belonged in, and was properly headed for, Tyler 2. Jack said, "Tyler 2 is people who when they stop using their problems get worse." My whole soul just dropped about four inches. Jack said, "You might have noticed that I'm never on the same floor two days in a row. I started working a different floor every day because I was getting too attached to patients. I cared too much for them, and I would develop attachments, so they assigned me to a different floor every day." Jack speaks confidentially with me. "I don't worry about you, doing your paintings and reading your Faulkner." He laughs. "I worry about Schizophrenic Mike who is never going to get out of places like this. You're gonna be sitting on the beach reading your Faulkner or climbing your mountain or fucking your girl. But Schizophrenic Mike is never going to get to do any of those things." Fuck, yeah, the guy I almost strangled after tricking his schizophrenic brain to attack me. I'm a real nice guy. "How are you sleeping?" "Until last night I'd been up for three days." "Then it's good you're going upstairs. In all my years working at the Refuge, the most reliable sign that someone is getting better, and getting ready to leave, is their sleep. Not sleeping well: you're gonna be here for a while. Sleeping well: you're almost ready to go. I can always tell when people are ready to go, because their sleep evens out. In all my years of observing and working with mental patients and addicts, regular sleep is the number one indicator of good mental health. You know Lynne and I and Michelle and Dr. Meggs are always slightly breaking protocol with you because you're easy to like, intelligent, and *you* help *us* to feel good while we're helping you not kill yourself." I smiled, and then I joined that caterpillar romping down the hall—just jumped right in as the first link in the chain and clomped and skipped and danced with them a little way down the hallway. I was totally welcome, and they were all totally nice, and I thought about Jack's theory of Tyler 1 and Tyler 2 and I thought he was right. - - - - Jack and I talked all the time. I told him that Lynne said it was easy to break the rules with me because she knew she could trust me. But one day Jack tells me something about the mental health tech hiring process after I tell him about the interaction I have with one of their lowlife health techs weeks after this caterpillar day. It's after I tell him about the mental health tech that I did a righteous smackdown on for his loud discussion of a certain instance of a gun his father had and *exactly how many people it had killed in Iraq* while I was up in the middle of the night, as always, sitting in the power chair by the nurses' station. When I told Jack this, he said something I wouldn't have imagined in a thousand years. He said: "You know those two ladies who do the hiring for the Refuge? They're these two middle-aged women, maybe in their sixties, named Agnes and Kelly. I like people, as I'm sure you've noticed, so one day I get these two ladies talking, and they tell me their hiring strategy for mental health techs—and to some degree doctors and other employees. But the mental health techs are the ones you come in contact with the most. Your doctor might spend half an hour or an hour with you if you're lucky. But we mental health techs, we're a dime a dozen—you have so many idioms in English, it's part of why I like this language. So Agnes and Kelly, what they're looking for is not *the perfect mental health tech*. They don't even look at your résumé. They hire us to create a mix of personalities, some helpful and caring like I try to be, some smart, some dumb, some articulate, some inarticulate, and *also*—and you're not going to believe this, but *they also hire jackasses* like Brent because they want to create a mix of personalities for the patients to interact with *inside* the Refuge to make it less of an artificial environment because they know that when you get out, you're going to be dealing with a mix of personalities. The outside world, your job, people you meet in shops or on the street, they're not hand picked to love you and listen to you and be considerate of your mental health problems. So these two ladies—I think they're quite brilliant—but they probably picked Brent to work here *because he's a jackass, because he doesn't like interacting with patients*. When you talk to me, you learn things, I learn things—everything is easy. But you being forced into a confined space with Brent is hard for you. And they want it to be that way." Now I've been to a lot of shitty mental hospitals, but the Brattleboro Refuge is not one of them. I never met Agnes and Kelly, and I have no idea where whoever hired *them* managed to find a pair that thought that much outside of the box, but I have to agree with Jack's use of the word *brilliant* to describe their hiring practices. That is out-of-the-box thinking there. - - - - And so correct. I live in a world where my uncle throws around the phrase "nigger pussy" like he's blowing the seeds off a dandelion, with relatives who naively work for fossil fuel companies that are destroying planet Earth—and they know it—just to put food on the table for their families. I live in a country with a bunch of motherfuckers who still hate black people, who think the poor should be made into slaves for the rich, who still shop at Walmart. And I live in the gun capital of the world. So for the rest of my life, I'm going to live in a world where my relatives carry pistols in the glove compartments of their trucks (while their language and actions indicate that they are even angrier and sicker than me—which I understand is hard for some of you to imagine), I am going to live in a world where cops shoot people for reaching in their pocket to pull out their motherfuckin' ChapStick. That's who I live with. And I have to learn to live with those people I consider to be either a) somewhat brain dead or most likely, b) extremely fearful. I have grown since my time in the Refuge. I've been working on my anger, learning that there is nothing I have to get angry about. It may be good for some people to get angry as a motivator but anger is not good for me. I have to stay as far away from it as possible. Even before I got sober, I deleted my Facebook account for the express reason of making it impossible for me to ever send a drunk message to my "nigger pussy" uncle. It became clear to me that he was drinking when he sent abusive messages to my mom on Facebook and I didn't ever want to do the same to him, even in defending my mom. That's one of the maybe twenty reasons I stopped drinking this last time—I didn't want, for *my* nephews, to be the uncle, like *my* uncle, who has since I was born been nothing to me except the drunk uncle that I hate. I used to fight with him on the internet. We've briefly argued in person. It mortifies the family, because they are all conflict avoiders and my grandmother, my aunt Susan, refuse to stand up for their daughter, their sister, their grandson, their nephew, when their son and brother is being abusive and hateful toward me and my mom. But I no longer view that as my responsibility to correct. People must correct themselves. I avoid contact with uncle Perish and sincerely wish him the best life possible. I do that thing where you pray for people who have hurt you. If you're skeptical of doing such a thing, let me tell you: that method works and it works fast. It has freed me of my resentment—I know now that my uncle isn't making a conscious choice to hurt me and my mom..he doesn't have a choice. He's doing the best that he can. And with that thinking, I can feel compassion for someone who has been nothing but hateful to me since I was a little kid. So I don't fight with my uncle on the internet. I care so much about never saying an unkind word to him that I deleted my Facebook just so it could never happen. Deleted his emails too. Removed him from my contacts. Pray every night to a god I don't even believe in that he has the best life possible. I'm praying that right now. And if you're reading this, Perish, these aren't unkind words, this isn't an attack against you—this is just you *looking in the mirror*. And not everyone has the strength to do it. ### 101 Dr. Meggs pointed out that *The Truman Show* and *The Matrix* are both about people living in a world where everything around them is fake. So is *Inception*, another one I repeat watch. And Dr. Meggs leveling with me: "We're past bipolar disorder with a little psychosis mixed in. Do you know what psychosis is?" Hallucinations..delusions..reality testing..a blurry line between reality and imagination.. "How does all that feel to you?" I tell Dr. Meggs I'm a little scared. She says, "You have someone with you on this journey. And I will do everything in psychiatry's power to help you." "Ok." She brought up this thing I snuck onto the ward. "Do you feel people don't understand you?" "Often, not." "Do you often sneak things past people in conversation to test them or see if they're paying attention?" "Hah. My whole family does that." "Why? Why do you do it?" "Because people are so fucking stupid. I'm trying to keep myself entertained." "No one else can entertain you?" "The entire room is empty! Not this room. But, typically, in a room full of people, *there's nothing going on*. It's all stuffed animals! Only *very rarely* do I meet someone I can talk to fully, on every level." "How rarely?" "About once every ten years." "And how do you handle the other people you meet?" "I translate. I warp what I'm presenting to them so that they have something they're capable of interacting with." "That sounds like a lot of work." "It is! But if you want to get by in this world *that's what you have to do!* Do you think I would have *ever been able* to get a job without doing that?" "So to get a job you have been translating yourself into some..performance?..that your employers can handle?" "Of course. They'd never hire the real me." "And what is that?" "A wider person." Dr. Meggs stops writing. "You think about things that you choose not to share, don't you? Things you think are too weird or taboo that you won't tell anyone, even me, because you're worried about what people would think." And I tell her yes, I constantly tailor what I reveal to fit inside what other people are ready to hear. I can never share my real self—with anyone—because it's too big for anyone to hear. "Are you afraid of being judged or punished if you share these thoughts?" "Yes, I am. I very much am." *Maybe some things are too big to share with the world.* "Aside from *The Truman Show* and *The Matrix*, is there anything else you watch on repeat?" "Well, one time I fell asleep to a YouTube playlist of supposed MKUltra mind-control videos and I felt a little irritated in the morning. But I already watched *Se7en* on LSD and—I mean—if you can watch *Se7en* on two hits of very strong LSD and keep your shit, you can handle some probably fake mind-control videos on YouTube." "How many times have you done LSD?" "Twice?" "How many times have you done mushrooms?" "I was thinking about that last night, since we talked about it, and I counted..eight." "Oh, Matthew." "Think I'm pretty much done with that." "I hope you will be." "I'm pretty sure I am. I've never done DMT but with LSD and mushrooms it is my experience that you don't need to go back there too many times—it's not like you find fundamentally new insights every time you trip. I've taken some notes while I was on LSD and mushrooms so that I can read them later and examine my mind from both points of view." "Do you have the notes?" "Yeah, they're in my notebook." "You have it with you?" "Yeah, here we go." I flip through pages of my infamous *Blue Notebook* that I keep with me always. "Ok, here's something. It's very hard to write a complete sentence when you're tripping—to maintain a complete thread of thought from beginning to end—so mostly they're little phrases, but I managed to get some complete sentences. Here's a phrase: *the subtleties of color, the smearing intangibility*. Or: *Thinking is important..and people should do it more.*" My psychiatrist laughs. "Try this: this was in response to the experience of writing the first thing ever written on a particular blank page. This was on mushrooms. It says: *oh, fuckbracelet, blank is better*. And then I said, again about mushrooms: *it's a mirror to how your mind works*. And then, on the same page: *the verbal detracts from the visual*." "What did you mean by that?" "Well I was tripping with..people who shall remain nameless..and the three of them were in one bedroom of the suite we had rented to trip in. One of them had a guitar and they were playing it. And that whole experience was amazing—it was perfect for them—but I went into the other room and I realized that the less verbal activity that was going on in my brain, the more visual activity could happen. And I was *reveling* in this visual experience—looking at the patterns that appear on a blank piece of paper—and knowing that the more I participated in the verbal, the less I participated in the visual. And if I eliminated the verbal altogether..by closing myself into the other bedroom in the suite..by ceasing to write on these otherwise blank pieces of paper, that my visual world flourished. And that's an insight I've carried with me into the non-trip world. Like a novelist versus a photographer, you know?" "Can I see that notebook for a second?" "Sure." I hand it to her. She flips through the pages. She doesn't look up at me when she asks: "Could you explain this to me if we had time?" "Sure." "And you would be able to explain it to me in a way that it would make sense to me?" "Yeah." "Where did these ideas come from?" "I made them up?" "What are they about?" "Things in math." Dr. Meggs looks up. "Just things about numbers. Like a five isn't really a five, you know? There's more than one five. Our counting system..one, two three, four, five..it's just a shadow of a more complex system, a network. It's just stuff in logic that I think about." "How many fives are there?" "One-thousand twenty-four." "How many sixes?" "Thirty-two thousand, seven-hundred sixty-eight." "Why are there so many sixes?" "Because each six has different *properties*. We think of a six as divisible by two and by three, but that's not exactly true. Only *some* sixes are divisible by both two and three. Some sixes are divisible by two but not by three. Some sixes are divisible by three but not by two. A six isn't just a simple *count*, it's a network." "You have several references to *d'Anconia* throughout here. Is that Francisco d'Anconia from *Atlas Shrugged*?" "Yes." "Do you relate to that character?" "I relate to the part where he locks himself in a hotel room for years and tries to figure things out." Dr. Meggs reads out loud from my notebook. "*Is it more useful/interesting/beautiful to repeat or to reverse? The innocence is dying..god is growing bored..and she is coming to destroy us.* Do you believe in God?" "Only as a metaphor." "What's this?" "I have no idea. It looks like a design for a search engine." "What's this?" "Me trying to solve the factoring problem. Foolishly." "Ok, Matthew, hold on a second. What is the factoring problem? And why are you working on it if you consider it foolish to work on?" "The factoring problem is the problem of developing a quick way to factor large numbers that are the product of two large primes. It's the basis of all cryptography, all internet security, and it's considered by everyone to be impossible to solve. If it was ever solved, all cryptography, banks, governments, would no longer be able to operate." "Do you consider it impossible to solve?" "Well, everything starts out impossible. Just because everyone in the world thinks something is impossible doesn't mean it *is* impossible. It just means it's not possible *yet*." "In your heart of hearts, though, do you think it's possible?" "No." "How long have you been working on this? Matthew, there are hundreds of pages here of you working on a problem that even *you* consider impossible to solve!" "Well, *solving* a problem isn't the only reason to work on it." "What other reason is there?" "Well, for one, it exercises your brain. Just because you always fail at solving a problem doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to *try*. You fail, but you emerge a stronger thinker. In fact, I think there's a reasonable point of view from which you could ask why anyone would ever work on any problem that *wasn't* considered impossible. And secondly, during the process of failing to solve an impossible problem, one may develop *techniques* that are useful in other domains. So, failure to solve the stated problem doesn't mean that *the work involved* in that effort was a failure." I take the book back from my doctor. I flip to a page at the end. And I read. "*There is a place beyond wanting—beyond knowing the relationships between—beyond knowing the definitions of—beyond feeling—beyond worry—beyond emotion, actually, in the realm of action, pure action; beyond caring about all the ways that people act and all the things that people do, there is just acting and just doing, just the motion of the body dancing with all of its desires and its circumstance.*" There was more that I read her, two more pages of *beyond*—all the concepts that the tripping me could conceptualize going beyond, and when I read her "*beyond goodness in all its forms, beyond the valuation of good and evil*," she asked me to stop. Meggs looks at me. "Were you on mushrooms when you wrote that?" I nod. "Some of it is beautiful." "Thanks." Then she gets up to go, and at the door she says: "Please don't do mushrooms anymore." "I'm not planning to." "I'd like to understand the inside of your mind better, ok?" "Ok." "So I'd like you to give me a moonwalk—a thought landscape—as though you were a moon rover and you drove around and captured the interesting features of your mind and encapsulated them in a way that you could transmit to me on Earth so that I could understand them. I think this may help me understand what's going on in your mind so I can know how to help you better. Take a few days and then we'll go over it together." I agree and for days whenever anything passes through my mind that seems like it should make the list for her "moonwalk," I write it down on one of my notecards. Dr. Meggs also says she's ordering some tests from the Refuge psychologist. "Don't overthink them or try to figure out what the test is trying to test, just go with your first answer, ok?" I agreed to do that. ### 102 These were the results: > **Brattleboro Refuge Psychological Services Report** > > Patient Tested December 1, 2011; December 5, 2011 > > **Referral Source:** Mary Alice Meggs, MD > > **Reason for Referral** > > Initial personality screening and clarification of diagnoses. > > **Tests Administered** > > MMPI-II, Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank, Draw a Person (DAP), and Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III (MCMI-III). Also, a clinical interview was conducted with Mr Temple. > > **Results** > > This is an initial personality screening. Therefore, the following hypotheses should be considered conservatively, and integrated with other sources of clinical evaluation. This becomes particularly important in that Mr Temple may have tended to magnify his difficulties. This may represent an inclination to draw attention to his plight, and perhaps reflect the degree of vulnerability he is experiencing at the time of hospitalization. > > Adults with similar test profiles, as well as comments made by Mr Temple, indicate his experiencing a significant mood disturbance with periods of depression that may often show agitation and erratic qualities, shifting between expressions of self-deprecation and despair, perhaps mixed with a sense of hopelessness and futility. At times this may be punctuated by outbursts of discontent and frustrations with inner tensions, as well as life circumstances. Self-loathing is apt to be present, with Mr Temple demonstrating an intropunitive style, contributing to his depressed state. His grumblings and, at times, provocative responses, may serve as a vehicle for discharging tension for brief periods. > > Mr Temple's test results also represent periods of hypomanic episodes that may punctuate his depression. He acknowledged these periods occurring for up to a week in duration. His manic episodes may be expansive and irritable in quality, rather than a more euphoric and cheerful presentation, both according to his test responses and his comments during the interview. Mr Temple also noted that his father had relatives who had been diagnosed as bipolar, as well as a sister who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. > > The test results also raise a question about an anxiety disorder, with obsessive features. He described previously being diagnosed with OCD, and described various ways that he would obsess and show repetitive and checking behaviors as part of compulsive loops in an OCD pattern. The results also raised a question about bizarre thinking and thought distortion, to a point that one might identify delusional content. Mr Temple described what might be paranoid kinds of ideation as recently as the current hospitalization, although, on some level, recognizing that these thoughts were "crazy," he was cautious about expressing them to others. His thoughts may be overlay to fears about contamination as part of an OCD presentation. Mr Temple denied auditory hallucinations, but did describe what seemed to be visual-type hallucinations, or images around texture and layers. There is a question whether this might be a side effect of his medications. > > Mr Temple acknowledged a significant prior history of alcohol abuse/dependence. He noted more recent sobriety, his lengthiest period of sobriety being 11 months. Individuals with similar profiles tend to self-medicate, using alcohol as a means to try to blot out their emotional distress for brief periods, and perhaps bolster their fragile sense of self-worth, particularly in interpersonal circumstances, when drinking *[This is so cliché and so trite that I can only imagine the Refuge psychologist plagiarizing it from some college textbook—it's also so accurate and so true about me that I find it hard to read, even five years later.]* > > The test results were in keeping with more enduring personality characteristics representing a depressive personality disorder with some borderline and narcissistic features. These individuals are often chronically depressed and pessimistic in their way. Mr Temple may frequently feel misunderstood and unappreciated, with intense conflict between his need for nurturance and care, and at times asserting himself angrily in a more impulsive manner. He is likely to often feel the victim, overburdened and mistreated, behaving in ways that contribute further to this expectation. These adults have a pessimistic outlook and anticipate being disillusioned, and thus behave, or rationalize, that they can be irritable and reactive to those who have not appreciated their status, or not responded in the supportive manner that they would have expected. Mr Temple may struggle between feelings of suffering, melancholy, and then resentment. He may show a rapid succession of moods with low frustration tolerance. He is apt to show a flux of attitude and contradictory behavior, with limited internal cohesion in coping strategies. Thus, he likely participates in a self-defeating cycle, further complicated if he is drinking at that time, undermining already a fragile capacity for internal response inhibition. > > Sincerely > > Fuckface, PhD No but wait, there's more: > **Brattleboro Refuge Psychological Services Report** > > Patient Tested December 1, 2011 > > **Referral Source:** Mary Alice Meggs, MD > > **Reason for Referral:** Assessment of Cognitive Functioning > > **Tests Administered:** Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, and Trailmaking Test: Part A and B > > **Clinical History and Behavioral Observations** > > Mr Temple is being treated for mood disturbance as well as a history of alcohol abuse/dependence. There are no specific medical problems reported, with the exception of Mr Temple describing negative consequences from the use of serotonin medications, including visual hallucinations. > > At the time of the evaluation, Mr Temple was pleasant and cooperative. He seemed to show signs of frustration when having difficulty answering a question. Mr Temple was attentive throughout the evaluation. He seemed to hyperfocus on anything that he might struggle to answer, or to complete. > > **Results** > > Mr Temple received the following prorated IQ scores on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI): > > Verbal IQ Score: 134 > > Performance IQ Score: 129 > > Full Scale IQ Score: 136 > > Based on the Verbal and Full Scale IQ Scores, Mr Temple is performing in the *very superior* range of cognitive function relative to his age group. His Performance IQ Score falls in the *superior* range of cognitive adaptability. Subtest scores show above average performance in abstract conceptualization of verbal as well as nonverbal information. Mr Temple also demonstrates a good capacity for the use of verbal language and finding relationships between words. One would anticipate optimal performance up to the very superior range across the areas of verbal comprehension, as well as nonverbal conceptualization. > > Mr Temple's results on the Trailmaking Test part A and B show a split in performance regarding efficiency completing each portion of the test, relative to his age group. Mr Temple finished the part A section in 21 seconds with no errors (mean = 30.2, standard deviation = 10.4). This task requires sequencing of numbers only under timed conditions. In contrast, Mr Temple required 97 seconds with six errors to finish the part B portion of the test (mean = 64, standard deviation = 23.4). This task is more complex, in that it requires sequencing and integrating of letter, as well as number series, under timed circumstances. Similar results reflect what may be a far greater challenge for higher-level processing of information, including cognitive flexibility when shifting set. Mr Temple seemed to struggle with the complexity, and showed some confusion when having to respond to fixing errors before moving forward on the task. He then became overwhelmed and frustrated with his efforts, further compounding his inefficiency of performance. > > Based on the results, one would anticipate superior performance in overall cognitive capabilities. His difficulties with a more complex task raise questions about executive performance, and the recommendation of a more complete psychological analysis. > > Sincerely, > > Fuckface, PhD I wondered for a second if I had hospital addiction syndrome. Was I just making up and exaggerating my experiences so instead of being alone in my apartment I could live among other crazies like me, even if I had to live in a locked ward to do it? Was what I was telling Dr. Meggs *true*, or was I making up a person I thought she'd like, just for the attention? Even my MMPI said I was likely exaggerating my responses to make my condition seem worse. I wish I could say I was consciously doing that, but I wasn't. Dr. Meggs said to answer those questions with the first thing that came to my mind—not to overthink them—and that's what I did. If I am lying to my doctor, exaggerating my responses to the MMPI, it's happening on a level I am unaware of. That's a scary thought to me, that I might be so out of touch with reality that I don't even consciously know that I'm lying. But when I read the definitions of Münchausen syndrome, I know that's not me. I'm not a well person pretending to be sick. I am a sick person willing to try anything, and hoping—probably in vain—that someday I'll be well. - - - - I met a woman once who was faking auditory hallucinations just so she could stay in the psych ward and stay off the streets. My Yahtzee buddy from my original LA psych ward stay. She confided in me after a while and I was like, ouch, you're willing to take a bunch of crazy psych meds, who knows what they're doing to your brain—just to not be homeless. I had been homeless at that point, and that's a tough choice to make. I would have made the other choice myself, be homeless, but I understood the path she was taking, too. I told that to my Dr. Meggs and she pulled her chair up close. She said: "I once had a schizophrenic patient who heard screaming in the walls and she tore through the plaster with her bare hands trying to free the people she thought were trapped inside the walls of her house." I'm looking at my psychiatrist like *are you shitting me*. I knew the patient she was talking about, naturally. "Of course there was no one there," Meggs continues. "Just empty walls. So you see?—Your hallucinations could be a lot worse!" Thank you, Dr. Meggs. Thank you for that image =) - - - - Sometimes I think the only difference between people who are outside of psych wards, and people who are *inside* psych wards, is that the people inside psych wards are getting better mental care. I hope I never have to take another IQ test again. I might just refuse if I'm asked to—or smear my feces all over the walls. I'm sick of solving puzzles and taking tests. I don't even like to play games anymore—there are zero games on my iPhone, iPad, MacBook—every game I've tried in about thirteen years just seems stupid to me. As for Dr. Fuckface and his analysis, I think it speaks for itself. Anything I did to argue with his conclusions would probably only strengthen them. There's a really fucked-up thing that we people do with psychiatric diagnoses: we give them character. Like a schizophrenic is widely characterized as someone who is so dangerous and delusional they can't function in the world. A bipolar person is characterized as an artist, some kind of genius with special insight into knowledge and beauty—but impossible to relate to. People with borderline personality disorder are seen as people so manipulative that they're even harder to have in your life than bipolar people—but people with borderline are good in bed if you can keep them from fucking with your head (which you can't). Major depressives are seen as pathetic alcoholics so boring they have nothing to offer society. Narcissists are looked down upon by everyone, due to that pack mentality in which *the tall nail is hammered down*. I hate that Dr. Fuckface, PhD used the word narcissistic in my Psychological Services Report. I hate narcissists, which suggests I am somewhat like them, otherwise there would be nothing in me which resisted resonating with them—I would ignore them, unbothered. I even have a favorite video on the internet by a doctor who describes the differences between grandiosity in bipolar mania and the grandiosity and other similar traits in narcissism. I use this video to convince myself that I'm not a narcissist (I could never stand it if I had that diagnosis) but, rather, that my grandiosity is always part of mania, putting me squarely in the bipolar camp. The *New Oxford American Dictionary* defines narcissism as *extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one's own talents and a craving for admiration, as characterizing a personality type*. *Extreme selfishness*—no, just the opposite. I'd rather have everyone else taken care of and me dead than the other way around. I'm self-sacrificing to a suicidal level—so far I'm not looking all that hot as a narcissist. *Grandiose view of one's own talents*—when I'm depressed, I think I have no talents and wonder why I'm alive; when manic, yes, I have an unbelievably grandiose view of my own talents. I believe it completely and it gets me high—higher than techno, higher than a shot of cocaine, higher than ecstasy, higher than crystal meth. Most of the time I'm not manic or depressed and I don't think about *talent* at all—I just work. *A craving for admiration*—this is a split for me: I don't crave admiration but I do try to manipulate others into admiring, not me, but my work. My ideal result is for a person to hate me as a person (due to the disgusting, unacceptable broadness of my mind and the amorality implicit in that) but be unable to deny that my work is superior. I don't care if you love or hate me as a person—both please me—but I want my work to be undeniable to you..I want there to be no way for you to ignore it. Once admiration is actually given to me I enjoy it for about fifteen minutes and then I want to kill myself for being the focus of anyone's attention. Actually almost anything can make me want to kill myself. Before I was ever diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I hardly knew what it was and I didn't have any associations of like or dislike for it—I had no relationship (in my mind) between me and bipolar. But over just about a decade since that diagnosis, I have come to cling to that diagnosis like someone who is about to drown clings to their sinking ship. I may *die*, but goddammit I'm going to die sinking with *the Titanic*, not some other ship with a bad reputation. I have gone from denying that I have bipolar disorder to defending my bipolar diagnoses from all other comers—*fuck no* you're going to diagnose me with narcissism, *fuck no* you're going to diagnose me with simple depression, *fuck no* you're going to diagnose me with borderline personality disorder..it isn't even a brain disorder!..*my behavior* can't be explained by something as *rudimentary* as borderline personality disorder! I mean, come on, borderline is for manipulative little girls (or my dad) and all they need is some counseling to get through it—I couldn't possibly have something that's solvable through *counseling*. Bipolar disorder is the perfect disorder for me (in my sick way of categorizing and judging and worshipping mental disorders). Schizophrenia is too crazy, depression is too boring, narcissism is deplorable (it's for the weak, the insecure), borderline is too easily solvable for me to respect someone who continues to live with it without solving it. I like to fuck girls who are borderline—that's it. But don't you see—as *I* have, over these years—that I could have never manipulated scores of psychiatrists in various hospitals to conclude or agree that I have bipolar disorder unless I had it. I have a fear, a delusion, that I don't have any sickness at all. I am insecure, and I do contain a touch of narcissism. I do have psychosis independent from a mood episode (one of the criteria for schizophrenia). But just as I once learned that the reason I was attracted to camp counsellors, the reason I *like* them, is that I *am like* them..in that same way, the reason my classification of psych disorders favors bipolar disorder as being the most likable—the one I would most like to have if I *had* to choose—is simply (and nothing more than) that that is what I have. I like it best because it's what I'm forced to deal with, and for better or for worse, it's become part of my identity. Finally, my puny analysis of Dr. Fuckface's overuse of commas: I feel you, bro—once a teacher handed me back a two-page paper and she had circled sixty-two unnecessary commas. I took out a few of yours to make it a little easier on my readers but I left in most of them so they can see how a PhD psychologist writes. ### 103 I've decided I'm taking no more tests. I'm giving no more interviews. I'm sick of diagnosis. I'll chat with Dr. Meggs, but that's it—and I'll only chat with her about off-the-record stuff. I'm going into my mind, and I'm going deep this time. I scribble in the nuclear submarine notebook, writing programs without a computer, theorizing about psychiatric practice, and writing about what is in and how my mind feels. Mental health worker asks me what I'm writing. I say a design for a program that simulates manic, depressed, awake, and asleep states. He said it looks psychotic. I say what do you mean by that? He says I have a good buddy who's a programmer..if I showed him your notes would they make sense to him? Would he be able to build the program? I said probably not but that doesn't mean I'm psychotic! Doctors have terrible handwriting..does that mean their scripts are nonsense, or the product of a psychotic mind? Just because I'm the only person who understands what I wrote doesn't make it psychotic! I can write in codes and special languages, draw thoughts visually using shapes and diagrams..this may be impossible for others to decipher but that doesn't mean it isn't perfectly cogent, lucid, sane, and sensible. He did make a good point then, by saying that if I spend so much time each day writing in my notebooks, being in my own imagination, that I miss out on possibilities occurring in the real world, the world outside my mind. I admit I do like the real world, with its geography and food and women's bodies..but between the world outside my head and the world in, I find the one inside to be the realest. I wrote: > watching Inception > > we want to make worlds like this > > where people can truly lose themselves > > interface pure consciousness > > bend and fold > > trade > > —weave— consciousness They used to call me Helen Keller at this bar I went to in LA. Because I'd wear headphones and sunglasses while I was in there, and I'd write on napkins or my laptop or my phone. But I didn't want to talk to people. I didn't go to that bar to make new friends. I went there to get drunk. My eyes were covered. My ears were covered—and these weren't earbuds, these were Sennheiser HD 280 Pros..they covered my entire ear and I was in my own world. Somewhere in there—maybe somewhere before—but sometime in my life I stopped believing in the real world and I started believing in my imagination. "See?" says the health tech. "Where were you just now? You could have been talking with me but instead you were inside your notebook, writing..what? Was it earth-shaking? Is it gonna help you get pussy?" "I think everyone's hallucinating—just most people don't know it." "Interesting insight. But how's it gonna help you get pussy?" "You think a lot about pussy, don't you?" "I love to think about pussy," says this mental health tech. And I say, "I have this video I like to watch, it's a a hot girl in bed and she's jerking off and so it's standard porno shit..right?" "Right." "But then—then, she picks up this picture from her headboard and looks at it while she masturbates." "Can you see what's in the picture?" "No. That's the thing. You can't." "Hot." "I know, right? But the thing that really gets me off isn't the hot girl in bed who grabs a picture frame and looks at it while she masturbates..and you never see who she's looking at, so I always imagine she's looking at me, and I'm her boyfriend off on deployment, and she can't want to get me home, you know, I'm off killing civilians in Iraq, shooting 'em in the head with some classified carbon-fiber rifle and torturing them and taking pictures of them with doggy leashes around them, making them eat their own shit, stuff like that..what *really* gets me off is knowing that my MacBook has a camera and I think about the NSA agents sitting in a bunker somewhere forced to watch a straight man jerk off to some 18 year old because somehow I got on their watch list..but some of them are gay, and their dicks are getting hard watching *me* masturbate to the girl who is masturbating to the picture that none of us ever get to see..it's those guys in that bunker, their dicks getting hard and the precum seeping out through their uniforms..*that's* what really gets me off. I don't get off on porn *itself*. I get off on NSA agents *watching me get off* on porn." And this mental health tech says, "Really?" And I say: "No, I just made all that up." And the tech gives me the one-eyebrow skeptic look and gets up and leaves me the fuck alone. Never fuck with crazy people. - - - - In fifth grade I took a ten-question test. I don't remember what the subject was. But I got a seven out of ten—seventy percent. My teacher called me up to his desk after he had handed out all the tests. He pointed out three marks I had made, each one to the left of one of the three questions I had gotten wrong. "What happened?" he said. "You marked your own test. If fifteen years of teaching I've never seen anything like this. You knew that these were wrong answers, so why did you go with them." "I didn't know that they were wrong. I knew that the other seven were right. These were the ones I was unsure about." "It's a true-or-false test. If you were unsure of these answers, why didn't you answer the opposite? You would have had a perfect score." My eyes welled with tears. I looked at my teacher. I shrugged. "It's ok. Do you need a tissue?" "No." My teacher passed the test back to me. "Go back and reconsider your answers." He gave me a pass that day. And when I simply switched the answers I didn't trust, I got a perfect score. Was it fair to me? Fair to the other students? That doesn't matter—it's not the most important thing. I thought a lot about that test and my own thinking in the next four years, the years I spent at the Julia R Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School for gifted students. And I learned to develop (or maybe always had) what students of education call *metacognition*—which is the awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes. It's *thinking about thinking*, *knowing about knowing*. The root word "meta", means *beyond*. Because there is thinking, and there is thinking that goes beyond thinking. It involves, not IQ, not some raw machinery that no one has any control over, but rather it is the simple process of stepping back..stepping back and getting a wider view. I learned from that experience of "marking my own test," as my fifth-grade teacher called it. Some people say that it is important to know things, but much more important to *know what you know* and *know what you don't know*. To think you know something, but not know that in reality you do not know it, it a dangerous thing. I learned to take a step back and think about what I thought, not just to throw knowledge around like having certainty in a first draft, but to perfect my knowledge, to grade my own tests, and I went from being a smart kid with potential to being someone who could score *one-hundred questions right* out of one-hundred instead of just ninety-nine out of one-hundred. I wasn't the smartest person in that school—Megan Heckert and this kid Blaise probably have higher IQs than mine. But from our elementary school days to our first high school year, I became the one who could not just *survive* a ninth-grade AP biology test, but dominate it. When the teacher graded on a curve, my perfect score made me the enemy of even the second-highest scorer in the class (usually Megan). On or off a curve, I was getting *one-hundreds—every question right—on every test they gave me*. The second-highest score was like a thirty-four. It wasn't a matter of brainpower—it was a matter of care. I'm not trying to convince you of my intelligence—you'll make that decision for yourself. I'm telling you this because I want you to know what things are like inside my mind. ### 104 Faith got there and it immediately improved my mood. I was eating lunch at a table by myself and then someone was standing very close to me. I looked up. It was Faith. We smiled. We laughed. We air hugged. Oh thank god my Faith was back. I mean you never want to wish someone into a mental hospital, but if I had to be there alone, or I got to be there with Faith, I'd definitely pick being there with Faith. When she got there my entire world changed. I actually had someone to talk to *who made sense*. I think I need to be around cool and interesting people. I think I'm a frustrated extrovert who just needs a high caliber of people to hang around. People with spunk. I'm an extrovert who hates people..not because I hate people..but because people are mostly worth hating. Faith stood at the door of my bedroom and tells me why she's back. "I was in this classic car. It was like a blue thing with you know those wings things on the back and a leather top and this guy—I won't say his name—he gets me in the back seat and he's like do you wanna fuck and I'm like, 'No! No I don't wanna fuck you.' This was a date in his mind—it wasn't a date in mine. He was just some friend from high school. We got McDonald's—is that worth raping my pussy? Apparently he thought so." "What *the fuck*, Faith!" "I know, it really sucks. And now I don't know if I'm pregnant or not so one of the social workers is gonna come and have me pee on a stick—how embarrassing." Just then this social worker named Shiloh or Turquoise or something, she comes by and takes Faith by the hand and she's mad at me *and* Faith just 'cause she's *talking* to a guy. Excuse me, we're not all rapists and I'm not talking to Faith to get down her pants, she's my friend, asshole. One of those men-hating women, this social worker was. Fuck her. I showed Faith my orange hat with a "P" on it that I had won in ward bingo and said the "P" stood for psychotic since I had just recently found out from doctor Meggs (who was Faith's doctor, too) that I was psychotic. It's such a charged word—mostly because nobody knows what it means. "YOU'RE *PSYCHOTIC*??" Faith asked. "Apparently." "What does that mean?" "It just means I have a blurry line between reality and imagination—I can't always tell what's real and what my mind is making up." "*Nice*," Faith says. "Yeah, it's pretty insane," I say. And then Faith says, "I wanna come in your room." And I say, "I want you to, too." "I'm gonna come in real quick." "Ok." She runs in and we hug each other from top to bottom, everything pressing together, and Faith says: "I want to *F* you." "I want to F you, too, Faith, now get out of my room before we get in trouble." That was when the social worker came by telling Faith she needs to spend time alone, and she asked me real mean if I know why Faith is here and I said: "Yes, I do, she told me." This undercurrent again that Faith shouldn't even be around males because all males are dangerous when they're really pulling apart two sick people in a psych ward who have found someone they can relate to. And what if I *did* fuck Faith, if she wanted me to? That would be a *good* experience for her, for me. Crazy people get to have sex, too, you know. - - - - Faith tells me this story: She says her counselor took a sexy letter away from her that some boy wrote Faith. She jumps in the counselor's car after work and won'r get out. She wants to read that sexy letter. They're driving all over the road crazy because the counselor only has one hand on the wheel—with the other, she's holding the sexy letter away from Faith. Faith must not read that sexy letter!! Then the cops start chasing the counselor's car. Faith reaches over with one foot and puts her foot on the gas! The car speeds up way past the cop. Now they're in a car chase with a cop who thinks they're some type of fugitive or something. Finally the counselor gets her car under control and pulls to the side of the road. Faith freaks out—she's sure the cops are going to shoot her or take her to jail just on general principle. Faith runs across a four-lane high way at dusk, cars barely missing her, to try to escape the American Killing Machine. Somewhere earlier Faith bit the girl who bit the staff of her monitored apartment: a girl bit the staff, and to show her that wasn't the right thing to do, Faith bit *that* girl! Then she almost makes the counselor crash her car, etc. She gets out of the counselor's moving car on the highway and when Faith is three lanes away the counsellor finally says: "Ok! Faith! I'll let you read the letter!" Then, one night with Faith pulled up to my door in a desk chair as usual, me telling her about my life, Faith says she heard this saying somewhere that she wants to tell me: "Failure is the opportunity to begin again." She gives me that piece of knowledge and I keep it forever. And I love it. It is powerful advice, the advice of sages, given to me by this curly-haired bipolar girl in a mental refuge. And one night..this I'll never forget..the normally spastic Faith singing to Adele's *Someone Like You* with her head inches from the ward radio, lying her torso down on a table in the main room. It's the calmest I've ever seen her. > *Never mind, I'll find someone like you* > > *I wish nothing but the best for you too* > > *Don't forget me, I beg* > > *I'll remember you said,* > > *"Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead,* > > *Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead"* I wish I could write the loneliness and connection that seeing Faith do that created in me, how I felt childlike and helpless still, as everyone does deep down, and how seeing Faith deal with her problems by listening to Adele and singing along while she laid her head down on the table—one of the only times I've seen her at rest—I wish I could write how that made me feel. But I can't, and in this point, I have failed my reader more than anywhere else in this book. - - - - Meggs said to me, casually, while I'm perched in a chair in the main room eating breakfast—she was helping another patient and she just shoots it off to me—that I was at "the top of human performance," or "the very edge of human achievement" in reference to the psychological services test results she had reviewed. I thought this was funny since IQ doesn't indicate you've achieved anything except taken an IQ test—it was a phrase that I thought didn't make sense in the context of a discussion about IQ—but I knew what she meant. I realized then that I had put Dr. Meggs on a pedestal, built her up into some type of X-Men super-psychiatrist who was smarter and better than me in every way, and her use of the term achievement or performance with respect to IQ showed me that she was either being lazy with the words or she didn't really understand what the test meant. I had told her I felt smarter than most people I met, and I think that's part of why she gave me the IQ test. Now she was casually and comically telling me it was true (Refuge confirms I'm "super smart"). But an IQ of one-forty or above is required to be considered a genius. So I'm no genius—and I can't tell you what a relief that is. I sit there in the vitals chair while Dr. Meggs talks quietly with Faith, who is lying on the couch. I thought of how close Meggs and I had become. I mean I told her that I used to stick my grandmother's maxi pads in my underwear as a kid. It made my penis so hard. The things I told Dr. Meggs in therapy..and to tell her that I feel smarter than other people..and not just people but almost everyone I've ever met. It isn't sexual but it's a very intimate thing to tell someone..it puts you in a very vulnerable position. So when she IQ tests me and says the results came back and the hospital psychologist said I'm at the edge of human "achievement" (even though IQ has nothing to do with achievement), I wonder if I'm talking to the right person—if I should have been so candid with Dr. Meggs. And when I finally see the test result it's a fairly unimpressive 136—I wonder if it would be higher if I hadn't done street drugs or if I wasn't on like eight psychiatric medications when I took the test. Anyway I figure if I stay away from crack I can keep that IQ for the rest of my life and I'll at least be able to keep my head above water in most smalltalk situations. Meggs is saying that I'm off-the-charts smart—but I'm not. I just think she doesn't understand the test. What I remember most, as I'm sitting in the vitals chair and Meggs is dealing with Faith who is lying on the couch is that Meggs speaks to me briefly, professionally, and as an equal. - - - - Later Meggs and I talked in my room. "You had an *encumbered* morning?" "Yes, I had an encumbered morning. I was telling Mom some of my recent thoughts and she told me I was being too intense for her—maybe for me too—and I'm sick of that in my family and in most people, this desire to shy away from the intense, as if the intense was something to be *feared* and *avoided* and not the juice of life!! I don't even *like* unintense people! Put 'em on an island—make 'em play Parcheesi for the rest of their lives or watch daytime television or something. I mean, I want to be someone my mom and other people feel comfortable around, but that may never happen. Even though lithium softens mania and depression, they're still there. The thing is I can't tell when I'm being too intense or depressive because they both feel normal to me. And I'm generally attracted to intense things and people. I like painters who couldn't possibly fit anything else on the canvas." "Like Basquiat or Pollock." "Exactly! Intense seems normal. Normal seems boring. My mental disorders have conspired to make me have emotional breakdowns many a night. And at times like those I don't plan to say much more than what I can't help getting out because I don't really want help. With a little time passed—and some CRAZY text messages—I get my head above water. When I'm using and I get depressed, I drink or drug. When I'm clean and sober and I get depressed, I make plans to kill myself. So, I'm always Tweeting: *No, I'm not suicidal tonight—please don't call the police or report my last Tweet as suicidal. I will let you know if I'm ever suicidal again. In fact if I ever try suicide again, I will live-Tweet it—deal?* I actually Tweeted that. What is that? Someone who treats life so crassly, so cavalierly, doesn't deserve to be alive. A lot of people think that "self-medication" by people with major mental disorders is just an excuse to drink and drug. I can easily see why that point of view seems sensible. But walk in my shoes: try to stay alive, with bipolar, even with lithium, without killing yourself. "The alcohol was helping to numb your more intense emotions." "Right." "I don't judge anyone for 'self medicating'—sometimes you do what you gotta do." "Yeah. Thanks. I'm not planning on doing that, but I mean in the past it has helped me survive, to get to this later point in life." "Exactly. When it's the difference between getting through the day and not getting through the day, *get through the day*." "I'm surprised you can tell me that, since I'm an alcoholic." "I'm not encouraging you to drink. I think if we can get you on the right medication, you won't need to drink." "Ok." I sniffle. "That sounds really good to me." "I'm not a substance abuse counsellor. I'm your psychiatrist. For now I just want you alive, and we can work on the luxury problems later." "It's fucked up," I say, "but as destructive as it is, for some of us, drinking is an alternative to suicide. Can I switch gears?" "Go ahead." "In addition to the humiliator pattern at work and with Dad, I have always had a need to be understood, and felt that I wasn't. I've written five books and no one in my family's read them. I get wildly great reviews on author sites but the people closest to me in my life have no interest *in the slightest* in learning that part of who I am." "That's gotta be tough. Let's talk about your moonwalk later, ok?" "Ok." I take a sip of orange juice. "I have a couple of patients to meet with early tomorrow and then I'll find you and we'll talk in your room, alright?" "Alright." "You seem cheerful today," she says, smiling. And I shrug. "I am." Dr. Meggs says in the most genuine way: "I'm so glad, Matthew." Meggs says she knows she doesn't do outpatient stuff but to call her if I ever need to. (And I did call her from Portland when I was up for three nights and woke up with ecstatic skin sensations after stopping my own Risperdal without telling anyone. That landed me in the psych hospital with my most intense hallucination ever..texture off the charts with music in the distance.) That night Nancy was right across the hall from me, screaming, and I went to sleep like a rock, covered my eyes and had not a single worry, schizophrenic woman screaming at the people in the walls and I was across the hall from her, in my bed, totally relaxed. And that night I had a dream I was done with Dad forever—that I locked him out of my mind, my world, and refused to speak of him or listen of him from any of my family. And it was amazing. ### 105 This last stay at the Refuge, I just ate, slept, talked with Faith, met with my doctor, and sat in my room making up writing systems. The first times I went to the Refuge I attended every class, went on every walk, *attended* so much that the teachers had me be their whiteboard note taker. On this last visit, newcomers to the Refuge, adults older than me, gently encouraged me to attend classes ("You'll get more out of your experience that way.") I wanted to be like, *Bitch, this is my seventh time here..I've memorized all the classes and to be honest I'd rather sleep than attend one more substance abuse class. But have fun.* I loved my sleep, though (depressed). I loved my quadruple-decker hamburgers (Risperdal). I loved when Faith came and talked at my doorway (I'd lie down and she'd dance around in the doorway or pull up a chair and sometimes she'd sneak in and we'd give each other sensual full-body-press hugs). I loved the evenings—I sat at my desk and made up a new writing system and taught myself to read and write it in my journals. My doctor comes in. "What is that?" "A writing system I invented." (Once my mother saw the genesis of one of my writing and programming languages called *dot oh* and she said, "You do realize normal people don't do this." And I just thought: *Pity that the world is filled with so many normal people.*) Dr. Meggs asked me to use some of my notecards to write down a "moonscape" of my mind—actually I think the word she used was "moonwalk." She said she wanted to know the terrain of the inside of my brain. She said it would help her understand my thoughts, because that's something she couldn't see from the outside, and that having this moonscape would help her treat me. "Write down anything that you are afraid to share, or that sticks out to you, or that you think might be 'crazy.' " So I write down a shitload of stuff—way more than she expected—and she sat mostly quietly and took notes as I read her each card and explained it a little. Occasionally she asked a probing question, and she feverishly took notes, asking me to pause from time to time so she could catch up. This took us two full one-hour sessions, over two days. These are the notecards I read her, along with my elaboration for each one: I feel like I'm smarter than almost everyone else—I feel like most other people don't make any sense. The things they do seem idiotic to me. They seem like foreign creatures, like one of us is alien. Like I'm humoring people, and I'm funneling and filtering and translating myself down just so that I can communicate with almost everyone. My native language would be completely incomprehensible to them. It makes sense. It just doesn't make sense to them. From this, they make the incorrect conclusion that I am "crazy" or there is something wrong with me. But just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it doesn't make sense—it means *you don't understand it*, which is entirely different. I abandon cars—I've thrown away a lot of things, ok? I used to have a normal number of things, kitchenware, chairs, desks, tables, bookshelves, clothes, *food*—stuff like that. And I used to paint. One time I mailed all my paintings *plus the contents of my spice rack* to an art dealer in New York who had never heard of me. I thought I was gonna get a show that way—Mary Boone was gonna get my stuff in my mail and see the spice rack and she was gonna get my artistic genius, you know—I mean how many times in the history of the world has an artist mailed an art dealer his entire spice rack?—probably only one. *Did she ever respond?* No, she never responded. But I had a lot of fun at Kinko's, in the middle of the night, buying packing materials—tubes, bubble wrap, tape, markers—I prob'ly made three trips to Kinko's that night, and the same guy was working the whole night. He'd be like, "Back again?" and I'd be like, "Yep!" happily buying *all the tubes they had*, *all the bubble tape*, *all the Sharpies*—*So you were manic?*—Well, I guess so, I didn't know what *manic was* at the time. *Did you have artistic genius? I mean I've seen the drawings on your walls, so I know you have talent, but did you think it was realistic that you might get the attention of a New York gallery?* Why not? I don't know that I have artistic *genius*—did I say that? But yeah, I thought I had a chance. I mean, back then I was selling paintings for a thousand dollars—to drug dealers, but still. *What else have you thrown away?* Gradually I threw away everything. People thought I was suicidal, of course, since they teach everyone that that's one of the signs of suicide—getting rid of all of your things. *Was it a sign of that for you?* Not consciously, not literally. But I was killing off parts of myself, killing off my *options*. And then I was running out of money in Los Angeles because I was spending all my student loan money on drugs and eating out in fancy restaurants..so I wasn't paying my rent and I knew I was going to get evicted. My girlfriend had left me at this point—well, that's not exactly true. I *kicked her out* of the fucking house because that bitch would not *shut the fuck up* for five minutes. It was like arguing was the only thing that gave her any pleasure with me. She did some crazy things like yelling at me in a restaurant—she was a very angry person, maybe even angrier than me—and I got up and I said, Rishi, don't ever yell at me again, in public, in private, anywhere. So anyway it was just me and the place was a mess so I took my essential things I wanted to save and I put them in a storage unit and I locked my door one last time and walked away. I hadn't paid rent in *months*. There were computers in there, printed out CAs all over the floor—*What's a CA?*—It's a cellular automata, one of the logic systems I like to play with and that I've discovered new types of—to me it looked like a reasonable person's workspace but Rishi did come over once and she said, "Wow, I bet this is what god's apartment looks like," because she could see the beauty in the CAs I had invented—it's kind of like looking at a fractal for the first time, you can recognize that there's complexity there that's infinite and fascinating. Except CAs are even more so. *Did you two have sex when she came over?* I doubt it, I was pretty fed up with her by then, we were past the point of hatefucking. One time she did come over after I had kicked her out—and that was like me yelling and screaming *Fuck you!* and he yelling and screaming *Fuck you too!* and then I pushed her—gently—out the door after I made her give me her key and I locked the door and sat there listening to her bang on the door yelling and she finally sat down on the carpet and cried. And she eventually left. I hoped the best for her but I could not live with that woman. Anyway she came over one time after we had broken up and I was about to go somewhere and I was like, Rishi, I have to go somewhere but I let her in anyway and she kissed me and the next thing you know we were bent over some cabinet in the kitchen and I was fucking her pussy so hard and pulling on that girl's hair *so hard* that my dick came out of her pussy and when it went back in it went into her ass. I was so mad I didn't even know the difference. I wasn't looking. It felt about the same. She was holding onto my hands tight and I came in that girl's ass. Then I saw that I had fucked her in the ass and she was like, That was nice—pulling her pants up—we never tried *that* before. What was I talking about? *You said you abandon cars.* Right, so I took everything I wanted to keep to a storage unit two blocks away. Two plastic totes—that's what I was down to. Two plastic totes. Then I got on a plane and visited my dad in Delaware—that was back when I was still welcome around him and his new wife. I edited my film school thesis project on my laptop. I talked to my film school friend Mike on the phone and he said, You wanna try heroin? I just went with my instinct—I said yes. It was always on my "never" list and the minute I agreed to try it, I got butterflies in my stomach as strong as being in love. Went home, went to my old apartment. The locks were changed and there was police tape over the door and an official notice stating the apartment had been reclaimed and all its contents were now the property of whatever gigantoid property management company company owned the Alto Nido. I rented a room in a crack motel, called Mike, and we did heroin. He shot me up for the first time. So I guess that's a story about *losing an apartment*. But I also lost my car. I stopped paying the parking pass and I would walk through the underground level it was on sometimes and talk to it—just quick affirmations and kind little prayers, saying I was sorry I had to leave you, Puma (which was her name), and I prayed that she would keep me safe on my new journeys. I wasn't really *fighting for my life*, I guess, back then. And one day when I walked down there, my Puma's parking spot was empty. And I said goodbye and walked on. *How many cars have you abandoned?* Three. I think. *Do you want to talk about them?* Not really. It's all pretty much the same story. I ran out of money or my car broke down and I didn't have enough money to fix it—but that's not true. Like, with this one car—it was a BMW, an old-ass BMW but I loved that car—it overheats, and I get off the highway and park it in this parking lot, at the very edge where I figure it won't be noticed for a while. Because I got paid in a few days, and I was planning to tow it and fix it—I had that plan in mind, but I was so scared they'd tow it before I had a chance to fix it. And then, when I got that check, I just gave up, I let it go. It was like this secret type of paralysis in my head—like not in my brain but in my *mind*. Like those times I get stuck walking and I can't take another step? It's like that, like there was part of my mind that I couldn't overcome, and that part of me kept me from *doing anything to fix the problem!* So there was *that* car, and one or two more, I can't remember. Maybe five total. *The real question, Matthew, is not a question of cars. You abandon cars. OK. That is weird, wasteful, maybe illegal. It is manic. But what you need to do is translate this idea to how you treat people..and see what the similarities and differences are.* Can't stand the idea of beheading—hate movies that contain beheadings..have read in a couple different sources that you are conscious for some number of seconds..three?..seven?..after your head is cut off..I obsess over the idea that I will be beheaded. *Would you ever want to decapitate someone?* No, but I would like to strangle someone. Bit through the skin of my own wrist—called the police and told them I had been bitten by a coyote—went to the hospital and got treated for a coyote bite. That's psychosis, right? *Right.* I killed a snake in the woods when I didn't have to—it snuck up on me and I pummeled it with this cinderblock that was behind the cabin. Its guts were coming out of the side of its beautiful black skin and I hated every moment of doing it—but I was *compelled*, I had to kill it once it scared me. I didn't want it to scare anyone else. I felt horrible, killing that living thing, and seeing the details of how it died, with this ground meat-looking stuff coming out of its scales and its skin and it was writhing and twisting in pain and I finally beat it to death with a branch to put it out of its struggle. I had blood all over my hands and my face and this girl came out of the woods and said, "Are you ok?" I fed one snake to another—put them in the same cage knowing they were a cannibalistic species. My favorite one died. I felt horrible. It makes me ill now. It's one of the worst things I've ever witnessed, and it was my fault. I don't keep pets anymore because I'm afraid of what I'll do to them and I remember this girl Charisma that I used to like to fuck..she was real violent with her animals and it used to disturb the hell out of me but I never said anything 'cause they were hers and it was her business. She used to have a really nice pussy before she had babies. Fixated on the idea of electrocution—was shocked plugging in a clock radio when I was a kid and ever since have been terrified of dying by electrocution..have dreams of my mother being struck by lightning..yeah, I think that's the worst dream I ever had, of my mother dying by natural electrocution..she was on a hill, on a cross, and I saw her face at the moment of death and I can still scare myself by bringing up that memory. Push/pull repulsion/attraction to electrocution murder stories—like that of Gary M. Heidnik—*I don't know him*—Well he's a sick fuck, don't bother. Unless you want to have bad dreams. I don't see myself doing what he did, but I feel what I think is an unnatural fascination with this man and his actions..and not just a fascination, but I feel an *understanding* and a *sympathetic resonance* with him..I'm not actually interested in murder. Partially because I'm a kind, empathetic person (most of the time..or..with most people) and in my experience so far, with people I love, I would never want to cause them pain..but with people I hate, who have crossed the line with me, I'm not sure I'm so kind after all, because with some people, I perceive that the only barriers I would have to killing them would be incarceration, reputation, and the physical dirtiness of it..there is nothing attractive to me about having body parts stowed around my kitchen..*So you're saying if murder was less* dirty*, you would be more likely to do it?*..it more depends on the *freshness* of the body..it's not about *blood*..I *like* blood..but where I find it exciting to think of Heidnik electrocuting women in his basement, he also boiled a woman's head in a pot on his stove, which I find pointless. *Why is boiling a woman's head pointless but electrocuting her not pointless?* Because electrocuting a woman is an emotional activity—there's an emotional connection—where boiling a woman's head would not be an emotional act (at least for me). *Would you ever electrocute a man?* No, I don't think that would be exciting. I used to steal notes—in school. Elementary and middle school. My cousin—who now teaches at Columbia—he did it first but I took it to the extreme. He showed me this shoe box where he kept notes written by girls in his classes. This was before cell phones, so girls would write notes about all their super sexy special topics of conversation, social news, gossip. It's a total violation. *It's a total violation*, Dr. Meggs echoed. I know, I said. *That's probably what you enjoyed about it.* Maybe, maybe. But I went to Houdini-style lengths to collect notes and *know about girls' lives*. I went in their desks, their purses, their pockets, hand in stealth mode, *stuck my hand in their pockets* so slowly they couldn't notice and I didn't just have a *box* of notes, I had a whole *crate*. It was a way to be inside girls before I was ever physically inside girls. *Hey,* I'm *the psychiatrist here.* Heh. *I do think it was a way for you to gain intimacy, but a* forced *way, and it wasn't really intimacy 'cause it wasn't two way.* I nod. Dr. Meggs says, *I think you already know that.* I nod some more. *But it was exciting, wasn't it, to have access to someone else's thoughts. Maybe what was even more exciting to you than knowing their gossip was that you violated them, violated their privacy. Do you think that might be true?* I think you're right on, Dr. Meggs, and that's a perfect segue to our next topic. Compulsively masturbate with girls' panties—I mean girls I like, I ask them for their panties and bras and they give them to me, and I use them to cum..but I also sneak into girls' rooms who aren't my girlfriend and steal or borrow their panties and imagine fucking them and think what their pussies must be like while I rub their panties on my cock and I cum so quick. *I'll tell you right now that is how many serial killers get started, by breaking into strangers' houses and masturbating with their clothing. You need to know that. That is a sort of classic first step for serial murderers*—*serial killers. The behavior ramps because it isn't satisfying so it becomes abduction and rape. I'm just telling you this because I think it might be useful for you to know.* I know. I've read about that in true crime books by FBI criminal profilers. *See, there again you're marking your own test. You're playing along the edge of right and wrong and you have read the manuals describing each, so you know what you're doing—you know where you fall on a certain spectrum. And yet you're standing at the hole..you have chosen to stand on the edge of a hole where on one side is safety*— For me? *For you and for everyone who knows you. And on the other side is the Mariana Trench. I assume you've heard of that.* Yes. It's the deepest part of the ocean. *Let's go to the next card.* Obsessed with virginity—I think I'm growing out of this one, I don't think it's worth mentioning. *Before you grew out of it, what was the content?* Um..being obsessed with having sex with virgins. *Have you ever had sex with a virgin?* No. *Well that's where the fascination comes from.* Yeah, but I'm not as into this as I used to be. I deconstructed the idea of my own virginity before I first had sex and that experience leads me to believe that having sex with another person who is a virgin would be a non-experience..or could be..just that it wouldn't necessarily be a big deal like my mind used to think it would be. Obsessed with vaginal blood, periods—What can I say? I like pussy blood. *What about it?* It just seems like such a special experience that women get to have. I honor it. I worship it, even. It's holy to me. *In a sexual way.* Absolutely. In a sexual way. I'm obsessed with stories of torture murderers—one story especially about a man/woman couple in the southwest who abducted women and restrained them on a table and kept them alive for months. They used medical instruments to torture them via their genitals and sensitive parts..they would drug them and the women would wake up in this shipping container that had been converted into a sex torture cell and there would be a recording the couple would play..without the victim seeing their captors..and the recording would explain to them that they had been detained for use as a sexual toy and that their body would be used for the sexual gratification of the couple, then the woman would be tortured sexually, and finally killed. The recording actually said: *You will die in this room*..isn't that fucked up? But I have to admit, I would like to have a woman strapped to a gurney and have complete control over her, for pleasure and pain..I saw this show called *Most Evil* and they measured brain responses to serial killers versus normal people while showing them various stimuli..it turns out that some people *can only be turned on* by someone else's pain, by someone else's suffering. That's not the case for me..I'm turned on mostly by seeing a woman cum, especially if I'm helping it to happen. But I can't deny that I'm also turned on by seeing a woman's helplessness, seeing someone completely used up for someone else's pleasure. I don't think I could ever actually rape somebody, I doubt I'd be able to get it up in the presence of someone else's real distress. But I can enjoy watching the violent rape of a young woman by, say, her father..and I know that's *transgressive* but I can't honestly say I think it's *immoral* in every case. Obsessed with choking during sex—I have of course (as safely as possible) choked and been choked by girlfriends to intensify the moment of orgasm..but it's more than that..it's the desire to kill a person at the moment of orgasm. I want to choke a girl to the point of unconsciousness and fuck her and cum in her while she's unconscious. I want to see her lifeless face bob up and down with the pressure of my dick and pretend she's dead and I know she would want me to keep enjoying her body even if she was dead. I'm getting an erection just telling you this. I would like to be killed by my dad—I told him this once when we went camping together..that was one of the last times we saw each other. I don't think he appreciated the symbolism of this act, but to me it was the most meaningful thing we could do together. He clearly hated me, or didn't know how to love, or just didn't want me around, so I thought we could combine his love of power tools with my dual desires *to die* and *to do something meaningful with my dad*, and he could cut my head off with a Skilsaw and we would both be done with each other. He didn't seem to know how to respond to my suggestion—which was genuine—but he's not very smart, so it was unreasonable for me to expect him to converse on that level. I don't believe everyone is subject to the same morality—*Yes, I think I read something about that on your admitting chart. You said, "..there is a different morality for more enlightened people." What did you mean by that? I can see how that would be an idea you'd want to keep to yourself*—*many people would find that idea frightening. From a bipolar point of view, it may simply be an example of grandiosity, but I'd like to hear more of what it means to you.* Um. People who can't or won't *even conceptually* play with thoughts outside their moral and cultural safety zones bore the hell out of me. I'm not sure I can say it more clearly than that. [Omitted](#)—I told Dr. Meggs that I had never told anyone this, and I told her my absolute darkest secret, something that I had kept to myself my whole life since it happened (until this moment), and which, if told in public, could send me to jail for decades..it is criminal..it was unintentional..but it was deadly for at least one person (probably two) and I somehow escaped alive..this action of mine has given me guilt enough to last until I, too, someday die. At the end, I placed the last notecard in my *done* pile and said: "That's it." I was expecting her to tell me what it all meant, to tell me that I could never leave the Refuge, that I had the signs of a killer written all over me, but all she said was: "Is this making you feel better, to tell me these things?" ### 106 I was surprised. I said, "Yes." And Dr. Meggs said, "Some of the things you've told me, I'm recording in my personal notes, but I'm not going to include those things in your Refuge chart..because..I don't want the other staff to see them and..they aren't of any use in terms of your treatment for bipolar or the psychosis, ok?" I nod, worried eyebrows. Dr. Meggs puts her hand on my knee briefly, then retracts it. She cocks her head to the side. "What are you worried about?" My eyes are tearing up. I shrug, wipe one eye on my shirt. "Matthew, I think you're scared of your own thoughts. I'm going to be very unprofessional with you and tell you that some of what you've said scares me. I'm trusting you not to tell anyone that I told you that." "I won't." "I know. I trust you. You're a very sincere and gentle person. I'm supposed to keep a certain distance from you but you're such a gracious person and, without crossing the line yourself, you're very inviting. So it's hard to maintain that distance with you, because *I* can trust *you*, too, not to abuse me if I cross that line with you—and by that I mean if I let down my defenses by being more honest with you than I would with a normal patient. It's not a psychiatrist's job to say *the truth* as she sees it, to a patient—it's her job to say what's helpful to the patient to help them get well. Do you understand the distinction?" "Yes." "Of course you do. This is what I have to tell you about your scary thoughts: thoughts and dreams are almost the same thing. We all have bizarre thoughts from time to time—I have them, everyone does. But where I might have a bizarre thought when I'm watching TV, my thought just comes and goes. I don't *live in it*. But because of that psychosis—that blurry line you have between *what is real* and *what is imagined*—you *stay* with those thoughts more than a normal person. And you seem to have more of those bizarre thoughts and more variety in those thoughts. Your mind is a busy place." "You can tell?" I laugh. "It's obvious, yes. And..for now I'd like to have a talk that stays between you and me." "Ok." "But I promise you, if I see any signs that you are a danger to anyone—including yourself—I will keep you safe. Do you trust me?" "I do." "Good. Now, some of the thoughts you told me are very disturbing. But just because you have a dream you raped someone doesn't make you a rapist." "Why is my mind focused on such horrible things?" "I don't know. I suspect your relationship with your dad plays a major role. And the loss of your girlfriend—that is very sad, I'm sorry. And that has to have been a very traumatic event for you." I nod, my eyes tearing up again. "You're not a violent person, Matthew. I think you have the potential to be. I think *at times* you have been, like with the killing of the snake in the woods and the other snakes. That combined with your love of fire as a child and the fact that you were a late bedwetter—although neither of us knows *how* late..we'll have to ask your mother for that. But there is something called the Macdonald triad or the sociopathy triad—" "You think I'm a sociopath?" "No, actually, I don't. If I did and I felt you were dangerous I wouldn't let you leave. But you may have a very complex mind in which part of you *could be a sociopath* if you let it—but that part of you is not in control. I think it haunts you in the form of these bizarre thoughts you've been telling me about. However the controlling part of you, the major or more powerful part of you—and I have had many weeks now, several months?, to observe you—that major, controlling part of you is very kind, Matthew. I wish you could see yourself through my eyes, or the eyes of any of the staff here. You maintain decency with Faith when she flirts with you—but you don't cut her off. She needs you and you need her. You are the only truly bipolar patients on the ward. There's an example of a relationship where you have more power and could easily abuse that power—and others have abused their power with her before." "She told me." "What did she tell you?" "That she was raped. By—" "Let's not talk about who. I'm already overextended with you in terms of patient privacy and a couple other areas. But, look, do you ever touch Faith inappropriately?" "We hug secretly—intimately—sometimes..but I don't touch her inappropriately. I respect the abuse she's experienced and I maintain an awareness of that when I relate to her. But we do touch sometimes outside the bounds of Refuge rules—though not in an aggressive sexual way..on either of our parts, by the way." "See? Even a normal (psychologically healthy) heterosexual male would take advantage of Faith if given the chance..and she opens herself up to those chances. But—and now I'm going to tell you something that if you told anyone else I would kill you—Faith needs those secret hugs with a person who is responsible with her..that's part of her healing. You two are very good for each other, and that wouldn't be possible without your maturity with her. I see you set boundaries with her. They may not be the boundaries the Refuge has set for you, but you set just the right boundaries, in my opinion. So don't scare yourself so much. There's a lot going on in that mind of yours. But from what I can see you govern your own behavior remarkably well. I think we have your mom to thank for that. If your dad had been your only parent—" Dr. Meggs shakes her head. "—you might have turned into someone more ruled by your psychoses in terms of internal domination by these thoughts and in terms of external action based on those thoughts. Do you know what I'm saying?" "I believe I do." "Yes, I'm sure you do." "Well, yeah, it's just like from *Girl, Interrupted* when they're talking about ambivalence." "I've seen that movie but I don't know what you're referring to." "Winona Ryder says her favorite word is ambivalence and the head honcho psychiatrist says *The word suggests that you are torn..between two opposing courses of action*. And Winona says, *Will I stay or will I go?* And the psychiatrist says, *Am I sane or am I crazy?* And Winona says, *Those aren't courses of action*. And the psychiatrist says, *They can be, dear, for some*." Dr. Meggs looks at me like she's fascinated by this simple recitation from pop culture. "Exactly," she says. "There is some control in your case. And you are very lucky to have your mom. So thank her when you see her, ok? And remember, having a crazy thought doesn't make you crazy. You have enough *meta*, a dual process going on alongside your psychotic process, that you can sometimes tell whether a thought is real or not. Remember that movie, *A Beautiful Mind*, where he notices that the little girl never ages, and that's how he is finally able to do reality testing and know that the little girl isn't real?" I laugh/sob. "Yeah, I love that movie." "You're lucky—*you can do* that type of reality testing *sometimes*. Some people can't do it at all." I start to cry full on. "Thank you, Dr. Meggs." She gets up and moves the box of tissues to beside me on the bed. She puts her hand on my shoulder and I start to cry harder. "We're gonna get you out of here, ok, Matthew? You're a kind, gentle, brilliant person and I think you've come to the end of Tyler 2's usefulness to you—don't you think so?" I nod and look at her through blurry eyes. She says, "Just like you find Sarah's thoughts disturbing, others may find some of your thoughts disturbing." "But what is disturbing?" I say. "Imagine a glass of water with a spoon in it. The water is still. You start stirring the water with the spoon. That's *disturbing* the water. There's no moralistic or judgmental way to think about *stirring* a glass of water being *disturbing* the water. But that's all disturbing is. It's not a moral concept. And I'll tell you this," I say, sniffling. "What?" my doctor says. I say, "If what you're doing is not disturbing, then what you're doing is nothing. We have a misleading set of connotations of the word 'disturbing' that makes this non-obvious. Think again of the glass of water. If you stir the water, you are disturbing it. If the water is not disturbed, then what are you doing? Disturbing is not a moral issue. It is an issue of content. Art or action that is not *disturbing* is art or action that is without content. Cries of 'crazy,' cries of 'weird,' are cries who come from people who are avoiding self-discovery (out of fear). That's ok, but let's call a spade a spade." I am choked up as hell at this point. Meggs says, "I get what you're saying. I do. I just want you to know that you have nothing to be afraid of. Even inside yourself. Those weird thoughts, they don't control you. They do control some people who have them—but in your case, probably because of your intelligence, along with a dose of your mother's influence, *you* control *them*. Nothing's going to take you over—you just have to live with a wilder mind than most of us. Put it in your books." "I do." "Ok. This conversation never happened, as far as I'm concerned." "Same here. Thanks for crossing the line." "Well, Matthew, you kind of deserved it." "Thank you Dr. Meggs." "And none of this will go in my report to the Refuge, alright?" I nod, hugging myself and rocking back in forth. "Get yourself a cup of water, get some sleep, and wake up in the morning ready to work on your discharge plan, ok?" She stands in the doorway. I can see her facial expression now. Compassion. Love. We've gotten too close, she's helped me all she can, and it is time for me to stop learning on her and leave the hospital. I give my doctor the thumbs up and a teary smile. And she leaves. "Oh yes," she leans back in the door. "I suggest you do *not* apply for disability because I fear companies will have a way to research that you've had it in the past and they will discriminate against you for having taken it, even though that's illegal." She leans back out. - - - - I think my doctor did not understand that with all my skills and my intelligence, I was not much more capable of taking care of myself than Faith. That rating system they have, 0 to 100 points, that says how capable you are of being independent or how necessary it is that you stay in a hospital..I think I got higher ratings than Faith because I was more intelligent. But intelligence doesn't mean capability in the world. I mean just because I can talk intelligently doesn't mean I can *live*. After the doctor left, as I thought about those two minds of mine, one who was dominating the other, I remembered thinking at a very early age (third grade or before) that the measure of a person I valued most was the distance between the two concepts they could hold in their mind that were that farthest away from each other. I wonder if this is a scary definition for most people, even a psychotic one. Because that great distance between those two far-apart concepts held by one person appear as inconsistency. Can I post a picture of a woman with no arms and no legs being fucked by a machine, a twist of hair falling over her forehead, her body beautiful, her breasts perfect, perfect face, and then post a quote by a feminist saying that men trying to bring levity to rape by making jokes about it is unwanted since rape has already come to the level of levity by our treatment of it in actual fact, when I have written a book from the point of view of a rapist, in a ridiculous dark comedy style, a satire? I have..I have done all those things. What will my young cousin think of me if she sees these distant stars held in a single constellation? Will she know that a person can be so broad? Or will she be so narrow that she will be forced to judge me in order to not think more deeply about herself? There is no such thing as contradiction—there is only such a thing as small-mindedness. And it is a mistake to think that someone else's way of looking at a thing is the same as yours—a very big mistake. When you judge me for looking at a sick painting, a taboo or transgressive piece of art, you are really only revealing that *your* way of viewing that painting is sick, that *you* view it as taboo or transgressive. You might think I'm looking at a piece of child pornography, when what I'm looking at is a picture of my joyful younger self in the bath, and by looking at that picture, I am gaining a sense of enlightenment at the reminder of how happy I have been in this life. If you say *that's sick*—that only indicates that *you* are sick. ### 107 I'm at the nurses' station ranting at Michelle. "If American companies would work with differently abled people, then maybe the government wouldn't need a disability program. Right? See?? What if the attitude in the country was: *Everyone can do something. There's room for all kinds. Let's find a way to work together!* But no, no, that's not how we think. For instance, I have a mind that still works fairly well at some things..I could potentially work as a programmer for four hours a day or less. I'd need to lie down for ten minutes out of each hour—" "Matthew. Matthew. I think you need to calm down." "I don't need to calm down. I'm calm. See?" "I think you need to *slow* down then." "I'm slow." I pound on the nurses' station countertop. "The thing is—" "Tell me." "I am. Lynne told me that even *this*—this psych ward—is too high stimulation for me. That there's too much going on inside my brain." "I know. I'm lookin' at it right now." "But companies aren't motivated to *include everyone*—they're motivated to *make profit*. Different is bad, cookie cutter is good. People are down on the government for providing disability money to people *companies won't hire*. Well, what's the other option: We allow companies to decide who lives and dies, based on who they will and won't hire? It's easy to consider it a waste of money to help the needy *until you become the needy*—and that can happen to *any*one, at *any* time, regardless of their work ethic or their effort or their quote unquote *net worth*. Americans are over-focused on the idea that they're individuals—the individual innovation of Larry Ellison, hard work and dedication—" "Who's Larry Ellison?" "He's one of the top American billionaires, consistently, according to the Forbes list. Larry Ellison—right—created the Oracle database and made him a long-running member of the top ten quote unquote *wealthiest* people in the world? Simple as that, yes? Well, no. His work was based on the work of others, developed with funding from the CIA, and then he started his own company based on that work paid for by the CIA, and *then* became one of the richest people in the world. Then Oracle was sued by the US Justice Department for defrauding the federal government for about a billion dollars. So, Ellison's story is one of innovation and hard work, yes, but also one of stolen innovation and massive fraud." "Matt. Slow down." "The point is—" "Slow." "The point is Ellison didn't get rich by himself any more than Howard Hughes or the Koch Brothers. They all inherited or stole ideas and money that we credit them with on Forbes' ridiculous lists equating *mere* money and *mere* property to the *esoteric* concept of *wealth*. My point is they don't exist in a vacuum, and neither do the homeless and mentally ill. The poor. You think those people are personally responsible for not fitting in with society—for not having a job, which is almost universally considered the mark of success in this country. Get a good job, make your momma proud. It's ridiculous. I've been in psych hospitals with schizophrenic people who cannot just *get a job*. They never will be able to. And I've been in psych hospitals with bipolar people who will never *get a job*—they can't, no company would hire them!! But does that mean they should die, should have nowhere to live, be poor? Why does having a mental disability that makes you unattractive to profit-motivated corporations mean that you shouldn't have a curved-screen TV and a nice apartment and the ability to live as independently as possible and have friends and loves and close ties to family? Because they didn't *earn* it? They *can't* earn it." "I'm asking you to slow down or else I'm putting you in ALSA." "I'll slow. I'll slow." And I do. "I'm asking you to hear my story, which is this: I used to be able to earn it. I had bipolar then. It stood out to everyone but me. But I made good money writing software for health insurers who later wouldn't cover me because of my mental illness. Think about that: *I* helped write the software so an insurance company could exist and then when I needed help from them—insurance coverage—they refused to sell it to me. How does that honor the web of interconnectedness we all find ourselves in? And now I can't work at all. I live with my mom. My various mental disorders may shorten my life by *decades*—statistically *they will*. Does Larry Ellison deserve a better life than me—more *rights* than me because of his billions? The CIA funded the initial development of Oracle and then Ellison took that work and formed his own company. What if I had gotten that kind of help from the government? Might my life be different now? "People who are against food stamps and welfare and disability say: *It's not fair.* Well, wake the fuck up because corporate subsidies and special treatment for the rich and pardons for politicians aren't fair either. But these middle-class dupes don't bother yourself with *all* unfairness—they believe the system works for them. It doesn't. It keeps them working—at a fragile surface tension—with just enough material distractions that they remain immobile politically, but continue to pay taxes. They're angry when a homeless person gets a free cup of coffee, but they don't give a shit that an upstanding-sounding company like Oracle takes a billion dollars from American taxpayers and is allowed to continue to operate. Or when ExxonMobil deceives the entire planet about climate change, intentionally fucking up this delicate ball of blue and green that we're living on in the middle of a bunch of empty space!! Or when the US Government knowingly allows people to continue to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes when science has known for a long time that certain of our illegal drugs are less dangerous than our legal ones!! What kind of fucked-up morality do these people have?" "Matthew, see that couch over there? Go lie down for fifteen minutes. I'm timing you..starting now." - - - - That night, after telling Dr. Meggs my moonwalk, I had a dream I cleared all the biting dogs (a recurring dream symbol) out of my house and they thanked me for my mercy of not killing them. And not only did I get them out; I changed the lock on the door—replaced it with a fresh, secure one—and locked it for good. ### 108 This time I was inpatient in Tyler 2, we could all feel a shift. My doctor and I knew we had to do something to break the cycle of me going to Birches, them releasing me to Tyler 2, Tyler 2 releasing me to Birches, etc. As David the RN said, "You've learned all you have to learn from Tyler 2." Dr. Meggs spoke about it from a different angle: "Some people," she said, "develop a dependency on the hospital. They become unable to live outside the structure of these walls." Then she made a pouty face. "We don't want that to happen to you." I nod. This is part of what made me willing to go live with Leona, my sister in Portland, and part of why my doctor liked that plan. I develop the plan over several days and several conversations with my sister. She says they are willing and excited to see me. Portland is a long way from Brattleboro, Vermont, but I believe I can get a job there doing software work and neither of my parents are offering me a place to stay so it seems like a good (and really my only) option with family. I'll always sting from the fact that neither my mom or my dad offered me their place as a transitional living space after I had spent three months in psychiatric hospitals. I mean, if there's a time for a parent to step in and help, it would see to be this. My little sister Leona offered to help, even when she and her husband probably didn't have the resources to follow through with their offer, and I will never forget that. I began to detach, psychologically, from the crew of patients currently in Tyler 2. My life would be in Portland now, and it was time to build those relationships, not the ones here in the Refuge. I remember one day all of us being in the lunchroom seeing Sue through grated windows as she left with her girlfriend, who was going to let her come live in Massachusetts with her, give Sue's addiction and their relationship one more chance. Sue relapsed by shooting cocaine and when I saw her in Tyler 2 this last time we were so happy to see each other! She was doing some sort of art project and had paint all over her face and sweatshirt. She relapsed with that girl Winehouse me and Sue were in Tyler 2 with. Seeing Sue go was a melancholy mix of feelings: hope for her, sadness she was going, and a realistic prediction that things wouldn't work out in Massachusetts with her girlfriend any better than they had worked out here, over and over, in Brattleboro. But I hoped I was wrong. - - - - Since I knew this would be my last time at the Refuge, and my last time seeing Dr. Meggs—my best psychiatrist yet—I asked her if she would write down for me some key thoughts she thought would be helpful for me to remember in the future, based on her psychiatric analysis of me. She agreed, and in one of our last meetings she whipped this little beauty out of her brain, improv style. I will explain it to you, as she explained it to me. *Ok, I'm going to draw you a skeleton upon which I'm going to hang some ideas about your mentality. This isn't a complete picture of you—there are of course the tendons and the muscles and the eyes, and those things are just as much a part of* you *as this skeleton, but for now we're just talking about your mind.* Ok. *First you have an organic layer. This is your OCD, your depression, and a weak tendency toward psychotic thinking. Those are features of your brain*—*you can't* think *your way out of them. Is this all making sense so far?* Yes, perfectly. Thank you for doing this. *You're welcome. You don't have to thank me so much. It's not that you can't deal with OCD in therapy, but it's a brain thing, it's well understood, it has to do with too much communication between the Leonagdala and your frontal lobe via the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is why we had such good results treating you with the clomipramine..except the clomipramine caused you to hallucinate, so..you have been marked as having an allergy to it in this hospital. But it was so effective that I am recommending that you*—*at some point in the future*—*you might try it again* at a small dose*. Small dose.* *For your depression, Lexapro seems to work fine. Are you having any side effects?* No. *Good. So stay on a small dose. Ten milligrams. More could make you manic, then you'll end up back in here..and we don't want that. Don't take that the wrong way.* Oh no. It's fine. I'm ready to leave. *I feel you are too, Matthew. Now your psychosis*—*you remember, is an inability to draw a focused line between what is real outside your mind and what your mind makes up. Based on your reports, Risperdal has sharpened your thinking, you said you feel solid and normal*—*more than usual at least*—*on the Risperdal?* Yes, it's my best drug yet. *Ok, good.* She smiles. *That's the organic stuff. Then there's a psychodynamic or therapeutic layer. This is your moonwalk. It has mostly to do with your relationship with your dad. Listen to me, because how you handle this layer*—*and this is something you* can *change in therapy and your own thinking, thought behavior, outward behavior, and so on*—*how you choose to handle this layer could make a great difference in your life, if you choose to handle it differently than you have been up to this point in your life.* No pressure. *No, there* is no *pressure. There are only choices.* Then her face gets real serious and she looks me in the eyes. *Your first relationships learned from your dad have given you a fixation on* status *versus* humiliation*. You remember me talking to you about this before? Your language, your concepts, are* crawling *with ideas of status. You are a classifier among classifiers*—*I have never met anyone as focused on and aware of* status *as you are. For you a thing can't just be a thing, it's a thing in a category..or, really, for you, it's a thing in* all sorts of categories*.* Yep, that seems like me. *Honestly, I don't see how you can do it all. I mean I'm a doctor and I'm trained to diagnose*—*which is a type of categorical thinking, dividing symptoms into diagnostic categories*—*and you're running circles around* me*.* Yeah, but when I run in circles I just fall down. *Well, that may be true, and I'm trying to help you fall down* less*, but Matthew, you've diagnosed things about* yourself *quicker and better than I can.* I marked my own test. *What does that mean?* I took this test..in the fifth grade..I marked every answer I got wrong with a little symbol beside the question. *So you had the option to score perfectly, but there were questions* that for you could go either way*.* Right! No one's ever understood that before. You're the first person to get that. See, because as I've gotten older—but it's always been the case for me since at least the fifth grade..like..the designers of multiple choice tests *think that there's only one correct answer* to each question. But there's not! Maybe to the simple minded there is! But *don't you see*: *the only thing you're testing* in these classic types of tests like multiple choice, fill in the blank, or matching one set upon another..the *only thing* you're testing is whether the test taker knows what *the test maker* thinks is the right answer. That's wholly different than testing what *the best answer* might be. And, in truth, the more you think about a question, the less likely it is to *have* a single answer. So tests have become increasingly hard for me, because they are, in effect, useless. *There's a lot there and I really can't express how much I would like to discuss these issues and dynamics you're touching upon, but I have to get to my next patient at the end of this hour so I am going to have to let you know that I have heard what you've said and tell you that*—*honestly, as your doctor, I'm not sure if what you just told me is an indication of your high intelligence or your psychosis..or both. I'm sorry, Matthew, I don't mean to treat you badly but unfortunately in the context of* Tyler 2 *I don't have time to discuss that further with you right now.* You're not treating me badly. *Well, treating you* curtly*.* It's fine. It's not a problem. *Ok, back to your moonwalk. I believe you are quite focused on status*—*that of yourself mostly, but also that of others*—*and you think of much of the world in terms of a competitive interplay between* status *and* humiliation—*one* or *the other. You learned to be humiliated at a young age by your father. Some of your moonwalk shows that for you, sexuality may need to involve humiliation. All this is just my theory, ok, and it's not set in stone*—*these are things about yourself that you can change. Ok? Matthew. How are you doing over there?* Yeah, I'm here, it's just hard to hear some of these things. *Do you want me to stop?* No, please keep going. *Do you want a tissue?* No thank you. *You prefer your sleeve?* Highly. *Are you comfortable with this discharge plan?* My mom already bought the plane ticket—or somebody bought it, but—the strings are being pulled and I'll fuck everybody else up if I change the plan. Plus I don't want to be here anymore, myself. *I understand that. You've been through a lot here. Can I give you a piece of advice?* Yes, feel free. *Don't think about anybody else. Think about* you*.* Ok, I'll take it under advisement. *Good*, she says genuinely. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that that way. You deserve better treatment from me—you've done nothing but help me. *Matthew. Go easy on yourself. People are imperfect and you're one of us, too, ok?* I laugh. Ok. *There may be an element of shame or guilt in your sexuality because of the early humiliation with your father, but I don't know, we haven't talked much about your real sexual relationships*—*mainly you've told me fantasies about what you'd* like to do *to women and I'm not sure if they're fantastical* play *for you or more realistic things you actually want to do or have done.* I don't know either. *It's ok. Let's move on. Staying in the psychodynamic/therapeutic layer, you display a consistent pattern of questioning what is genuine versus what is artificial. Remember the day you told me that you weren't sure that I was a real doctor and that you thought everyone was just* playing a role—*you're not* really *a patient in a psychiatric hospital, you're just* playing *one.* I still feel that way. *Do you feel a sense of depersonalization?* Yes. Why? *It's just a theory I'm working on. But I'm not sure yet. Do you remember the earliest time you felt that way?* Honestly I feel compelled to tell you about a time when I was preschool or kindergarten aged and I was at church and no one was looking and I pulled a booger out of my nose. I thought it was a booger. But it wasn't. It was two blood vessels—one red, one blue—and they were twisted around each other. It was this very large for something that had come out of my nose. And I was convinced I had pulled out part of my brain through my nose—like the Egyptians—and ever since then I've been convinced that I'm missing part of my brain because I digested it. *Have you ever told that to anyone before?* I have never *told* that to anyone, but I wrote it in one of my books. But I'm pretty sure no one ever read the book, so in actuality I'm pretty sure that you're the first person to ever hear that story. Why do you ask? *Because I'm trying to determine of the story is real.* Tough, isn't it? *I think one of the saving graces on your psychodynamic/therapeutic level is that you have a tenderness and a generosity within you whose etiology is most certainly your sisters and your mom.* What is etiology? *It means* the cause*. I think you are very lucky to have had them.* Yeah, I know, I'd be fucked without my mom—my sisters too. *Now there's an existential level.* Thank you for doing these notes. *You're very welcome, Matthew. You're fascinated with life versus death, what it means to die. Your experimentation with feeding one snake to the other*—*the cannibalistic snakes?* The California king snakes. *Yes I really think your experimentation there is a part of your fascination with life and death and that it's not*—*at least I don't think so at this time*—*I don't think that's a sign of sociopathy in your case. I'm pretty sure of that, actually.* My favorite one died. *What?* When I put them in the cage together, my favorite one is the one who lost. My favorite one died. I sniffle. *You remember the Macdonald triad we discussed?* Setting fires, bedwetting, killing animals? *It's* obsession *with setting fires,* late *bedwetting, and* cruelty *to animals, but yes. The fact that you're crying because your favorite snake was the one who lost the contest between what are*—*if I recall correctly*—*cannibalistic snakes?* Yes, they're cannibalistic. *But they would have done that to each other naturally in the wild.* But they didn't do it naturally to each other in the wild. *I* did it to them. *Well maybe it was a mean thing to do. Maybe it was a horrible thing to do. Maybe it was a tad bit cruel. But let's use Ted Bundy as an example. At eight years old he was killing animals, dissecting them, and setting them on fire. I don't think he was crying about it after he did it, either. You have a fascination with death*—*and with* life*, I believe!*—*and make no mistake, you push the boundaries, sometimes very hard. But how long ago was this snake thing?* Six years. *Six years ago and you're you're crying about a snake dying! Most kids forget about a goldfish in a week!* I let out a humongous sob. Dr. Meggs holds a tissue out for me but I decline, stick with my shirt instead. You can never be sure where those tissues have been. *I'm sorry*, Dr. Meggs says. *It's ok*—*you can cry about that snake all you want. But the fact that you even had a favorite snake in the first place, and that you're crying about is six years later..you're not a serial killer, ok? You very well may have* chosen *not to be one. You have some bizarre thoughts. You have* very *bizarre thoughts. But you do something creative with them*—*you* write*. You do* safe *things with them*—*you go to the hospital when you need help. So your responses and coping mechanisms are healthy, so far. Just keep doing what you're doing, take care of yourself, stay sober, stay away from drugs that are bad for you, and the only other thing that's key to you on the existential level is that you're lonely and depressed. You need to be around people*—*they will check your psychotic reality against the real reality just by the nature of social interaction. You know, we can* all *drift into la-la land, but most people have social structures like a spouse and kids and a job. You don't have that structure to create responsibilities that keep you grounded*—*it's just you, and you alone, floating around in space, or the sky, or the sea, or whatever. So don't let yourself get too lonely*—*be with family or friends. Take your meds. You need to be in therapy*—*for the rest of your life. And you're probably going to be taking meds for the rest of your life, too, but don't look on it as a* bad *thing*—*it's just you doing what you have to do to keep yourself stable. Keep meditating*—*that seems to help. And on this question of SSDI. I wouldn't pursue it in your case. I know that by law employers aren't supposed to discriminate based on disability..but I wouldn't trust that. I don't know what all they can see when they do their background checks, but if you've received disability in the past, it could make it impossible for you to find a job. Is all that clear? I'm sorry, I have to run.* It's clear. I appreciate your explaining this to me. Dr. Meggs nods and gets up to leave. She picks up the paper she's been scribbling on from the bedside table of my hospital room. I say: Can I keep that? *You want to keep* this*?* If I can. *You're welcome to, it's just..if I had known you were going to* keep *it I would have typed it up or something.* This is fine. *You can read my handwriting?* Oh yes, it's very clear. You have have very clear handwriting for a doctor. *Meggs laughs and shakes her head. She folds the page in half and gives it to me.* This way I won't forget. *Well, if you think it will be helpful.* I think it will. You've been a great psychiatrist. I—well it's my nature to say this in a formal and convoluted way..but I'll just say: Thank you. *You're very welcome, Matthew. You've been a joy to work with.* - - - - Michelle had suggested at one point that Dr. Meggs was "keeping [me](#) around for another week." "Oh, yeah, does she think it's unsafe to release me into the wild?" "No, I think she likes you." "What do you mean?" "I mean I think she likes your company and she's keeping you around for another week because you make Tyler 2 a better place for her to work. She likes to see you. She likes to talk to you. We just got out of team meeting. She's not ready to let you go." I smile. "Well I like her, too. She's a good psychiatrist." "But it's more than that. You two click." "That's true. We keep it professional but, yes, I like her as well. She's smart, she's really smart. And she cares." "You need somebody like that to talk to, don't you—somebody who's smart and who cares." "I guess I do." "Well she thinks *you're* smart. You impress her. She's impressed as hell that you diagnosed your own allergy to clomipramine." I keep it to myself that I have since come to the conclusion that my clomipramine diagnosis was incorrect. "We're a team," I say. "The other thing," Michelle says, "is I think she likes to see things go well for a patient once in a while." "Is *this* going well?" "Compared to most people?—Yeah!" ### 109 I wrote this on December 8, 2011: > When I'm sitting, I'm imagining a fantastical event thinking how I would phrase a description of it in a book > That's highly un-present. > > ——— > > more fast-moving > > white clouds on blue Liliana read this after asking to see my book. (Remember, she's the PTSD dissociator who was brought in in handcuffs that that stupid kid Ross likes to imitate?) Liliana read my book. We talked for a moment. Then she had a seizure. She stood up, started to seize, then fell to the floor right at my feet. Chad grabbed my pen to stab himself in the wrist—he was poised with my Pilot Precise Rolling Ball V5, which has a very long needle-like protrusion at its tip..he was poised with that above his wrist, where all those little veins are. I reached out and firmly took it from him in one motion. "Give it to me!" That from Chad. He needed to self-harm to have some control in a scary situation. We all yelled for help and Dr. Meggs was on the spot, asking us questions, taking metrics on Liliana's body and clearing the space. Meggs asked, "Did she start to seize before the hit the ground, or did she hit the ground and start to seize?" I answered. "She seized first and that made her fall." Then I left the room because I didn't want to be in the way. The health tech who I wasn't a big fan of for calling me a pedophile (or likening me to Lewis Carrol or whatever) said I saved the day by preventing Chad from stabbing himself in the wrist—suddenly I was a hero. Bullshit. I'll never let Chad stab himself in the wrist. That's not heroism. In a psych ward, that's just doing your job. - - - - And on December 9, Full moon: > Thinking of the stars, and moon, and earth, and sun, and how few revolutions, up there, it takes to spell out my life down hereMaybe there's nothing to worry about, about being inside a psychiatric hospital—and not much to celebrate in staying out of oneAnd maybe I can be at ease about the particularities of my life, knowing how many of us there are and how small we seem to the sky - - - - Hearing patients speculate how much it costs the Refuge to keep a patient in the hospital for a single day. People guess two-thousand dollars, one-thousand, other guesses. One of the mental health techs overhears this and says it's something more like ten-thousand a day per patient. None of us can believe this, but he says just look at all the staff..there's maybe three staff people per patient..so there's all their payroll..and there's the janitorial staff, the kitchen, security, building maintenance. "Don't forget we generate our own power here—we have our own power plant so if the town's power goes out we never lose power. Plus, the Refuge has to pay insurance out..on each of you." "Why?" a patient says. "So if you kill yourself," another patient says, "and your family sues the Refuge because they were supposed to be keeping you safe." "Is that true?" the original patient asks. "Yep," the mental tech says. "A lot of what we do around here is for the insurance companies." And as they went on about everything the Refuge has to do to get insurance against any of us killing ourselves, I thought of how stupid and wasteful this all was. Ultimately I would spend three months in the Refuge. If this mental health tech's figure of ten-thousand a day was twice whatever the actual figure was, I could live for a year outside the hospital on what it cost to keep me here for a week. I mean I know I have psychological problems and I'm psychotic and suicidal and shit, but half the reason I was suicidal was I couldn't find a suitable job and I was running out of money and was about to be homeless. Since I'm so abhorrent to society due to the fact that I refuse to break the law when my employer asks me to, maybe instead of spending whatever mountainous sum it must cost to keep a bipolar person like myself locked in a psych ward for three months out of the year, might society instead spend a small fraction of that to buy meager shelter, food, clothing, outpatient psychiatric care, and pharmaceuticals that make me less dangerous to myself and others? I think all that would be roughly equivalent to a couple of weeks in the joint—nothing compared to what Vermont Medicaid must have spent on me the year I tried to kill myself. ### 110 I saved my perfect wrist badge I had the front desk make me on the last night of my stay just so I'd have some nice quality memorabilia from my journey in Tyler 2. I didn't feel bad at all about getting a new bracelet made if someone was paying ten-thousand dollars a day to keep me here. I don't know exactly when, but somewhere in my series of inpatient psych hospital visits, I developed a sense of pride for my wrist bracelets—maybe not pride, maybe more like love. I kept them after I left the hospital, though after a few days or weeks outside, in the normal world, I would come to view old hospital identification bracelets as junk and throw them away. But at my last stay in the Refuge, knowing I was probably never going back there again..on my last night I went to the nurses' station and asked for a fresh one. I started to apologize to the nurse on duty, but he stopped me. "I get it," he said, and he printed me another one and put it in the plastic sleeve. I was planning on keeping that one forever as a souvenir. I thought I took it to Portland. But it's mysteriously gone. I probably decided, at some point (as I always do) to let go of my identity as a locked-ward psych patient, and threw it away. Or maybe the CIA stole it. (Just kidding—I think.) Thoughts like that I'm never really sure if they're true or if they're false. But there's nothing in me now that wishes I still had that bracelet. - - - - On my last night in Tyler 2 I was feeling generous so I decided to go to one of the always optional AA meetings led by Matt the spineless substance abuse counselor. There were only like five people in the whole meeting, including Matt, and I knew each of their history and knew that I had been to way more 12-step meetings than anyone there, so I decided to share first. And I shared kind of long—line ten, twelve minutes. I went into some past history. I used generic language—didn't mention drugs by name or anything. Then this psycho woman on a couch perpendicular to mine apparently has been holding it in and she turns to me and says: "You're glorifying!" And here was my thought process: This bitch can shut the fuck up 'cause I'm in the middle of my share. She'll get her share. And for now she can STFU and listen to whatever the hell I goddamn want to say. And I thought about telling her that, right in the meeting, in about those words. Then I thought: Why am I even in this meeting? I came in here to do Matt the spineless substance abuse counselor a *favor*. My share is a) a generosity, b) appropriate for an AA meeting. I don't need to expose myself to people who don't know what the fuck happens in an AA meeting who want to criticize my share. So I walked out. I just stopped speaking, stood up, and walked right out of that motherfucking room. And I didn't need to vent my anger, I didn't need to let everyone know how slighted I felt, I just needed to stop—for me—so I stopped. I could have argued with that bitch, I could have put her in her place and destroyed the sanctity of that entire so-called AA meeting. But instead of venting my anger on that..woman..for interrupting me, for incorrectly categorizing what I was doing as *glorifying*, I just got up and walked out of the meeting. Brilliant—a new choice for me. At the nurses' station, Michelle asked me if I was alright. Her face showed genuine concern. And I peacefully told her: "I don't like being interrupted when I am speaking in an AA meeting and a woman interrupted me while I was speaking so I decided not to participate anymore in that group." "Was it Kelly?" "I don't know—who is Kelly?" "Brown hair, red sweater." "Frizzy-hair bitch?" Michelle nodded. "She's carrying around a lot of repressed feelings. Of course I can't talk to you about another patient but I think if you get to know her you'll find out she's had a hard life." I tapped on the nurses' desk with the ball of my hand. "Well," I said, "I don't feel like getting to know someone who interrupts me while I'm sharing in an AA meeting." "What did you do?" "I didn't do anything. I just got up and walked out." "Good for you," Michelle says. "And you didn't get angry!" "Oh I'm angry. I'm angry." "But you didn't act on it. I see you making major progress. You're totally different than when you got here." That seemed like a bit of a stretch to me, but I don't argue with people paying me compliments. "Thanks Michelle. I think I'm gonna get a chocolate milk." "That sounds like an excellent coping mechanism," Michelle says. See, in the real world you just act on your cravings, or follow your schedule, or generally do what you like. But in here, in the psych ward, you learn that all of those behaviors are not as innocent as we think—they are *coping mechanisms* with which we constantly assuage ourselves in a world so hostile and so chaotic and truly so *evil* that if we didn't have chocolate ice cream and back rubs and junk food—not just the crazy people, but *everyone*—would flip the fuck out. - - - - That night I played Scattergories with a group of four, and we're all having fun and we are keeping score and I am just *dominating* the game which surprises me because I suck at trivia, crossword puzzles, and chess, and I don't even play games anymore. Someone comes by and says I have a telephone call..it's my sister. I tell them to keep playing without me. I go to the short hallway. There, Joanne and I have a half an hour conversation. Then I go back to the game table and I'm surprised to see they're still playing. And they all laugh, telling me that even after all those rounds they played without me, my score is still in the lead. Lol. I just laugh, because that seems impossible. And they all still want to keep playing, so I sit down and we play some more! ### 111 Michelle brings over my crisis plan. "I need you to fill this out sometime tonight and return it to the nurses' station." "Ok." "I don't want to interrupt your game. You all seem like you're having fun." "It's ok. I can do this at the same time." And I did. > **Tyler 2 Discharge and Crisis Plan** > > **Name:** Matthew Temple > > **Date:** December 14, 2011 > > **What are your early warning signs that you need to ask for help and/or practice skills you have learned.** Anger at self or others—this is not a yellow flag..it's red. Stress in unwanted relationships; participation in such. *[Obviously this refers to Gretchen. She didn't respect boundaries when I set them, I sent her mixed signals, and I didn't know how to get her out of my life—which is exactly what was needed, nothing less. This is especially hard in a small town.]* Stopping taking or modifying doses of any medication. Missing, avoiding, or holding back in therapy. Not hiking regularly and/or not exercising regularly. Getting very very lonely. Feeling bad or guilty about doing reasonable, nice things for myself. Allowing my bank account to be dangerously low. > **Who are the people who will help you and how can they help.** Sister Joanne Sister Leona Mom Sharon David (NA) Stripes 1.800.RETREAT 911 > I need support, listening, substance abuse talks, and medical help including psych and/or emergencies. > > **List positive ways you have dealt with stressful situations in the past.** > > Write about it. Talk with someone I can trust. Let it go. Call for help. > > **List the special coping skills you will use in a crisis situation.** > > Breathing meditation. Calling loved ones for help. Calling the Refuge or 911. > > **List places you feel peaceful, content, or safe.** My apartment *[which I knew I was getting evicted from so I don't know why I listed this]*. The Refuge (grounds or inside). Mt. Wantastiquet and Indian Pond. As a backup, my Mom or Leona's house. > **What are some affirmations you can use to feel better about yourself and the world.** > > It's important that I'm alive. It's meaningful that I'm alive. I deserve goodness in my life. I deserve a place to live. I deserve to live easily. I deserve to live peacefully. I deserve meaningful work. I deserve to love and be loved. My consciousness, my experience, is valuable and meaningful for its own sake. > > I am amazing. > > **What did you learn in treatment that you can take with you and apply to your recovery.** Breathing meditation is a way to practice living in the moment, to slow down and calm down, and something I will benefit from practicing regularly. I must take my suicidal thoughts seriously; they are not minor, they are not minimizable; they are real, and they are dangerous—dangerous enough to justify hospitalization, as a pre-emptive measure to avoid suicidal action. My anger must be handled in an equivalent manner to suicidal thoughts in (2); my homicidal thoughts must be taken seriously and handled similarly. This is the only crisis plan I kept from the Refuge. It is filled out in handwriting neater than I ever remember my handwriting being. It fills the space exactly—if there are five lines for an answer, my answer is five lines long. It is written in some type of art pen with a very fine tip. I can't tell exactly what pen it was but it writes at less than half a millimeter—I would guess it's around 0.3 mm, one of the art pens I bought at the art store in Brattleboro at Stripes' suggestion that I buy myself something nice, some art supplies and Indian food, once I got out of the Refuge. I don't know why I only kept this particular crisis plan, but my guess is that I thought it was the one that would be most useful to me. I filled one out every time I left the Refuge, so perhaps I thought I had finally perfected the art of creating a psychiatric crisis plan. - - - - Also that night, I filled out the client review form, as always—a three-page form asking about your experience at Tyler 2, asking for any suggestions or improvements you might have to suggest, asking you to rate the food, staff, restrooms, classes, and other aspects of the experience. It also asked if there were any staff members who did their job exceptionally well. I always nominated Lynne, but there were too many to name. Anyway, on the night of my last discharge from that ward, I filled out my review form in art-ified, barely legible script, then decorated the blank space with chaotic, reverberating lines in colored pencil. My intention was to say: *I really appreciate the work you've done. You're exceptional, so I'm giving you an exceptional-looking review form, something truly a work of art.* But that's not how it came across. In fact it almost cost me more time on the ward. A few minutes after I handed it in, head nurse Michelle gestured at me with her finger to come to the nurse's station. "How are we doing right now, Matthew?" "We are doing fine." She holds up the form. For like one-tenth of a second, I see it from her point of view. It's crazy (for lack of a better word), it's chaotic, it's disorganized, it's antimatter, it's a black hole, it's insane. "What is this supposed to mean?" "Oh I was just doing some decorations." She leans in close to me. "Do you think you're ready to go tomorrow?" I take the review form from Michelle's hands. I look at the first page. I flip it over and look at the second and third pages. I'm kinda shocked at how full it is with color and pen and lines and complicated lettering. "I can hardly read what you wrote," Michelle says. "I can see that." I nod. "Yes," I say. "This is hard to read. It's the combination of everything, combined, it's—there's a lot going on here—they say that when you try to over-control your external world, it's a sign of an out-of-control mind. So maybe this is a sign that my mind is clear and organized." "Nice try," Michelle says. "So do you think you're ready to go tomorrow?" I think about that. I'm basically *always* ready to go, when I'm in Tyler 2. And I've been here most of the fall, now into winter. I can't stay in the psych ward forever. I already have an Amtrak ticket from Brattleboro to New York, then a plane to Portland to live with my sister Leona. If I stay here it'll fuck up my transportation. But like Lisa said, without your life all that other stuff is useless. But I don't think I'm going to kill myself. Tyler 2 is home now, but it's a sad home with a revolving door—all the patients are temporary, you can never make any lasting friends, and I don't want to live my life in a hospital. "Yeah," I say. "I'm ready to go." Michelle looks at me skeptically and puts the review form in my chart. The next morning, Dr. Meggs finds me in the main room eating breakfast. She kneels beside my chair. "They showed me your review form," she says. "Yeah?" "Yeah. And I'm a little bit worried." "Why? It's just aesthetics. I'm just trying to keep myself entertained. I didn't mean it any particular way except to dress it up a little and make it look pretty. It's kind of like a *thank you* to everyone here for doing such a good job." My doctor looks at me for a long time. "Ok," she says. "But that's not what it looks like." "*I know.* I got sent here from Birches for decorating one of my daily journal forms." "I've seen it." "Is that in my chart, too?" "Yes. That is in your chart." "Well, I like to fill spaces with words, lines, shapes sometimes. One time I took down my shower curtain liner and wrote random poetry *covering the entire thing* with Sharpie script *this big*. It just looks good to me. It looks crazy to you. But to me, that's just beautiful. Lots and lots of words." My psychiatrist frowns. She speaks quietly in this room bustling with patients eating, people getting their vitals taken, staff setting up new clients with crappy toothbrushes and sandals and shampoo and lotion which I assume is meant to aid in masturbation. "With this drawing..your review form..the risk goes up for me. If it's just *beauty* to you, that's one thing. But when you fill out a review form like this, it sends a message to me and all the staff." "What message did it send you?" "That maybe your thoughts aren't as organized as we'd like." I look at Dr. Leona Meggs, MD. My eyes tear up. "They're not as organized as I'd like, either. Ok? But I'm doing the best I can." "I know you are." "I'm not going to bullshit you, I'm not in tip-top form. I *haven't been* for years. And it's been hard to spend the last three months in Tyler 2. My life has fallen apart. My *whole life* has been a series of events in which *my life falls apart*. That's what I'm used to now. I used to have girlfriends, jobs, cars, apartments, I ate at restaurants. I had fun. I made *art*. I sold art. I went on camping trips. I had a relationship with my dad. It was a *fake* relationship, but it was a *relationship!* But..I grew up..or something..my mind became more complex..I became more of who I am—" "You have bipolar disorder. It was there all along. It got worse when your girlfriend died. You're never going to have a normal life again. You operate at a high level *in some ways*, Matthew, but all your problems at work, some of that is because—" "Because I don't make logical sense anymore?" "*Sometimes you don't.* Sometimes you do. But it's never going to be like when you were twenty-two again. That culture, software development, whether it's a hedge fund or a search engine, that's a young man's game. It's caffeine culture, ripping and running. I have a nephew who does that and I know how it is. I'm not saying you can't get back into it. I'm hoping you will! Move to Portland—if you're ready..if not, stay here as long as you need—but if you can get back into some sort of job, try to re-develop your independence..I think you *can* do that. Look around. Schizophrenic Mike? *He's never going to leave. He'll always be in this place or some place just like it.* He's a rock that you drop into a pond and it sinks straight to the bottom. You're in the same pond, but you're like a rock that's skipping along the surface. Part of this is biological. Part of it is managed with medicine. But *part of it* is *managed by you*. You're not doomed because of your illness. But look at me. Matthew, you have one of the worst mental illnesses that you can have. It's debilitating. It might get worse for you. You have to be very careful. You cannot drink." "It lowers my inhibitions," I say, voice wobbly. "Right. And if you feel suicidal, you go to the hospital. You have to treat suicidal thoughts like a heart patient treats chest pains." I'm silent. I'm looking at her, tears streaming from my eyes. "Which is how?" she says. "Go to the hospital," I say. "Right. Do you have your little card?" My Brattleboro Refuge Emergency Card. A card filled with phone numbers and strategies and advice. "Yes." "If you feel suicidal," she says. "Take out that card and call one of your supports. And if you can't get one of your supports—" "Call 911," I say. "That's right. And you better take it seriously. You call 911, you go to the hospital, you get to a safe place. There's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your spirit. *But you have a brain disorder* which makes people twenty times more likely to kill themselves. Ok? If you need help *you call Tyler 2* and you have them *page me*. Whatever I am doing, I will come talk with you on the phone, and if you need to come back here, *that's ok*. Ok? We're always happy to see you go, but you're always welcome to come back. That's how this works." "Ok." "Ok?" I wipe my face. "Your coming here is not failure. Are you listening to me?" I nod. "What you did was the action of someone who *wanted to survive*. You did what you had to do to get the help you needed. That's a good sign." "It is?" "Yes, it's good *because you're alive*. Some people who try to kill themselves—regardless of their level of ambiguity about life and death—some people *succeed*. And that's it. They're no longer with us. *But you are.* And—if you want—you're going to go on to Portland and live with your sister and find a job and move on and you're going to live a wonderful life, Matthew. You're very capable and heaven knows you're more capable than some of the people who work *here*." She smiles. "You're just a little nuts, that's all." I laugh. Cry/laugh/snort—the whole fucking thing. "You know I'm kidding." I nod, smiling, laughing, closing my eyes. Dr. Meggs stands up. "Alright. I'm going to tell these nurses to forget about your review form and let you go, ok?" "Sounds good." "Find David and have him get your things out of contraband. I'll see you in your room for our final checkout." I nod. "You know," I say. "Something doesn't have to be true..to be true." Dr. Meggs hesitates for just half a second, like she was going to say something else, but whatever it was, she decided not to say. ### 112 The night before. Me sitting at 3am reading Pema Chödrön and making notes, sitting in the blood pressure chair by the nurses' desk. > I think about some specifics. > > December 15, 2011 > > Probably my last night at the Refuge ever, as I'm going to NYC and on to Portland, Oregon after that. I am unsure of this plan, and as usual confusing my mythic internal story with the actual external story. In short I don't know what I'm doing. I hope that life gets better, for me, clearer and maybe easier and more happy. > > Dream I was having trouble keeping my car on the rollercoaster track. Over the hills and bumps it would come off, fall afar the tracks and leave the coaster. But then with help from a guide, on a different train on a different track, and in a different final car with two other riders, I was able to keep up with the train, just barely (or have the hope to), running behind the car to speed it up, manually coupling it back to the track and to the train ahead. > > Interpretation: With Meggs's guidance, and Leona and James' help, becoming able to weather some of my life's ups and downs. > > Dream that I discovered ghost friends and occult books and had an unnatural affinity in reading and communicating with them. Change address. Register clownfysh\.com another 1-2 years. Thank you cards to Mom, Joanne, Leona. Buy Neuromancer eBook. Get daily pillbox. Friday 12:31pm, Amtrak, Reservation 04A91D, Boarding \#2Y1XZC, $69. Also I think of all this has conspired to place the knowledge that I have, the genetics, the experience, inside my head..the value there is considerable..a blessing..and my job to use in the best way I see fit. I am a blessing, a benefit, a gift, a wonderful package or a package of wonderful..not something to be wasted, not something to disrespect..but something of extreme value, which must be played strong, not underplayed. I really do think, even as fleeting as it might be (or might not), that I have found something in this moment, today, some happiness, some self, something that had been worth fighting for, but which is elusive to even the best sleuths. May I never cease to find that self, that health, that wonderfulness in life. May I do whatever is necessary, use every means available, to keep along this path. When I look at this picture—a selfie I took in the woods—it's like: *that's* the me I should be seeing..that's the me I deserve to be able to feel..I deserve my own satisfaction, I deserve to be happy, to be on *my* path. I am worthy to pursue my dreams. I think that's the basic idea I'm getting at, that I haven't always, haven't often felt: That I am worthy to pursue my dreams. That I'm ok enough, worth enough, to try for happiness. That I don't automatically deserve to suffer and die..that I am worth working for, worth living for. - - - - And while I'm sitting there, having these holy revelations, this one male nurse is talking about how many Iraqis were killed with this gun his buddy gave him, about how accurate the gun was, the perfect deadly weapon. I'm sitting in the power chair, the vitals chair—night nurse John had told a story of the girl who sat there and controlled the whole room with her spaceship helmet, how she was their most memorable patient ever—and I just stewed and stewed at this guy's endless speech until I finally gave him an ass-ripping that would have made my sister proud. Of all my righteous smackdowns, this one was notable in that after I scolded him for the inappropriateness of discussing weapons in a psych ward because a) you're around unstable, suicidal, homicidal people, and b) we have a contract on the ward that we read every morning that you—male nurse—may not ever have been to, but this contract states that *we will not behave violently toward each other*, and glorifying *the number of Iraqis killed* by your father's gun is flagrantly in violation of this non-violence policy. Also, I told him directly that if he was so interested in murdering people that perhaps the job of mental health technician in a psychiatric hospital, surrounded by suicidal people, was not the best job for him. "Your job is to help people who are so depressed and have so much self-hatred, to heal so that they can feel good about living, and live for a long time instead of a short time—yet your hobby, and your *avid* interest according to my hearing of the stories you've just told, is in *murder*, is in *killing people*, is in war. Do you really think, that with all that focus on killing and the weapons that do it, that you can function effectively in, say, a one-on-one with a suicidal—or probably in your case, worse—a homicidal patient? Do you think you're in the right headspace to do that?" And then, after all that, while he and John sat there silent, listening to me talk, I informed them that this behavior was so inappropriate that I was considering writing a letter to the clinic director describing the event and asking her to respond however she felt appropriate. Then I reminded them both that the clinic director and I were on a first name basis, had spoken many times, and that she liked me very much. "And Mr Dude—Mr. Gun Freak Mental Health Tech Dude—this isn't the first time I've heard you brag about your buddy's gun and I've come *this* close to talking to the clinic director about you before—you should know that. All these nights you're in here bragging about killing Iraqis *we're listening*—patients are listening—and some of us—ok—just 'cause we're mentally ill, we happen to be a lot fucking smarter than you and we're the kind of people who can deal with organizations and raise a stink and *get people fired* because they potentially make the boss look bad in, say, a local newspaper story that features your name prominently?" Then I stopped, and though that mental health tech gave me dirty looks for the rest of the night and into the next morning, I never said anything more to him—not once I got up from the chair. I wanted to. I wanted to wheedle that weak-minded pro-violence pencil-peen motherfucker into a puddle on the floor. But I didn't. I just kept silent, let it go, and didn't say a word. Finding a job that fits it hard. I know that from experience. There is the pressure of what your parents want you to do, there are ideas you have from childhood about the first roles you imagined you might play in society. There's what you're good at. There's what you love. And there's what you can actually get someone to hire you to do. If you're this guy, Asshole Mental Health Tech, living in Brattleboro, Vermont, the best job you can get is working at the Refuge. He's obviously not a nurse, so he doesn't have any mental health schooling..he's a mental health tech, which means he has a bachelor's degree in *something*—prob'ly blowing up Iraqis and shit—and as a mental health tech he gets the shittiest jobs, just slightly less shitty than the custodians. But you've got to follow your love. I have never seen that guy talking with a patient, helping a patient. If he was my nightly check-in I'd instantly request someone else. If you're so interested in guns and blowing people's skulls apart and you have the type of conscience that allows you to talk about "popping that sand nigger in the eye" then grow a pair and join the fucking Army. Go over to Iraq. Actually risk your own life—'cause over here you're just talking..over there the "bad guys" have guns, too. They wanna pop *you* in the eye, and there's a good chance they'll do it. I'm not a career counsellor. All I'm saying is, Asshole Mental Health Tech, if you're reading this, maybe you should find a new job. But that asshole kept talking. And I was like, "Would you please shut up? Don't you see the irony of this? You're supposed to be a mental health worker, helping sick people, and yet you're a person fascinated by and honoring Americans killing people from another country, acting like its some sort of game. If you don't respect Iraqi lives, how can I trust you with *my* life, in here." His boss, John, the one with the lip movements and bald head and the Rugby shirts, told his subordinate to change the conversation after that oakie gun collector just looked at me and continued to talk about dead Iraqis—what balls. And of course I steered clear of him the rest of the night—though it angered me to see him and to know that he existed. But he didn't say anything to me. And I thought of that line from *Apocalypse Now*, where the French woman says, "There are two of you, don't you see, one that kills, and one that loves." And her husband says to her, "I don't know whether I'm an animal or a god." And she says, "But you are both." And sitting in the vitals chair in the Brattleboro Refuge on my very last night, I thought clearly: *You might have to see yourself from several points of view to really know yourself.* And I believe that to this day. ### 113 Some last day memories: > All the conversation is inane. > > I resent itI resent people intruding on perfectly good silence with their idiotic words > > I miss a little conversation with Sadie or a lot with Stripesgod, I thought Stripes was beautifulwhen she was at the pottery wheel in an art apron, especially, I fell a little bit in love And Daniel's refrain, every time I left the Refuge—every time I left the room: "Good luck to you, sir. Good luck to you." Good luck to *you*, sir. Air hugs with Faith throughout, then a real hug on my leaving day, in front of everyone, before she took the elevator down to arts and crafts. She finally gets on yellow level and can leave the ward. The staff sees our hug and allows it because they know I'm leaving and they know Faith and I love each other. The elevator closes. We never see each other again. Last morning. Yoga/meditation. Lynne asking me after the millionth class I took with her what I had to say about my meditation experience just then. I said, "I really have nothing to say right now." Lynne said, "After as many times as you've taken this class, I'm glad that you have nothing to say." (That is, perhaps, the point of meditation.) Lynne talking to me in my room on my last day there and us talking friendly and lovingly and tearfully and her saying: "It's easy to cross the line with you, to be more personal than professional." I told her, "Stripes and I were talking on the outside and we both agreed—well—we both agreed we were in love with you." > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (7)** > > Patient Admitted November 28, 2011—Discharged December 15, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is the fourth Brattleboro Refuge fifth lifetime admission for this 33-year-old single white male. Patient is an unemployed computer software engineer and also a writer. Patient lives alone in Brattleboro, Vermont. > > **Chief Complaint** > > "Because I'm a little manic. I decided to talk to the doctor at Birches." > > **History of Present Illness** > > Patient was discharged from the Brattleboro Refuge on November 15, 2011 and is currently attending the Birches IOP Program. He has not been able to sleep since this past Thursday. However he did report that on Saturday night he had a couple hours of sleep and a half hour yesterday. He reports "I really want to go to sleep." He watched *The Matrix* multiple times last night in order to fall asleep *[Never fell asleep, watched the Matrix like five or six times in a row.]* He has been having difficulty completing tasks and needed to make note cards in order to remember what to ask his doctor. He has also been writing down his thoughts which include "sounds are intense," "colors are extremely bright," "texture hallucinations." On admission he denied auditory hallucinations and paranoid thoughts. He also had fleeting thoughts of suicide and he does have a concrete plan. The plan is to cut himself deeply in the bathtub but "it doesn't have to be a bathtub." He also thought about taking a whole bottle of clonidine. His last thought of harming himself was on Thursday. He denies homicidal ideation. He has not been showering because he does not want to touch water; cool water feels too cold on his hands. He does not want to be in hot water because it may be too hot *[Before my suicide attempt and inpatient hospitalizations, I bathed every morning—I couldn't feel *awake*, like my day had started, before my shower or bath. After this point, I stopped bathing, dropped down to once a week, once a month. Only now, five years later, am I once again comfortable bathing every day]*. Denies drugs or alcohol since he was last discharged *[Of course not—the Refuge is my new addiction.]* Says he feels anxious about going to the floor and being behind doors. This shower thing might seem trivial to you or weird, but showering at the Refuge is fucking disgusting. It's also complicated. I went from needing a bath or shower at the beginning of every day, to the Refuge, to not bathing for a week at a time, to not bathing for a month at a time, to slowly, slowly getting back into bathing and hygiene until now, five years after my attempt, I not only bathe normally but I've become a deodorant junkie—I wear it three times a day—just because I like the way it smells to me =) I'm a person of habit, though, of obsessions. Remember that period I went through where I would make enchiladas every night, drink a bottle of wine, and watch a movie? And at a certain time each night I'd call T-Mobile and change my telephone number? I was concerned/paranoid/angry/whatever that my phone was contained in the company directory and I didn't want there to be any greater than a zero chance that anyone who worked at that loser-ass company would call me. That's more about habit than anything—about obsession and compulsion. > **Course of Hospitalization** > > Patient was initially admitted to Tyler 1 as there were no beds available on Tyler 2. When first seen on Tyler 2 patient reported having "slept fantastically" and he denied auditory or visual hallucinations. He denied suicidal and homicidal ideation. He reported however "I've lost my ability to think clearly, I can't finish a thought. My thoughts are really an endless box of glitter *[Actually I said: My mind is like a glitterbox.]* I feel that you're just pretending to be a doctor and that I'm pretending to be a patient. I feel that the cellular automata program has infected my brain." He also reported some grandiose thoughts: "I'm smarter than most people and there is a different morality for more enlightened people." We elected not to change any medications until a neuropsychological exam could be conducted to help us diagnose and clarify as the patient has had multiple admissions at this point in time. Patient has a history of reconstituting very quickly on the unit, discharging and then decompensating over weekends ending up in A&E *[Accident & Emergency, same as Emergency Room]* at the Brattleboro Refuge and after one admission went to Windham Center. Patient was emotionally labile on the second day on Tyler 2. A minor slight set him crying and tearful. Patient reported "I know it was out of proportion to what was said." Patient was very downcast but was able to contract for safety and had a neurological exam and completed the neuropsychological testing. The patient reported that he was very depressed since he came off the Lexapro the last time and requested a restart of his Lexapro. Although the neuropsychological exam did not result in any focal findings and was basically within normal limits they did recommend a head MRI given what appears to be an increasing psychosis as well as some visual disturbances reported by the patient. Patient continued to be despondent about his situation: "I'm unsure that there are reasons for hope in my case." In the event, the head MRI was essentially within normal limits with the exception of small cysts viewed at the base of the left maxillary sinus. There was no evidence of any space-occupying lesion. As patient continued on Lexapro his mood improved. He began to evolve a plan for discharge this time that would be essentially different from the previous two which had resulted in a rapid decompensation. Patient reported that he felt that it would be better to live with a family member for the time being in order to supply structure to his days. He evolved a plan to move to Portland, Oregon where his sister Leona and her husband agreed that he could live there and help in the care of their young child. In addition the patient had a plan to begin to look for work again in order to get his life back on track. Ultimately receipt of the neuropsychological testing suggested that patient did fit the criteria for bipolar disorder and in addition there was some evidence for psychotic process. After the patient was feeling well again and having ruled out any organic causes for his psychosis we agreed that patient would discharge and move to Oregon to live with his sister which is in fact what he has done. Our plan for outpatient treatment would include medication, psychodynamic psychotherapy, continued work with mindfulness techniques, living with a family in a structured day and refraining from alcohol and drugs. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar Disorder. Psychosis NOS. OCD. Ethanol Abuse. Street Drug Abuse. Recurrent Kidney Stones. Questionable History of Serotonin Syndrome. He has good support in his family, has an increasing history of mental instability including a psychotic process that threatens to undermine his ability to engage as his past work as a computer programmer. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 40. > > **Condition on Discharge** > > Patient was well groomed, cooperative, good eye contact, no psychomotor agitation nor retardation, mode of speech was within normal limits and mood was "Solid. I feel good with this discharge plan." Affect was constricted, cognition was intact. Patient was alert and oriented x 3. Thought process was logical and non-psychotic. Patient denied auditory or visual hallucinations and there were no overt signs and symptoms of psychosis. Patient denied suicidal ideation. Denied homicidal ideation. Denied craving and denied pain. Insight was good. Judgment can be considered fair. Patient was not deemed an immediate risk to self or others at time of discharge. > > **Prognosis:** Fair. > > **Patient Strengths** > > Patient is extremely intelligent and has relatively good insight into his mental health issues and has a supportive family which will help in maintaining his stability. > > **Arrangement for Aftercare Services** > > Patient was referred to Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare where he could be assigned a therapist and psychiatric prescriber. Cascadia Health is in Portland, Oregon—*[phone number]*. Patient was encouraged to seek a primary care provider. We are under the impression that the patient will be eligible for Oregon Healthcare within 24 hours of moving to Oregon. Patient is advised to resume a low-calorie diet and increase his physical activity. Well, as they say, *The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry*. Oregon's implementation of Medicare, which they call Oregon Healthcare, only supports a certain number of people, and it was full. There was a lottery for spots that opened up when people died or got different health insurance. I entered the lottery, but lost—no health insurance. I entered again and lost again. With no money and no health insurance, I couldn't get a primary care provider. Dr. Meggs agreed to continue to prescribe my medication for a while—I would call her in Vermont and she'd phone the orders in to our pharmacy in Portland. Then my sister and her husband would pay hundreds of dollars so I could get my psych meds—money I only recently paid back, five years later. I had better healthcare in Vermont—I wonder sometimes if I would have been better off with health insurance and a good mental hospital in Brattleboro, even if I became homeless, than living in Portland. ### 114 Remember when I was in Tyler 1 for one day before they transferred me up to Tyler 2 for my last admission? I saw that girl again—the cool one with the Skittles who I always saw at AA meetings. Her name was Rose. I guess she hadn't gotten clean yet before she started going to meetings, or else she relapsed, 'cause now she was in detox. She was always friendly to me in meetings, but now, in Tyler 1, I was the only person she knew at all from the outside, so we were instantly best friends. She asked me what I was detoxing off of. I said, "Nothing." "Oh right," she said. "I heard them say they were moving you upstairs. What's wrong with you?" "Bipolar disorder." She has a genuine look of sympathy—even though she has one of the prettiest faces I've ever seen, Rose is not just another pretty face. "My sister has that." "I'm sorry." "No, yeah, no. I know it's really hard. My littlest sister has it. She's only nine. They say the average age of onset is getting lower and lower. Either that or we're detecting it earlier because there's better psychiatric support in schools." "I think the latter." Rose puts her hand on my thigh and I can feel my dick immediately get hard. "That's fucking sexy." "What? My pajamas?" "No, the fact that you said *latter*. There aren't a lot of smart people in Brattleboro," she says. I say, "There aren't a lot of smart people anywhere." I take her hand off my thigh. "Why'd you do that for?" " 'Cause if you keep your hand there ten more seconds you're gonna be giving me a hand job in the utility closet. *No touching!"* "*Just* a hand job?" she says, and squeezes my thigh again. "You are a naughty bitch," I say. "Now I'm not gonna be able to stand up for ten minutes." "You seem like you would be fun to do drugs with," she says. "Yeah, that's what people tell me." Rose puts her leg over mine. My cock gets harder. "*I'm* detoxing off heroin," she says sweetly. "I know, I've been in meetings with you, remember?" "Oh. I didn't think I ever shared." "You did once. At a meeting here." "And I said I was hooked on heroin?" "Those weren't your exact words." "Fuck I must have been high. Now prob'ly the whole town knows." "In this town, probably, yes." "Rose!" one of the nurses shouts. "No touching!" "I have his permission. I have your permission, right?" "It doesn't matter!" Rose gets this sullen look on her face but she unties our legs. "I have your permission, right?" she whispers, walking two fingers across my leg and giving my dick a little *shank*. I turn my head, look her in the eyes. This girl is movie-star gorgeous—more than that, actually, because she looks that way without makeup—she's smart, she's got a hot body ten years younger than mine, and she doesn't treat me like an untouchable, the way most girls with that amount of coin would treat every guy except the ones they want to have sex with. She doesn't blink. "I have your permission, right?" she mouths the words. I smile. The nurse says, "Rose, he's not detoxing. I'm just warning you, you and Matthew may not be in *nearly* the same state of mind. You might want to give him his space." "Basically you're trying to tell me he's crazy and I might get hurt if I talk to him." "I'm just saying that you can't assume that everyone on the ward is here for the same reason." "I know he's bipolar. He already told me. So you don't have to maintain his secrecy for him. I *know* people with bipolar. I mean I have an *affinity* for them." "Ok, just have your affinity without your hand on his leg." "I have his permission." "There's no *touching* on any of the wards. We respect each other's physical space here." Rose takes her walking fingers off my leg and crosses her arms. "You seem worked up," the nurse says. "Do you want to spend a few minutes in your room?" "This is how they talk to you," Rose tells me, as if the nurse is a painting on the wall, not a person with ears and a brain and feelings. "Do you hear what she's telling me? She's saying Rose, go jill off in your room and stop venting your sexuality on this poor bipolar kid because if you push him too far he's gonna *snap*, as bipolar people do, but *I'm telling you*, I have *experience* with bipolar people and I'm not even sure this cat *has* bipolar. He seems perfectly fine to me. *I've* never seen him snap—I bet he only snaps when people act up around him, isn't that right?—well guess what, *we need* people to fuckin' snap on fools who act up or else—" "Calm down, Rose." "—*or else* the world would be pure chaos. Am I right? Tell her I'm right. Honestly, tell me, Matthew, tell me if I'm right." "You are right. But you'll never be right in here," I say. "Detox and never look back, Rose, never come back here." "Fuck," she says. "I am getting a little worked up. I mean like *I don't care about the rules* of Tyler 1, the world, the country, the county, city, state—not necessarily in that order—are you with me?" I nod. "I might need to spend some time on Tyler 2!" she says. She stands, walks up to the nurses station. She points at me. "*That* guy is not fucking crazy. Take me. Take me instead." "Rose, please go lie down in your room." "You know what," she says. "I *have* learned something here." "What," says the nurse. "You got the wrong people in this hospital. Tell 'er, Matt. *He's not bipolar!* Or if he is then what's wrong with being bipolar." "So you're a nurse now." Rose busts out laughing. She's laughing so hard she's hitting herself in the stomach. "Actually, *I am* a fucking nurse, you dimwit bitch. Didn't you read *my chart*? Marlboro College, two-thousand nine. Fucking. *Nurse's* degree. Right there. *Boom.* And *I'm telling you* there's nothing wrong with my man here." "Matthew." "Matthew, right." "Rose *T.*, will you *please* go to that water fountain and put some cold water on your face or sit in the vitals chair and I will *bring you* a cold washcloth because you are ramping and you're upsetting everyone in the room. Maybe your friend can help you calm down." Both Rose and this nurse—who I had every respect for—look over at me. "I don't really feel like helping her calm down." The nurse shakes her head. Rose does a victory dance. "Rose, get some water." "No, I'm *not* getting some water. You know why?" "Why." "Because I have *one more thing* to say." "Well you have everyone's attention! Go ahead and say it!" That was a mistake on the nurse's part—she let Rose get under her skin. Usually there's not this type of excitement on Tyler 1. Observing Rose, I am reminded that those with bipolar siblings are eight times more likely than average to have bipolar disorder themselves. I think of how I started in detox as well, in Tyler 1, having forgotten my previous bipolar diagnosis, and it was my drug use which was the obvious symptom that brought me to the hospital, but it was my bipolar, my psychosis, that were visible once I stopped drinking. I hoped Rose's path would follow a simpler course: detox, get released, get a job, find non-using friends, fall in love, live a happy life. But that was extremely unlikely. "Your basic fundamental problem with mental hospitals," Rose said to us all, "is you have mentally healthy, perfectly fine, perfectly *normal* dudes like that dude over there. Do you think he would be *in here* if the world made more sense? Do you think *I* would be in here if the world made more sense? If I wasn't raped *at eleven*?" "Rose—" "No I don't care! This is *exactly the point!* Why *am I* supposed to feel ashamed about *being raped..by my brother..when I was eleven?* *Where is the part in that* where *I* am supposed to feel ashamed. Where is my brother now, while I'm in here trying to fucking *survive*? He owns a bar in Trenton. He's doing fine! He's probably still raping *eleven*-year-olds! But do you think *that motherfucker*'ll ever end up in a *detox, in a psych ward* like Matthew's going up to in a few minutes? Maybe if people weren't *allowed* to vent *their* sicknesses on *people like us* then there wouldn't be so many crazy people in the world! Because what is a crazy person? *All people are crazy*—we certainly know *that* by now. But *crazy people*—the ones who end up in institutions—all we are is the *weight-bearers*. We're just *the sensitive ones*. We're not *the sickness*—we're just the ones *who take the blame* for *the sickness*. You know why we're in here, right? Do *you* know? Do *you* know? *We're in here*..to get a break..from what's out there. Because what's out there *is so bad* that if you *feel* too much, or *think* too much, *what's out there* can destroy you. But who does that make sick? The people who are part of the *oppression*—the *mental* fucking *oppression*—or the people who are in here *taking refuge* from it??" I realized—as I always have—that often the urge to have sex with someone, if you scratch the surface, is really a surge of affinity with them. It's the recognition that you've found someone like you. After that, sex is arbitrary. What really matters is that you're not alone. - - - - I left the Refuge. It was weird, being free, outside, in all that snow. I checked my voicemail and got a message from my old friend Ashley saying her dad had been hit by a car. When I finally got ahold of her it quickly became clear that it was her *dog*, not her *dad*. Still sad though. The Refuge called me saying housekeeping had found a folder in my room containing my passport, Social Security card, name change documents, Arizona photo ID. I had just gone through the whole ritual of leaving the Refuge for the last time, now I had to go back to get these essential papers. Fortunately when I got there one of the mental health techs brought them to me in the lobby. My OCD was tickled by the fear that I would lose these documents and end up in one of the many societal voids that are difficult or impossible to get out of. I checked and double-checked and triple-checked and quadruple-checked and more, making sure I had each one of those special little pieces of paper or plastic. Finally I put them all in a folder and somehow convinced myself that after I had put them there, they were still there. At some point I had to let go my doubts and leave the Refuge lobby for the last time. I walked down Main Street. Checked my PO box. I took care of a little piece last-night B-boro business: going to Whit's, eating with Thomas, not drinking, not telling him I'm leaving Brattleboro forever but making this our one-sided goodbye. I went to Gretchen's house. She had gotten the duffel bag from my apartment. We hug, tightly—too tightly, as always, like lovers *which we were not*. I kept having to make multiple trips to the post office and bank once I opened my mail, to get unemployment money deposited in the bank and another two weeks applied for. I ended up with a net balance of $9.61—this was below the minimum balance and in Portland I closed that bank account to avoid being charged a fee greater than my balance. I don't think they understood—that bank account wasn't about the $9.61 for me—it was about maintaining the illusion that I was connected to the world. But I had to close it, and for about five years I didn't even have a bank account. Gretchen saw me organizing my pills on the carpet in her living room and we went to the Hotel Pharmacy and picked out a pill box. This was a step for me: I was now someone who took so much medicine that he needed a pill box to organize it. By phone, I made an Amtrak reservation for the next day's Vermonter from Brattleboro to New York. I wasn't about to make the same mistake I made during my first trip to Brattleboro. I needed a clean break—I needed to get out of here. Once all my business was settled, Gretchen and I sat on the floor in front of her couch and showed me pictures of her in high school and she looks younger and cuter, yes, but mostly she looks happier, and I wonder if she was as psychotic then as she is now—my guess is not—she used to have cute round cheeks, now her cheeks are sunken in—too few calories under the guise of veganism. She would look better if she gained a little weight. Gretchen's husband Tom talked about this sleep apnea study he was doing that night and showing me his old sleep apnea mask—he and Gretchen call it Darth Vader. We talked a long time before Tom awkwardly left me alone with his wife while he went to spend the night having people studying him breathing—and periodically not breathing—while he slept. I left a duffel bag with Gretchen that contained some clothes and drawings and my vibrator..days later she's emailing me telling me how she's wearing my clothes because they smell like me. I hope she used the vibrator and made herself cum, too, thinking of me—she said when I met her than she and Tom hadn't had sex in seven years. Our relationship was already unhealthy, I wish she and I *had* fucked..it would have made up for some of the stress of our whole ordeal, made it worth it. My mom says she had an emotional affair at the end of our parents' relationship—is that what this was? Not really, more of a stalker situation and I was too lonely (as usual) that I took whatever friend I could find, even when doing so got in the way of me and Stripes, because of Gretchen showing up like a lost puppy at Stripes' bar, creating the distinct impression for Stripes that Gretchen and I were together. Then there was that time at Metro when I left Gretchen at the bar to speak with a woman whose husband has bipolar. Gretchen came over and gave me the meanest look. I tried to shake Gretchen, telling her she can't treat me like that, but she was sick enough and I was sick enough that it just never stopped. Gretchen drank wine on our last night together. She asked me if it was ok and I said sure, what am I, just a mentally ill dude trying to stay sober, go ahead, drink in front of me, get loose, invite me to sleep in you and Tom's bed together while you're tipsy. We slept in their bed together under a huge white comforter—my favorite kind. I couldn't breathe and I was sweating but Gretchen and I held each other under the covers. Gretchen reminded me that on the first day I met her I was so sexual with her, even trying to get her to come home with me that night..and she notes that now things have changed, that I'm standoffish with her sexually/physically. "What happened," she says. "What happened is that I got to know Tom, and I now consider him a friend, and as such I would never do anything to hurt him." I touch Gretchen on her nose and speak with our lips so, so close together. "Like sleep with his wife." Gretchen reminds me she and Tom haven't had sex in seven years. I don't know if that's supposed to be an invitation, a tease, a what. Gretchen and my relationship was always inappropriate and it continues that night to be inappropriate, leading up to one final kiss. We kissed, yes, very delicately and gently, like a first kiss among teenagers, holding each other's faces and touching only slightly with our tongues. We slept in the same bed all night, holding but not fucking in her and her husband's bed on my last night in Brattleboro. I felt it was a colossal moral failure on my part. So I never slept with Gretchen, leaving me with the irksome fact that the last person I fucked was the fat girl. This will bother me for years, whereas if the last girl had been Walsh, especially if we had better sex and she had cum and I had cum inside her, I would have felt proud and affirmed, sexually, through the following years. It's like this one time a long, long time ago when I saw Charisma at this punk show and I wanted the attention of Chrissy or one of the skinny girls but fat Charisma was the sure thing and I took her home and her post-childbirth pussy was loose and she said it was the best sex we ever had. I felt so tainted that I invited my problematic ex, Rishi, to come back to Dayton when she'd been asking and I'd said no. Even though I knew it wouldn't help me and Rishi's relationship, I just wanted the last person I had sex with to be sexy, and a prize, someone who indicated I was worthy of a decent sex partner. To me, the fact that I fucked fat Charisma, and later that I fucked petite Rishi, were acts that reflected on me and that helped to determine my status, even just in my own head. ### 115 Awkward goodbyes the next morning with Gretchen at the parking garage. Many hugs. One hug that was finally the final hug. She went to her car. I went down the hill. I got my usual sushi train food from the one sushi place in Brattleboro. It was the same cashier—the dancer—I had spoken to on my first trip here. I wondered if she recognized me. We just talked business, I got my sushi, I left. I had a moment in the waiting room and in the train on the way to New York accepting my comings and goings to and from the town. I was leaving almost exactly one year from when I arrived and in a way leaving was failure..but it was unavoidable. I talked to this kid in the train station who was sitting across from me. He said he just graduated from college and I ask him what he wants to do, what he's interested in, but that's not the world he lives in. "I just want to get a job." "Doing what?" "Anything, man, I just want to make it." I lamented his whole generation. I'm jobless now but at least for a good twelve years I was able to work and find jobs (without a degree). Now, college graduates don't even have faith that they'll be able to work..at all..at any job. I pulled out my laptop and wrote. > **December 16, 2011** > > Sitting in the Brattleboro Amtrak station. This will be the first time I've left since I moved here, just about one year ago. The town has changed significantly in that time, with fires and floods, and the closing of the Walmart. > > I think I might be done here. If I ever have money, I might like to come back to Vermont to hike, or [to live, in](#) a remote house. I could probably "make it" here if I wanted, but I might be a little less of a small-town person than this place requires..or maybe I'm just in a hard spot at the moment. This has been a decent transition from living with Mom. Though now I'm going to live with Leona. Maybe I can find a real job in Portland. Maybe I'll publish a book. Maybe I'll live off unemployment and disability and write another book or two, continuing making work I can be proud of. I made a friend here (G) and I'm leaving a friend, which is hard. I'd like to be closer to people, more people and in a few cases in deeper ways, than I have been in recent years. Maybe in Portland some love with women, maybe I'll find some friends I can really connect with. We'll see. The Refuge has been good here. Today I feel quiet as I listen to the breeze. Mind is at peace. And in terms of getting down to a few possessions, I'm about as Zen as I'd ever want to be. A backpack and a satchel. With more money [available at all times] I could get it down further. I'd love to have a house but what I really want is to make art—great art if possible—in words. Maybe I can do both. > > Doing pretty well, these days, at enjoying the good in what I'm doing, in where and when I am, and not pretending there are other realities. In the train station I held on to the memory of seeing those Florida postmarks on the letters from my dad as a way to know that I'm not delusional. Knowing I have those secret scans of a couple of the choice Florida letters. I don't read them. But I keep them, in my digital files, as proof that it's more the case that my dad is lying than it is that I am crazy..or..unfortunately..more likely..that my dad has been lying to me and my sisters and my mom this whole time and it's pushed us all over the line and made each one of us crazy—some of us more than others. One thing I learned is I wasn't technically suicidal..I never have been. I love life. I'm even afraid of death sometimes. But on no occasion have I gotten myself into the position where I did not know how to take the next step in life, and where I was hurting so badly that I equated *not knowing the path* with *death* and *unbearable pain* with *a desire to die*. Close, but not quite. And I met a girl with a back brace, who once asked to smoke one of my Kamels, who I saw sitting at a potter's wheel in the Brattleboro Refuge, and for the first time in a decade I felt my heart move. Like, truly move. Like, would do anything for you and live with you as long as you would have me. Her mother committed suicide. Stripes had attempted it many times. She's the kind of person who is full enough to feel enough pain to really end her life. I hope she's not ashes at the bottom of the ocean right now or decomposing bones in some terrible box underneath the ground. I hope her blood runs hot and her mind is firing and she's lying in bed and I hope that someone's licking her pussy, and fucking her—maybe not as well as I would—but well enough. And that she's reading this right now. And that she has a smile on her face. I wish luck to the recent graduate in the Amtrak waiting room, then board the train. I take a window seat. Dagny Taggart sits next to me. Yeah, when I left Brattleboro I took Miss Taggart with me. I even bought her a ticket. Sitting next to me in the two-seater she wears her ripped and tattered jacket, buttoned up to look as smart as possible. Like me, her hopes and ethics and romances and tendencies are real and realistic, but she lives in a world of fiction. Our train could crash at any time—all those moving parts—rails and gears and the engine all produced by indigent hands. Even Dagny Taggart couldn't have prevented it. And we end here, on the train with unbelievable light coming through the bare trees, blinding me, speeding on the rails in a contraption that at any moment, through some small mistake, could derail and kill us all. But we ride anyway, as far and as fast as we can. ## part 333 ### 116 Well, as you've seen, the *Brattleboro Stories* didn't start in Brattleboro—and as you're about to see, they didn't end there, either. I went to New York. I went to Portland. I want to Baton Rouge, in the deep south, where they have hurricanes and lizards and crawfish and you're basically living in a swamp. You wanna know what happened in all these places? Well sit tight, I'm going to tell you. > In New York. Scared. Lonely. Found Joanne, left my bag in her studio. I've put all my possessions in a bag and left all the limited home I had. Getting through this minute at a time, and some, wishing I had a partner in life to go through things with. Getting comfort food to make it through a few minutes, a laugh with my server, and a few deep breaths. Not drinking—but why not—to get through some time..ugh. > > Want a home. Want love and community. Want security. Want my life to come together. > > ---- > > Feels good to at least be out of the cold, in this restaurant for a second. Drinking a Pepsi. Sometimes I wish I was just born in a place like New York..or..in New York. That I had a family here, a reliable dad, etc. He's just clueless—he sent a note recently that indicates he hasn't been paying attention to, or simply doesn't remember, the content of our recent conversations. I have sympathy, pity, fear for him even, but there's no peer relationship there. He's busted, needs help, and I'm not in the position to help him. Makes me sad, a little. > > Calming down now..settling a bit..glad I sat down. > > ---- > > Adjusting now. Took me a couple of hours. Understandable, as I've spent the last one year in a town of thirteen-thousand people, and there are probably thirteen-thousand people in about a two-block radius from where I now sit. It's a bit of a shock. > > Ate food and drank juice and Pepsi. Even my handwriting feels better now *[It's shocking, the difference in my handwriting from the previous two entries to this one. Those are oblique and irregular, this one is neatly squared and legibly stylized. I was more out of sorts, in a basic way, than I realized]*. Needed to warm up and eat something substantial. Hadn't eaten much before just now..only a small sandwich and salmon earlier in the day. Centering, and better now. > > Took a clonidine *[supposed to act as an anti-anxiety agent by lowering your blood pressure]*. > > Stuffed myself on food..but..it's ok. > > ---- > > Ok, universe. I love you, I trust you, I throw myself upon you. I'll give myself completely and I'll ask only that you do the same. Of course you, by virtue of being much larger, have more to give, but I am attempting to give a large enough percentage of myself, and in such a wild style, that my drop will be noticed in your ocean. ### 117 Portland. Even though I made it through a meal at Whit's (my last supper with Thomas) without drinking, and I made it through a night with Gretchen while she was drinking wine and gently offering me wine (only if I wanted it), when I got to Portland I didn't call Leona right away. I found a bar in the airport and had a few glasses of wine. *Then* I called Leona to pick me up. I didn't think I could handle the embarrassment of needing my little sister to give me a place to live, I was afraid she'd be harsh toward me—not her fault, not her fault, just my own insane fears that even my own family hates me. I'm scared of people—my muscle clenching gets worse when other people are speaking—because you never know what crazy evil antagonistic shit someone else is about to say. Even the thought of illogic scares me—funny, huh, since I'm full of it. But in an AA meeting, when I'm speaking, my muscle clenching stops—I think it's because *I know what I'm going to say next*. But when someone else is speaking, my muscle clenching increases, especially with people I distrust, people who might inject illogic into my brain or at least spray the environment with it. And I'm afraid, that's the basic statement. I'm afraid of other people and *what they might be about to do*. When I'm home alone all day, my clenching subsides to a great degree. But even when I'm around Mom, one of the safer people I know, I don't know, maybe my nervous system got fucked by the combination of drugs I've taken throughout my life—some prescribed by my doctors, some prescribed by me—but I'm scared when she walks in the door. And with good reason. Every day we have a fight and I am increasingly bracing myself for the day when she says, *You can't live here anymore*, and I'll be homeless again. I was homeless ten years ago, and I could hardly do it at twenty-seven. Now I'm thirty-six, and I don't know if my body or mind could take that again. But yeah, I had to have three glasses of wine before calling my sister to pick me up at the airport. And all that clenching stuff—the muscle clenching stuff?—that happens much later. Forget about that for now. If I had unlimited funds, I might wander around airports for the rest of my life, never calling anyone, sitting on the floor eating Wendy's hamburgers with triple beef and triple cheese, drinking wine, getting drunk, and watching strangers arrive and depart, observing them with my sharpened intuition, pretending I knew their whole backstory and pretending that we were friends. Every hour a new girlfriend. Every hour a new father. Then I'd fly drunk to a new city and do it all over again. That's how lonely I am. - - - - Leona took me to the thrift store to get some clothes since I hadn't packed any. The only clothes I had were the clothes I was wearing. Daniel was in a car seat in the back. I cried a lot and Leona cried a little when I thanked her for taking me in. I got some amazing finds at the thrift store—Izod shirts, jeans I still own—even Leona was impressed. Leona and James made me a tiny bed area using their futon chair. It was perfect. Tucked behind the couch in their living room, I could fall asleep instantly while they were still awake, working, watching TV, playing with the kids. Didn't seem to bother them, didn't bother me. I slept a ton when I first got there I think I was depressed. I applied for disability. I filled out half of the forms. Someone who knew me well had to to fill the other half—Leona agreed to be that person. I remember Leona sitting at her desk and me sitting in my bed, each filling out our separate portions of the disability application. Leona shakes her head. "I'm sorry things have gone so badly for you, bro." "I'm sorry too, Leona." Her husband says, haltingly, smiling, "I just don't think of you as someone who would need to have disability. I mean *disability*. I thought that was reserved for people who have serious illnesses." Leona was like: "He does!" In a way it's a testament to how well I hide my illness, but even more it's an indicator of how little we understand mental illness. James knew that I had attempted suicide. I'm not sure how well he understood the link between suicide and bipolar disorder, but in his mind, and probably in a lot of people's, including my own, I was still in the mode of thinking, "Just get a job!" when for me, chronically suicidal, bipolar, possibly schizoaffective, just getting a job would have been impossible. And even if I could find a place to hire me, I would have just continued the same pattern of failure in the workplace—sure I have the programming chops to be useful to almost any company, but my moods, my sense of pointlessness around that kind of work and my intolerance of the average people I'd be working beside..and my unique (perhaps sometimes delusional) way of thinking..make me anything but the ideal candidate for a job in corporate America. Also I just don't think any of us know each other. Years later, when I told GranGran I wanted to stop drinking and was going to AA to help me do that, she said: "Well Matthew, I didn't realize you had a drinking problem." This is coming from a woman whose husband died of alcoholism. Whose daughter, whose son, have drinking problems (half her children). Are we that good at hiding it, or is she that good at denying it? Probably both. But either way, we're all fucking clueless as to how fucked up we all are. - - - - We were leaving the house and I was checking email on my iPad when I just stopped in the kitchen. Leona saw me looking at the screen. "Is everything ok?" I smiled. "Hah. Yeah. I got my book published." "You *what*??" "Yeah." I'd been trying to get *Things Said in Dreams* published for years. "Listen to this: 'Just finished reading your book, *Things Said in Dreams*..Holy Shit..Damn, damn, damn..You're hands down the best prose writer I've read in a long time..I like the edginess of the book..I like that it's a ballsy book! I like that it would make some people's heads explode (but hopefully not literally). CONGRATULATIONS. If you realized the level of enjoyment I got from your writing versus most of the other submissions I received..or even most of the BOOKS I've read this year..you'd be one proud dude.' Well fuck me, I got my book published." And Daniel says, "Fuck me." Leona shakes her head but smiling, making a finger-over-the-mouth motion at me. "Fudge me!" I say. "Fudge fudge fudge." Leona and James took me out to sushi to celebrate. I was high on that for months. - - - - Leona and I discussed Dad's poop situation. (Pooing with the door open, eating tons of fiber and laxatives and Metamucil.) And Leona tells me: "Dad is obsessed with pooping at the same time every day." "He is?!" "Yes." I look at her. "Yes," she says. "I have observed it and I can tell you with absolute certainty that many of his behaviors are designed around pooping at the same time of day." "You are shitting me." We both crack up. Leona slaps my knee. "That's why I love you bro." "Oh, shit, thank you but—why? Why does he want to poop at the same time of day?" "I don't know. I don't know if it's some thing from his childhood, like the way his brother treated him or something." "I think Danny was much older. I think he mostly played with his sisters." "I'm glad you brought that up, actually. Speaking of his sisters, did you know they used to *dress him up* like a girl?" "No, I did not know that." "It's true. I've seen the pictures. They'd put lipstick on him and everything." "Do you think that fucked him up?" "Who knows. Who knows, my bro, but I get the feeling it wasn't like *a game* they played together—it was more like they *forced* him to do it, so I could see how that could be traumatic." "How old was he?" "Two, three." "Where did you see the pictures?" "In Seattle. Mabel lived there before she died. She showed us pictures of all the kids. It was weird, to see Louise as a kid. I almost felt sympathy for her. *Almost.* Had you seen Mabel recently before she died?" "I hadn't seen Mabel in twenty years." "Well, it was kind of scary. She stopped making sense. She 'lost her mind' and I think it really shook Dad up." "That almost gives me sympathy for Dad." And Leona says, "Almost." - - - - Cleo, the PTSD researcher, called me for a follow-up interview. Her voice reminded me instantly of her professionalism and perfect-10 cuteness. Now that I was safely in a different state I had to settle for listening to her voice and picturing her consummate professional little self sitting in a chair in some empty office needing badly to be raped. Look, I'm a feminist, too, but sometimes a girl just needs to be raped and Cleo was one of these. Everything about her was so perfect and it just needed to be messed up in the best way. I wanted to get that bitch sticky. But we were in a PTSD interview and the questions and answers did everything but turn me on. Hearing myself answer these questions to things I had never considered like *how little social contact I had* made me see myself in a different light. The reality of this situation was that *I* was the whore and Cleo got everything she wanted out of me for a mere sixty bucks. ### 118 We potty trained Daniel in that apartment. I got more involved than I expected, but when your nephew, for a while, prefers you to help him carry his pee bowl to the toilet to flush it down, it's a strangely glorified experience—an honor, really, to be so involved in your nephew's life. I snuck a little 1800 and SoCo at Leona's house. I learned to feel drunk on tiny amounts of alcohol so my consumption wouldn't be noticed. Drinking became more using the act of drinking a tiny amount of alcohol to give my brain permission to *feel* drunk..more like a symbolic act, you know, like putting on your comfortable shoes. They decided to move from their apartment to a house. I helped with the move. It was infinite work. Infinite trips from the apartment to the house moving boxes in a little Hyundai or whatever. Or, when Leona and James were packing, infinite episodes of *Dora the Explorer* with Daniel to keep him entertained. I learned to truly love the backpack song and when Leona banned *Dora* in favor of *Blue's Clues* my depression deepened. That's not a joke. I fucking hate *Blue's Clues*. Not to get all deep and psychoanalytical on you, but maybe it's the mixing of reality and fantasy on *Blue's Clues* that made this psychotic person uncomfortable, whereas, as repetitive as *Dora* is, she is firmly in the realm of fantasy. See, you thought Part III was gonna be a gimme—no—this book gets deeper and more conceptual as the parts progress, so don't get comfortable..I'm just warming you up. So we *moved* from one house to another. It was a lot of work. - - - - One day I said to Leona that my suicidality was a financial problem. She said, "No it's a mental problem." But we're both right: part of the reason I considered suicide as a life path is there was nowhere for me to fit into society. If I'd had a stable job and wasn't losing my apartment because I couldn't pay rent, then I could have been less situationally depressed. I would have felt affirmed by society as having the right to live. Which, when society is telling you it has no place for you to fit in—to work and to live—that is society telling you to die. But Leona is right, too—even if I had a place to live and work, and I had money, even lots of money, bipolar might still be telling me to kill myself, and might succeed in getting me to do so. - - - - I went on trips to watch drag shows, eat mac and cheese hamburgers, and get drunk off wine. I made grocery store trips secretly purchasing wine with cash, sneaking it to my room, drinking and Tweeting..trying to reach that perfect state I had felt before—a social/artistic nirvana where I was socially connected and artistically active, writing good poetic Tweets. But the nine months I was at their house I probably drank only six or seven days. I didn't want anyone to know, though—I'd sneak my empty wine bottles to the Taco Bell dumpster a block away so no one in our family would see them. I didn't want to be critiqued. I'm defensive, I know. I don't stand up for myself. - - - - I went to a psych ward for freaky body sensations (like my whole skin surface was cumming all at once—yeah), automatic erections. I called Dr. Meggs and had her paged and she discontinued some medication that can cause dangerous permanent erection in men and told me to call 911. Leona and Daniel took me. Daniel napped on the hospital bed while I paced around the tiny room and I had the sensation that all colors around me were ultra bright—it's a manic thing. The first night I was in the hospital I had insane hallucinations but I was back to normal quickly with some Seroquel, an extra antipsychotic on top of my normal Risperdal. I was only there for four days. After I get out of the psych ward for those manic texture hallucinations like I've never seen before, plus auditory hallucinations of music way off in the distance, I email SXG, an options trading company I used to work for, a hedge fund—I was a programmer there. I had crazy plans. Even though I had no money, I was going to get SXG to rehire me, offer me an advance so I could fly to Philadelphia, then I was going to live in the apartment building across the street—have SXG pay the rent—and from there once I got my first paycheck, I would move out, start a life, and everything would be great [delusion](#). To entice them, I proposed a plan for what I would build. It was either brilliant or psychotic—I have no idea. I would work alone, under my own direction. No one there was qualified to be my boss. I had met their so-called whiz-kid programmers when I worked there and their only demonstrable skill was their snobbery. "I built SXG's options model" was the only thing one of these greenhorns would say to me when I asked him what he did—just trying to make conversation with the guy. He was offended that I didn't already *know* what he had done—like his work was so important he thought it must have rippled through the company ranks with hush and awe. Congratulations, you built an options trading model. You know C Academic programmers like that, just silly kids really, they're proud if they write ten-thousand lines of C code a year. I write a thousand lines of C code a *day*. Anyway, yeah, a guy I used to work with at SXG, a manager, wrote me back and said "I don't have open spots that match your skills..but I will pass your note on to recruiting." Uh, you still need *programmers*, don't you?! Their job board had *hundreds* of postings. There's no loyalty, no idea that we're all part of a team. They're not trying to hire the smartest people they can find. It's a club, and it's about going to the right college and wearing a tuxedo to your interview (yes, they actually do that). It's a fucking club. And I'm no longer in it. There was a millionaire named Josh Harris. You've probably never heard of him, but in the nineties he founded pseudo\.com, the first internet television network. At the time, it was cool as fuck—the only thing like it on the internet. This man was an entrepreneur of historic scope, an eccentric whose rise and fall is documented in the film *We Live in Public*. Well, Josh made a lot of money and he lost a lot of money. And the social experiment he spent his money on is beyond art, it's beyond science, it's beyond all common sense, actually—but it is visionary. Roger Ebert called him prophetic and strange. But here's the kicker—and I'm no visionary internet entrepreneur—but I can relate to something that happens at the end of the film. Some time after Josh Harris is at the top of the mountain of venture capital fundability, in the late nineties, he is out of money and needs a job. This documentarian follows him to several interviews with Silicon Valley startups. The CEOs are younger than Harris, and even though these interviews take place roughly only ten years after *everybody* knew about pseudo\.com, these CEOs have never heard of pseudo\.com—the name means nothing to them, the name of its founder means nothing to them—and they *refuse him work as a programmer* because they think he lacks the requisite skills! Pseudo\.com rose and fell, as all things do. But these startup CEOs who were interviewing Josh Harris..their businesses hadn't even rose! Probability says that now, five years later, two out of three of them are jobless. But they wouldn't hire a—granted, crazy, but—visionary internet entrepreneur who had already done more in his life than *any of them* are likely to do in theirs, in terms of impact to the world. They wouldn't hire a guy *who pioneered the first streaming TV network on the internet* because they didn't recognize his name or his company's and they thought his programming skills were rusty. So quickly we forget!—or in this day and age, so quickly we never learned—about the past. The *industry in general* isn't loyal to one of its pioneers, Josh Harris—in fact that industry doesn't even know who its pioneers are. They wouldn't give Josh Harris a mop job. And I feel that with SXG. There I was, a former employee with a good record—I programmed needed systems that nobody else would or could do, I worked quickly, I innovated, my code reviews were perfect, I was friendly, had social skills, I was easy to work with, I helped other people. And there's SXG, with hundreds of open programmer positions posted on their public job board, and they would rather hire an unknown quantity—some baby chick with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania—than someone with a decade of experience, some of it with them! I can make a lot of assumptions from this, but I'll stick to the one most firm. When that corporation told me they hire the smartest people they can—that's frozen orange juice filled with maggots, it's b-u-l-l-s-h-*double i*-t. That is not the primary criteria for their hiring. In fact, you won't find your smartest Americans working for the corporations—you'll find them in exile in Russia or Bolivia, hunted by the secret governments they exposed as they blew the whistle on their way out the door. Or like Josh Harris—former superstar internet millionaire living in Africa to avoid US creditors. Or like me, simply unhirable because I have a mental disability—and even though discrimination on those grounds is illegal, we all know we do it anyway. ### 119 Leona and James bought me a bike! It was awesome! It was a fixie—a fixed-gear bicycle—and I loved riding it. I rode my bike to my bi-weekly mental health appointments. It was dangerous but I did it for Leona's convenience, so she didn't have to interrupt her day to take me. That's why they got me the bicycle. - - - - Leona yelled at Daniel one day so strong that I had the experience of seeing terror truer than I have seen anywhere else, in the movies or out, in psych wards, African jungles, emergency rooms. It was the look on Daniel's face when my little sister Leona *screamed* at him and his mortally scared little body ran for me—the only other person in the room. Within ten minutes they were friends again, and I doubt Daniel will ever remember that event—but I will. I imagine parenting must be hard, but I don't think that kind of yelling ever needs to happen, and though I know my sister goes to counseling, I think she needs to take a step very far back and reconsider her own mental health with some new paradigms. I got yelled at as a child, but that wasn't just yelling—it was hellish, it was menace, it was shrieking—not things any child..any person..ever needs to hear in a relationship with someone they love. James's parents have suggested that my sister is unfit emotionally to be a mother. While I have a natural tendency to disagree with anyone saying that about my sister, when I saw her yell at Daniel that day—the way she yelled and the terror it caused in him—I questioned, myself, whether something drastic might need to change within her in order for her to be fit to be around children. That yell—that scream—was way out of bounds. - - - - I did some chores at Leona's house. I loaded and unloaded the dishwasher. People did not put their own dirty dishes into the dishwasher. They left them on the counter or on the sink and it was my job to keep the surfaces clean and get the dishes into the dishwasher, run it, unload. Sometimes Daniel helped unload. That was particularly fun. It didn't actually speed up the process—but it was something I could do with my nephew that we enjoyed. We were a family of four; we did the dishes twice a day. I also mowed the lawn. I did this with a manual lawnmower. It was extremely physical work that made me sweat (I don't like to sweat) and I resented the person doing the lawn mowing not being the person to choose the lawn mower. This was like: you're going to do this job to help me and I have chosen the hardest possible way for you to do it! Prior to our dad coming for a visit, Leona gave me the task to paint some shelves—something I have no experience with—then being unhappy with the result (but not telling me that) and covertly having Dad redo them. I felt like I was set up for failure here. My only work skills involve me sitting at a keyboard. I am not a carpenter. I am not a painter. I cannot paint a room. I don't plan to ever learn how to paint a room. And by the way, my dad was quite disappointed when he learned this about me in my early twenties, as he is a handyman of *epic* proportions. I'm not interested in things involving rust, splinters, or nails. While I'm bitching, Leona decided that having me cook a meal a week would be a good way for me to participate in the family. So each week, one day, using a large quantity of my food stamps, I researched a recipe on the internet and made it. I am not knowledgeable about cooking, but I have aptitude as a cook, therefore meals I cook are quite tasty and proper and I followed all of the dietary restrictions of everyone in the house. And I made my meal, to participate in the family. But after a while, Leona wouldn't eat the food I made—on my dinner night, she'd go up to her room with an alcoholic drink and ask James to bring her different food later. That really hurt my feelings. Also, at the risk of connecting too many of the dots here, it injured my motivation. *Leona* is the one who asked me to cook. *Leona* refused to eat my food. *Do you see how that fucks with my motivation??!!* - - - - So Dad's trip. It was weird. It was really weird. He was supposed to be hanging out with us—right?—but half the time he spent at the hardware store or at his hotel room or on mysteriously long trips in his rental car. He also exhibited a trait which is becoming common in our family—not answering your phone and having some really good but improbable reason like you didn't hear your ringer. Multiple people in my immediate family do this now—I'm not going into this in this book. Did I mention the word *weird*? What about my dad's weird inability to interact with Daniel? I mean he treated Daniel like a *dog* and told him to get out of the way while he was attempting to fix their doorbell, instead of prioritizing the child first and the fix-it job second. That a man of his age doesn't prioritize interactions with other people—especially children..especially his grandchildren—is worrisome. I am being very nice here. - - - - A few days before Dad's visit I could see Leona was really anxious. I could tell by the way she talked. I could tell by the way she moved. And I said, *Leona, what is going on?* "I don't want to tell you because I'm afraid you'll get mad." "Well tell me anyway. I promise I won't get mad." "I'm worried about you and Dad." "You're worried about me and Dad getting into a fight when he comes here?" Leona starts crying. "Yeah, I'm really worried about it." "Ok, listen to me Leona. Look at my eyes. I am *promising* you that when Dad is here I will not initiate a fight with him nor will I respond to anything antagonistic he says. If he says something antagonistic, I just won't respond. I'll pretend like he never said anything. I'll get up and leave, go to my bedroom. But *I am promising you* that a fight between me and Dad won't happen because I won't let *my end of it* happen. Ok?" We hug. Dad comes to visit. Dad and I are civil to each other, and we even hug when he get there, which makes Leona cry even though the hug didn't mean anything—it didn't to me anyway. It wasn't some big reconciliation if that's what you're thinking. I would have hugged the fucking exterminator if it would make Leona feel better. And the whole time Dad was there, I treated him like a platinum customer. It didn't matter what he did, how rude he was, how inconsiderate, how inappropriate he was with Daniel, I treated Dad with undeserved respect and I made it sound sincere and I gave him every chance, second, third, fourth, and last. I helped him as his slave. I laughed at his stupid jokes. I let him take control of the dinner we were supposed to be making *together*—but that's the way he always takes control. I'm used to it—I lived with him for half my life. And during that trip, Dad bugged the ever-loving *shit* out of Leona and James. He was supposed to be helping them hang some shelves and he wouldn't do *their* project *their* way—he had to take control and they wouldn't let him. I was in the back yard editing, so I didn't actually see this, but Leona and James said when he couldn't get his way he threw a tantrum, threw some tools around, and left. Like left *the house*. And at the final dinner of Dad's visit, Leona and James were so fed up with me and Leona's dad—and Dad was saying such fucked-up stuff to Daniel—that when Dad got up and went to the bathroom, Leona and James were *begging* me to tell Dad off. They knew I could do it in style. They wanted to see some of that righteous smackdown that my sister Joanne talks about, and they wanted to see it smack our father right in his idiotic fucking face. But I said: "I can't do that, Leona. I *promised* you that while Dad was here I wouldn't argue with him because I wanted to help reduce your anxiety." And Leona said, "Well, I release you from that promise." They were mad. They wanted some retribution for my dad's terrible treatment of them while he was their guest. Understandably. And they wanted me to give it to him, because they knew that once you got me going I was like a fucking nuclear reaction—it starts out small, then it blows up an entire city and every living thing in it. That's what they wanted to see. Some kind of verbal/psychological justice for this man who was playing the fool in their house, mistreating their child, my nephew. I was mad about that part, too. But I was also a changed man—or a man beginning to change. I didn't spend three months in a psych hospital for nothing, and when Leona and her husband were seriously begging me to tell off my father for all his missteps during his visit to our house, I did tell Leona, smiling and shaking my head: "I *promised* you that I wasn't going to have conflict with Dad while he was here and I can't break that promise now just because we have new information—the information that he's still a fucking jackass!!" They laughed and we all shushed each other—the bathroom was right next to the dining room, and my Dad might have heard everything we said. But that promise wasn't just to Leona. It was to myself. I saw myself in the mirror so many times at the Refuge when it comes to anger that I had *started to learn* what a dangerous emotion it is for me. Not *learned perfectly in Zen master holiness*, but *started to learn*. But that start was enough to keep me cool for a week of Dad being at Leona's house while I lived there. I mostly just ignored him and did my thing—and it felt really fucking good. David Mamet in *Redbelt* writes, "A man distracted is a man defeated." Well, these days, my dad isn't my dad anymore—he's a distraction. For me to stay on *my* path, to write, to accomplish my objectives, I must ignore my father, I must not be distracted by him or anything else. I'm not on his trip anymore. I'm on my own. ### 120 We had our little routine. James would go to work and Leona and I would sit downstairs watching Daniel. During Daniel's nap, Leona rested and I wrote, then I took care of Daniel from the time he woke up to the time Leona woke up. I rode my bike to all my mental health appointments. I was getting my medicine from the clinic now so Leona and James were no longer paying for my medication. The food I ate came out of my food stamps, so I wasn't a burden on them in that way. But, after a while, Leona and James told me I needed to find somewhere else to live because, "It was just too much." "I was stressing Leona out." "Taking care of me was more than she expected." Leona wanted me in a group home. We met with my social worker and Leona suggested the idea. My social worker laughs. "You'll never get him into a group home." "Why not." "Because he doesn't need that level of care." "Well I think he does." "Why?" "He doesn't bathe. He wears weather-inappropriate clothing." "How often are you bathing?" "I don't know..like..once a week." "What's the deal with the weather-inappropriate clothing?" "He wears *wool sweaters* when it's warm out!!" "Well that's not hurting anybody." "But it indicates he has disorganized thinking." "The thing about a group home in Portland is..first of all no one will ever evaluate him as needing that level of care..and secondly the waiting lists are over a year..two years..so if you're looking for some sort of immediate solution—" We stormed out of the meeting. Leona wanted a second opinion. She thought my social worker was crazy. - - - - I let my psychiatrist know about the situation..told him I might be moving soon. We talked about the usual things. He asked about my thoughts, my plans. Toward the end of our session, he said: "How do you think your medicine is working?" I said, "Fine." He said, "You just told me you're thinking about going back to your former mental hospital in Vermont and killing yourself on their grounds. But you think your medicine is working fine." That was the last time we met. - - - - I called Mom for help. I needed the big guns. She suggested I take a three-week vacation to Baton Rouge and stay with Susan, Bob, GranGran. To give Leona time away from me and time for us all to figure out a good next move when it came to finding me a place to live. We were all on the phone together. "How does the idea of a vacation/break sound to you, Leona?" "I think he needs to be put in a group home." "Did you two meet with the social worker?" "His social worker says he doesn't need to be in one and there's no way we could get him into one because his level of functioning is too *high*!" "So he thought it was high," my mom says. "And what did you think?" "I think it's low!" Leona almost screams, then she goes into the fact that I'm wearing wool sweaters when it's warm out. "Well, I'm working on a temporary solution that could relieve some of this pressure." This is what my mom says. - - - - This disconnect between my family and my doctors has become typical. What has happened since, with my sister Leona, my Mom, my aunt Susan, is that they will take me to the psychiatrist or tell me to take myself, claiming that, "it seems [I'm](#) doing really poorly," or, "You look manic." Then I go to the psych doc and he says, sometimes with my relative sitting right next to me, that I am fine. I am not manic. For a person with bipolar I, I am stable—or as stable as it gets. Leona wanted to put me in a "group home?" My social worker almost laughed us out of the room. He said I wasn't sick enough to need that level of care and when my sister insisted he try to put me on a list to get me out of her house and into a group home, my guy said, "Ok, I'll do that if you want but he'll never get in because that is for people who are in dire situations." "Well, I think his situation is dire. He doesn't bathe every day. He can't take care of himself." "Those aren't bipolar symptoms," a psychiatrist once told my mom when she said I was having fast talking periods and crying spells and I don't know what all else she mentioned. I got the distinct impression (and I'm sure she would disagree) that my aunt, when she was having a bad day, would tell me to go to the psychiatrist. I had become enough of the identified patient that Leona couldn't see the inconsistency in calling me an invalid when I spent more time than she did, each day, taking care of her kid. She yelled at me once because Daniel took a glorious spraying shit all over the changing table during the two seconds she had gone into the bathroom for some wipes and come back. "HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN??!!!" "Leona, I have no control over Daniel pooping." "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE WATCHING HIM SO HE DIDN'T FALL OFF THE TABLE." "He didn't fall off the table. I was watching him. He never went near the edge of the table and if he had I would have stopped him from going any farther." "But you *standing all the way over there is part of the problem*." "What problem are you talking about?" "Your—you and Joanne's—problem with poop! You both have a problem with poop. You won't get near it. *Babies poop*, ok?" "Yeah, I know. If you want me to help with changing diapers just let me know." "No. That's not the issue. Neither you or Joanne are married." "Ok?" "Neither of you have partners. Do you even have friends?" "Yes, I do have a few long-term friends." "Who?" I roll my eyes. "Ashley, Astrea—" "Do you ever see yourself having kids?" "If I'm ever financially stable enough to support kid, yeah, I'd have one, and I'd change the diapers, too—I don't have a *problem with poop*." Leona snorts and shakes her head. She's wiping up Daniel's shit from the changing table. She starts crying. "I just feel like *I have to handle all of this alone*." "This what?" She holds up a baby wipe with poop all over it. "*This.* Couldn't you have done *anything* to stop it?!" I'm racking my brain. "No, Leona. There's nothing I could have done to stop it." "It's just that I leave and he's clean and I tell you to watch him and I come back *two seconds later* and there's..*shit*..everywhere!!" "But do you get, Leona, that you leaving him with me has nothing to do with him shitting all over the place and that *I did my job* which was to make sure he didn't fall off the table. Just because I'm standing here when you come back and get surprised by this fuckload of poop doesn't mean that I have *anything to do with it* or that I'm a punching bag. I'm not your whipping boy for when Daniel poops in a messy way." "I know," she says, "I know. But I just wonder what in you and Joanne's childhood's contributed to both of your misanthropy." This is what I had to look forward to after I failed to kill myself, after I spent three months in a mental hospital, after I abandoned all my possessions except a backpack and a laptop bag and moved to Portland because my sister Leona was the only one kind enough to suggest that I come and live with her during one of the roughest periods of my life. I'll never forget that she said the word *misanthropy*. I mean if I'm senile someday and I only remember eight things, I wouldn't bet against this being one of them. My one sister thinks that my other sister and I are *misanthropes* because neither of us is married or has kids or a partner? The *New Oxford American Dictionary* defines "misanthrope" as "a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society." The *Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus* is much more expressive. To them, a misanthrope is a "HATER OF MANKIND, hater, cynic; recluse, hermit." Those are their capitals, not mine—honestly, I did not know that the *Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus* was capable of such a smackdown. And I know Leona didn't mean that particular definition, but when she said that to me, there is no doubt in my mind that she meant *at least just a little bit* of a moral judgment between all three of us siblings where she was superior to Joanne and I because she had a kid. And a husband. And a house. And a car. And money. Basically, all the things that make up a normal American life. Most children imagine their weddings when they're little. Joanne and I have talked about this and neither of us ever imagined that. I mean from an *early* age that destiny of aloneness was already set—I won't say set in stone but there's some reason, somewhere deep in our genetics or our subconsciouses, that neither Joanne or I ever wanted to have kids, get married, or maybe even form close relationships. Joanne and I are close in age. Leona is seven years younger. Maybe this misanthropy which irks Leona so much is because Joanne and I grep up with a seriously different set of parents than Leona did. Maybe it's as simple as that. - - - - Or you could go with a theory held by two separate women who are close to me. I won't mention their names because their theory would royally piss off people close to them—let's leave that at that. But the theory, which these two women who hardly know each other and I am certain did not learn, one from the other, is that artists have the ability and vision *to make things*—things like symphonies and photographs and books that never go away—and if you're an artist, that's what you do, you make those kinds of things. And if you're not, you make babies. And there is a frustration that these theory-wielding women have when the whole family gets together and *everyone talks about the baby*. Baby this, baby that. It's so disgusting. I mean we all love those babies, too, and we love the people they grow up to be even more. But, while raising a child is certainly a lot of work, *anyone can do it*—just about anyone can do it. As one of these women said to me, "I mean *we all know* how you're doing that." Exactly. Congratulations. You fucked. That's all you did! Penis in vagina. And the whole family will sit around gaga-ing over this [truly] beautiful thing you "made"—But you didn't really *make* it. You just fucked and took some prenatal vitamins and waited in angst and did breathing classes and went through tons of pain and fucked up your vagina and changed a lot of motherfucking diapers. While *you've* got—as these two women who shared this theory with me do—*you've* got actual mental skills that allow you to make art. And let me tell you, most grandmothers don't give one one-thousandth of a shit about art as they do about grandbabies. The women who told me this theory, and other related ones, one of them has children, one does not. So no one's saying *don't have children*. I'm certainly glad my mom had me! But it does seem like, even though it's not literally true that you have to *choose*, there is a psychological choice you make between developing yourself and developing someone else. ### 121 When I left Leona's house, about a year after I attempted suicide, it was on bad terms: my sheer presence in her house had become too much for her to handle, even though all I did was help her with Daniel, wash the dishes, mow the lawn, make one meal a week for their family using my food benefits, and sit in the corner and write during Daniel's nap. Yes, they paid for my prescriptions at first, since Oregon denied me Medicaid, but by the end I was getting everything I took from a free clinic that I drove to on a bike that they purchased—Leona and James were generous and welcoming to me. But one day Leona had a bad day, probably because she shares some of the same mental traits that make me bipolar. Mom had already arranged for me to take a three-week vacation to Baton Rouge, leaving the next day by airplane, to give Leona and I a break from each other. So help was on the way. But Leona and James decided to create a problem. Leona and James accused me of doing fewer loads of dishes because they had told me to find a new place to live—they said that I was shirking on my chores after they politely asked me to start looking for where I could live next. It all came down to a single day when they were working in the yard. They claimed that they had done two loads of dishes that day to make up for my supposedly having not done any dishes that day and that I had not done any dishes that day *specifically to punish them for asking me to find a new place to live*. "Leona, I would never do that. I'm not mad about your request for me to leave. I am looking for where my new place will be, and (because you were in the yard much of the day) you didn't see the complete picture on the dishwashing situation, which is that we've done *three* loads of dishes today. I did one of them. Whenever there were dishes to be done, when James didn't beat me to it, I did them. James seems happy, on occasion, on the weekends when he isn't working, to do the dishes for me sometimes." Leona and James claimed that I was lying about the number of times I had done the dishes. Leona said she had noticed a change in my behavior since she had asked me to leave. "Leona, I don't feel a change and I am absolutely *not* upset with you. I don't love you less or anything like that! It's your house. I'm thankful to you and James and Daniel for welcoming me here, warmly—which you certainly have." At the beginning it was me and Leona watching *every season* of *The Biggest Loser*, sitting on a couch cluttered with baby toys and afghans and it was the best time of my life in a while, to be with the sister I have seen the least in this life. And after we watched every episode of *The Biggest Loser*, we watched every episode of *Cake Boss*. It was true decadence. But you know how things change, especially with fiery people—or maybe people with certain mental illnesses—you can feel amiable for months and then one day, maybe *just* for one day, you can be so out of control emotionally that you're *yelling* at your brother while he is gently trying to disarm the situation, using a quiet voice with my sister even as she shouted at me and told me lies about myself, about what I was thinking and what I was feeling, about how many times I had run the dishwasher, finally screaming at me in a way I have only been screamed at a few times in my life, to—quote—"GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!!!" James did what a husband has to do: he backed up his wife. I had gone up to my room to hide from the hate and screaming and James knocked on the door and said, "I'll take you to the airport in ten minutes." Ten minutes to pack my stuff, whatever was critical, into just the bags I could carry, for a flight to Baton Rouge that my mom had already arranged and which left *the next day*. Leona wouldn't let me stay in the house one more night so that I didn't have to sleep in the airport. She told me to get the fuck out of her house and I got the fuck out of her house. Happily. Refused the ride from James—took public transportation. When you've given up personal integrity to passive-aggressively support your wife as she angrily kicks me out of the house and yet at the same time offer me a ride to the airport—no thank you. That's some weird push-pull power shit that I want no part of. - - - - And someday, James is going to have to stand up to Leona—or not. Because Leona goes too far. She's like me. I told you one of the scariest things I've ever seen is the look on two-year-old Daniel's face when Leona got fed up and gave Daniel a BALLISTIC scream that sent him running for the nearest safe adult—which happened to be me. I was sitting in the corner, writing, and Daniel ran to me..for protection..from my sister. He clung to me and Leona cooled off. And of course ten minutes later Daniel trusted her again. But when I heard my little sister scream, I looked up and saw Daniel's face: it was *terror*. That face burned into me and there it will stay forever. James is a glacier. I told him about a bad dream once and he said he's never had bad dreams. James doesn't wake up in the night because his subconscious is haunting him. He goes along with everything that Leona demands. She sets the rules. She makes the plans. She makes the decisions and James quietly puts up with it all. He's a stable personality—and I'm glad. I want James to be stable..because he takes care of my sister. I'm glad James is the kind of guy whose psychology allows him to go to work each day and feel happy, earn money, and support my little sister, himself, and their two boys. In short: I'm glad he's not like me. But Leona is bipolar—her manic reaction to the SSRI proves it. And if she or you do not like hearing that diagnosis from a non-psychiatrist, then allow my descriptions of Leona's temper, irrationality, yelling, yelling at her fucking kid and not just *yelling*, but *wrath-of-god* yelling that puts the fear of the devil into my nephew..her three-day descent from treating me politely to kicking me out of her house *right the fuck then* instead of the next morning so that I didn't have to sleep on a bench at the airport..this is all (and I offer this as gently as possible) but this is mental illness. Someday James is going to have to decide if he's going to let Leona's extremes go unchallenged for the rest of their relationship. I don't know—maybe he's already made that decision. The two of them owed me twenty dollars from a food stamp exchange. I asked James for it and he gave it to me. As I was walking out the door, James was standing there with his arms outstretched, smiling genuinely, telling me that he loved me—I don't think he saw the contradiction between his actions and his words. I Tweeted from the airport later that night that I tip well even when I'm poor and James replied *instantly* with some smart-ass Tweet asking if I had any money left. It's my money, motherfucker, and if you have something to say to me, skip the subtext and say it directly. Don't just be quietly "supporting your wife" while she goes into a bipolar rage and forces me to sleep in an airport when there's a perfectly good extra room in your house that I could stay in for *one more night* without bothering a goddamn soul. And now, when I see James, he doesn't make eye contact with me. If he tells a story to me Joanne and Leona, he smiles and waves his arms and gets wild and funny and he looks at my sisters over and over, connecting with each of them, but the entire time, in a twenty-minute interval, he never, ever, not one time, looks at me. Fucked-up shit happens, especially when you're crazy, especially when your whole family is crazy. But my relationship with my sister and her husband does not rest on the insanities of one day..*any* one day. Rome was not built in a day—it wasn't burned in a day either. I never did get to sleep that night in the Portland airport. The bench was less comfortable than the floor so I curled up under the bench. At some point in that night, I pull out my notebook. > if As I intentionally fill, I must intentionally empty thenI think the universe is emptying me right now because it wants to fill me very full for a time, and it can't start yet because there's not enough room Wishful thinking? Wishes..well..when it comes to thinking, I think thinking should be full of them =) ### 122 I was on a writing schedule. I had been writing every day during Daniel's nap on my book *Lacy*. I hadn't missed a day yet in over two months and I wasn't about to miss a day just because I'd had no sleep and was on an airplane. My plane changed in Vegas and on the second leg, from Vegas to New Orleans, I used offline Google Docs to write my three-thousand words for the day. Met up with my aunt in New Orleans. She picks me up at the airport and I tell her about what's been going on with me. When I tell her I attempted suicide she goes silent. That's the end of the conversation! I mean from that point on the road all the way to the house in Baton Rouge, our raucous conversation fizzled to a rate of close to zero words per minute. I don't blame her. It's hard for people to understand. It's considered taboo to indicate something that wrong with you. She did tell me that she's taken antidepressants and she's had that feeling before (a suicidal feeling) for a week or a few days or something. She says she takes antipsychotics. Maybe it's the similarity of our situations that is running through her head while she's sitting over there silently driving. I'll never know 'cause she didn't tell me—a theme you'll see continue in the coming pages. We get to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the Deep South, home of slavery, the Bible Belt, swamp land, hurricane country, one of the fattest and poorest states in the Union. Upsides: my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousin live there. Oh and the food is excellent. ### 123 I set up my laptop in the front room, where I sleep. The room is filled with my uncle's bookcases, millions of Tupperware containers, antique furniture and old pictures. The ancient aesthetics of the place make me feel like a foreigner, and the closest thing I can compare it to in my panoply is Deckard's apartment in *Blade Runner*: lots of shadows and a bunch of old stuff in a futuristic world. My aunt and uncle are working, my cousin is staying at a nearby rental house, and my grandmother is in her TV room watching entertainment news with her door closed. The house is essentially empty, so I revert to journal writing, a skill I learned in fourth grade. I clear off a corner of an old coffee table by stacking some boxes on top of each other. My laptop screen is familiar to me, the surest home I have. > **October 12, 2012** > > Have an unfinished book. > > Have ideas for more. > > Feel stuck in Baton Rouge. Not sure what I have to look forward to here. I'm both hopeful I can get a job at McDonald's and depressed about the possibility. > > Started smoking. A little wine at the end of the day is the greatest thing I have to look forward to. While my funds hold out, which is only a couple more days. > > Read a C. S. Lewis quote today about it never being too late to start a new dream, to begin something new. Or: one never being too old to start a dream or begin something new. Liked that idea. > > I could still be a writer. Could still have a shot at making money doing that, such that I would have a career that fit my personality. I just have to make it from here to there, from sitting around my grandmother's house to paid writer, with my own place to live. Maybe I can make enough money at McDonald's to rent my own apartment. I tend to doubt it, but maybe I can. > > I wonder about my mental illness. How much it has to define me. Hopefully not much. I don't want to be overly fixated on it, but I don't want to be caught in the trap of not paying enough attention to it that I end up being screwed at work by bipolar symptoms and end up getting fired. > > Can't wait for tonight's wine. Even though I'm not even really getting tipsy lately, I don't know why, but even the littlest bit of fun is welcome in my somewhat dreary days. > > Maybe I can write another book, not Lacy, but something new, while I'm here in Baton Rouge. Something I can write while the TV is on in the background, as it is so often here. > > I want a long break from my family. I want to be doing well and separate from my family for a while. There's been too much needing, to much dependence, too much intertwining. I want to be ok separate from them. > > I want fame. I want my books to be rocking the boat, to be controversial, to be events. That's what I should focus on above all else. Trying to make that happen. > > Even a bit of writing makes me feel better. This little document is organizing my brain, sequencing me. Yay. > > Believe that this can happen, this becoming an important writer, an event-causing writer. Write like there's no tomorrow. > > I'm in such a low space, a low mindset, that it's tough to rally myself up. I need to be easy on myself, not demand too much, give myself time to come back to full force, if that can happen. I'm still in my mind debating whether I want to be in the hospital or not. Do I want myself to be heading in the direction of the hospital, or heading away from it? I haven't been entirely sure that I want to be moving away from it. But I have glimpses that I could move away from it, that I don't need to be on the ward, that I could manage my life without that. I wish I had a little money and a job prospect in say Brattleboro. Maybe I can save money from a job here, like McDonald's, and move to Vermont again, find a job in town, live there successfully this time, write. > > I worry about my ability to live with a non-software job, to live simply and cheaply, and to live alone. I fall apart too easily, lose track, lose faith, fail to execute, grow mad. I'm too volatile a mixture, too complex, too unbalanced, to simply live life in jobs and bills and routines. I long to do this, to live normally. But I forget! It's intolerable to me, impossible to stomach. > > What if I make my plan to move to Brattleboro, after saving money in Baton Rouge. Write down lists of places I can work in Vermont, apply to them all when I get there. Make budgets, make plans. Make my project to see if I can live successfully. > > To move toward being a greater writer. Keep writing. Make statements in books, not Twitter, not blog, not conversation, but books. Continue the age of books, where that's how I communicate, that's my medium and mode. > > Just visualize TSID taking over the world. That one book becoming a bestseller and getting me into a new financial way, and professional way, leading into my other books being bought by major publishing companies. When I smoked, I developed an obsession with looking at pictures of women smoking while I'm smoking. I liked to pretend I was them..celebrities..Lindsay Lohan, Katherine Heigl..I had a whole set of bookmarks to my favorite female celebrity smokers and I would read their gossip and watch them smoke and I would smoke right alongside them. I imagined going to Rutland and picking up Faith (despite the precautions they take in a psych ward to prevent this, I knew her last name) and me and Faith being a perfect odd couple, traveling the country like a bipolar Rainbow and Clyde. We wouldn't rob banks, but we'd be crazy like bipolar people are, and in particular how me and Faith are. We'd say STFU and laugh our asses off about it and then Faith would start saying UFTS instead and with a touch of mania, the fire of our wordplay would rage in directions that straight people can't even follow. I don't know if we would have sex—we probably would. I'm not even that sexually attracted to Faith, but I'm attracted to her as a whole person. I would have sex with her personality. But I'd have sex with her body, too—Faith deserves it, deserves to be taken care of sexually, loved by someone who's not taking advantage of her, and I'd love to hear that bipolar girl cum. It would be the scariest, most beautiful cum sound I had ever encountered, I am sure. But if Faith and I traveled the country like Rainbow and Clyde, we'd prob'ly run out of money and end up in a mental institution somewhere. I can only hope it would be the same one. 'Cause when it comes right down to it—and I've had some great company—but that crazy, bipolar, oppositionally defiant, big gulper, coffee guzzling, fighting maniac of a human being is just about the closest person to me that I have ever known. Certainly in a mental health sense. Stripes says she's immature. And she is. I don't know what Faith is like now but back when I was in Tyler 2, Faith was in a sweet spot of age and crazy and spunk and words and the fucking pit bull in the girl. She got kicked out of her assisted living situation because she attacked the safety attendant. The safety attendant was in a swivel chair behind a glass window. The window was open. Faith jumped through from the outside. She landed with one knee on either side of the woman. The woman had insulted Faith. So Faith beat her face in and the safety officer had to go to the hospital. Faith got kicked out of the building. She had nowhere else to go. Her father didn't want her back. I love Faith for beating up that security attendant, sending that bitch to the hospital with her bare hands. You can't let people talk shit about you. Maybe the future will be wonderful, maybe it will be horrible, but if I think good thoughts about it now, I will enjoy this time more..that's my most solid reasoning behind thinking happy thoughts. And even in my depression and disconnectedness, I was still reaching up for a branch with one spring leaf on it. > If I wanted to, I could make something that was beautiful, true to me, but something I would make if I loved the world, if I wanted to give my readers something that broke them down, and then breathed life into them. I have the skill for that, and I wonder if I am deciding to want to do such a thing. Then I write the title of a book I'll write later that year. > *Of Bicycles and Boardwalks and Oceans and Ships* Yeah, I like that. ### 124 There was hurricane not long after I got there. The rain came in. The power went out. Our generator had seen its last seasons, but some neighbor friends loaned us one, which meant we had a lamp in each room and the food in the refrigerators didn't go bad. There are three refrigerators at that house. Don't ask me why. I missed the internet of course, but other than that I loved the hurricane. No one got hurt. The lack of air conditioning brought everyone but GranGran outside to the carport, where we sat together for the most time we all sat together the whole two years I lived there. Susan played on her phone (which did still have internet). Bob and I read books from his extensive library. I read several books by Brett Easton Ellis, who I had been meaning to read. Also, Susan and I made frequent trips to Walgreens to buy bottle upon bottle upon bottle of red wine, which she drank fast and I drank faster. I didn't mind that at all. Me to Bob: "Do you have *American Psycho*?" "I believe we have that." "*Less than Zero*?" "Yes." "*Imperial Bedrooms*?" "No, I don't think I have that one." "That's ok, everyone says it's just *Less than Zero* twenty years later." "Ugh." Bob had all the classics and all the classic authors. I even fleshed out my D. H. Lawrence while I lived there. But during the hurricane it was Ellis and copious amounts of wine and it was delightful. Overall *Less than Zero* was my favorite, but the technical achievement of *American Psycho* was staggering. One day Susan cooked us burgers on the gas grill, and it was great to be doing something together, but other than that one meal it was fend for yourself and we all—forgive the dated metaphor but it's the perfect one—were like ships passing in the night. And I don't mean just during the hurricane, I mean the entire time I lived there. I couldn't relate to a single one of my family members, and I remembered why I had decided to stop communicating with them at the end of high school—everyone just watched TV alone in their rooms, refused to ever discuss anything of controversy or substance, we didn't eat together, we hardly talked to each other, unless it was to passive-aggressively complain about what someone else was doing. Some people call that family. But I am not one of those people. Of course if I was happier myself I would have been less concerned with what everyone else was doing. In a way I made a colossal mistake coming to Baton Rouge. Nothing was within safe walking distance to our house—and by that I mean the bigger streets had no sidewalks. To walk to McDonald's, to walk to anywhere at all, was to risk your life. So I felt I had foolishly moved to a house where I was basically isolated—I couldn't safely get to McDonald's if they hired me. And they didn't hire me. I applied online and never heard a word from them. ### 125 Then Susan's friend Mack moved back into the house. Susan was preparing Mack's old room for my Mom while Mack was off dealing a poker tournament, so when Mack returned, he and I shared the front room. Mack. Susan introduced us like "here's my best friend" and "here's my nephew" but it was never a friendly arrangement and, per the good God of the south, it was never designed to be. This asshole isn't worth a sentence, not a period, not a comma, not a single pile of shit from a single fly, so I'm going so try to contain him within this one chapter, which, if this book's chapters had titles, would be called, "Asshole Roommate." That's all this fucker ever was and that's all he'll ever be. (If you can't tell, I'm more of an Old Testament God than a New Testament one. If it was up to me I would just incinerate this fucker and save the rest of the world the trouble.) Check this fucker out: In fact, if you want to save some of your precious life, just skip to the next chapter and don't even read about this motherfucker. Honestly, just skip ahead. Ok, check this out: I'm sleeping. Mack and Susan come in at 4am yelling, cussing. Then I realize that they're yelling and cussing at each other. Then I realize that they're both drunk and I don't know where you took math but by my math that means at least one of them drove home drunk. This is them after an all-night poker session at one of the casinos. "Well I don't need you to be yelling at me like you're a fucking hyena!" That's my aunt. "Well if you didn't act like such a *bitch* then I wouldn't hafta." That's Mack. "Did you just call me a bitch?" "Yes I did, ya bitch, and I'll call ya a bitch as many times as it takes to get through that thick bitch skull of yours, ya fucken' bitch." Susan's husband, Bob, is in the next room. Mack and Susan are *yelling*. "You are a low-class piece of country trash and you *need* to remember who's putting a roof over your head!" "I knew you were gonna hold that over my head, ya fucken' bitch!" "You need to get out of my face before I—" "Before you what? You gonna bring *Bob* out here to back you up? That pansy ass ain't gonna do nuthin'. Gonna bring your *GranGran* out here. I can kick your ass right now if I want to." Susan laughs. "I'd like to see you try." "This is why you should never play poker with a *woman*." "And why is that?" "This is why you should never *drink* with a woman." "Mack I could drink you under the table." "And she brags about it, too!" "It's not a brag it's just the goddamn *truth* so why don't you *get. out. of. my fucken face. fore you find out. how a southern woman fights.*" "You ain't nuthin' but a unused piece of southern white pussy. And you better be glad you white or else you'd be worth *nuthin'*." This was one of my first nights at the house in Baton Rouge. I was scared. Waking up to people cussing at each other at the top of their lungs—that's the type of shit that brings back childhood memories, you know what I mean. If it had been one of my last nights at that house I would have gone out there and told those two assholes to keep it down 'cause people are trying to sleep. But my first night—I didn't know—for all I knew this could escalate to violence. So I stayed in my fucken bed. - - - - Let's proceed. Susan and Mack coming home from the casino and Susan proudly telling me that Mack had gotten kicked out of the casino for using the n-word at a security guard. You should have seen how excited she was by it. Like she didn't condone it. But it got her off. Yeah. It got her need for chaos off *big time*. She liked going to the casino with someone just the opposite of her husband—someone who fought fights and used the n-word and generally acted like a two year old plopped into the adult world. Mack is learning disabled. Or IQ challenged. Whatever you want to call it, the guy should not be allowed unsupervised into the real world. I call it being a dumb motherfucker, but that's just me. *Used the n-word at a black security guard at a casino.* *If I'm in charge you get your wings clipped for that one.* - - - - Oh yes: Mack's fatherly lectures to me about how to get my life back on track. (He's a mentally disabled part-time construction worker with two kids. Susan says he's undiagnosed bipolar—I say he's just an asshole.) Susan says, "Oh well that's just the way Mack is. He's an asshole and he knows it and everyone knows it and that's just the way it is." And I say, "Not with me, it isn't. I won't be treated like that by anyone." "Well he's just like you, he has bipolar..except you're getting treated for it." "Susan, even if he had bipolar—which he doesn't—the fact that he's not seeking treatment makes him not like me. And that's if he wasn't already a lot *not like me* in other ways. And what if *I* was 'just an asshole?' Would you accept me and defend me or would you have a problem with it. Just a question. Think about it in your spare time." Let's just jump to the core of this situation. Susan has a crush on Mack. So Mack gets to follow different rules. Mack is judged in different ways. Mack sits in Susan and Bob's bed with Susan and watches TV with her. I brought that up at one point with Susan—I think I have it in an email later in this book—and boy did Susan hate me for saying that. Now I'm not glad when Susan hates me, but when you get that kind of reaction from someone, it usually means you've hit a nerve. Mack left his cigarettes out on the carport table and I extracted an asshole tax of two cigarettes per day from that asshole. Oh yeah, his fatherly lectures. *Matt, go help your grandmother*—Fucker, I know when to help my grandmother. I grew up helping my grandmother in this house you just came to be squatting at recently. Fucking dotard. *Matt, take the trash out*—Fuck you, asshole. I take the trash out once a week and I take it on my schedule, not yours, you pinprick. *Matt, we got to get you out of the house. Play some poker, get you laid or something*—Look, I'm not stupid, I know this is this dimwit's attempt at making friendly conversation with me, but he'd be better off keeping his mouth shut. I can decide how much social contact I need *and what kind*, thank you, you terminal fucking *loser*. "And for God's sake, when you address your mom and your aunt and your uncle and your GranGran, say 'sir' and 'ma'am.' " "Mack, I'm from the north, we don't say 'sir' and 'ma'am.' You would know that if you ever left the state of Louisiana." "Well *show some fucking respect*, somehow—I don't care how you do it—but *respect your elders*." I decline to comment further. Mack says "sir" and "ma'am" but he pisses with the bathroom door open right across the hall from my grandmother's TV room. This is not the guy I'm taking manners lessons from. And even if he is "undiagnosed bipolar," (a preposterous phrase since bipolar is nothing *but* a diagnosis) at least I didn't go off and have two kids I didn't have the brains to provide for financially. That's something I never said to him, because deep in my heart, I have no intention of hurting Mack. A person like that is just a colossal inconvenience for me. And I know I need to make it less colossal. Around this time my alcoholism was budding, rekindling. I drank wine every day—box wine, Bob bought it with the groceries. I was sitting on the porch drunk when two trick-or-treaters come up, porch light on, me drinking and smoking and looking at pictures of celebrity female smokers on my iPad. I very apologetically explained to them that we didn't have any candy and I sheepishly turned out the porch light and resumed my ritual. - - - - This next one, as I read my notes for this chapter, I actually can't believe that I still talk to my aunt Susan, that I gave her another chance after this happened. It makes me angry. My cousin Stephen is over—he's folding laundry in the living room. Mack is watching some ridiculous titty movie on TV—like softcore teenager water park bullshit, with the sound way up. Mack goes outside for a *looooooooooong* time to smoke and listen to commercial pop music on his iPhone. Susan is in the kitchen drinking and eating cheese and whatnot. I turned off the TV. "Do you mind?" I asked Susan. "No," she said, with a mouth full of food. "Stephen?" "Cool with me, brother-o." "Cool." So we all go back to what we were doing. Mack eventually comes back inside, looks at the TV, and says, "Who turned that off?" I proudly said, "I did." And Mack said, "Asshole." And I was like, "*What did you say?*" And Susan said, "No trouble here." And I said, "Mack. Repeat what you just said." And that little wimp said, "I was saying it to Stephen. We joke around like that sometimes." And I said, "I don't care who you're saying it to. That's my cousin. This is a peaceful house. We don't talk to each other like that here." And Susan and Stephen were all defending Mack like, "Oh, that's just what he does, ignore him." And I was like, "We need to solve *this* right now." But Susan shushed me with her finger over her mouth and Stephen said, "It's better just to ignore him." And I was shocked. My family are the biggest conflict avoiders in the world. Actually I might have made Mack move his clothes so I could sit down and watch TV in the living room—whatever—it was some minor thing but the point is Mack called me an asshole in front of my Aunt Susan, she heard it, and she didn't do a thing about it. That's a thorn that manages to stick in your hand for a long time. Then there was the Hemingway incident—the straw that broke this camel's back. When this happened, I told Mom and Susan that this was the end of the line for this bullshit train. It's noon. I'm writing. I'm at the dining room table. Mack is in the same room watching TV. I get myself a glass of wine and go back to my laptop. Mack says, in the most judgmental, sour, condescending tone his weak verbal engine can muster, "Did you just *pour yourself a glass of wine*?" I didn't say anything. I went back to writing. It's none of Mack's business if and when I drink wine and *therefore* I owed him no reply. But I told my mom (who was living there by that time) and I told Susan about this incident and I told them this was not to happen again and we were going to do anything that needed to be done to/with/about Mack to make sure that it didn't happen again. I told them about his lectures. I said they must end. Right away. I don't need to be lectured on family matters by a non-family member with the IQ of a Lemur. End of the line for that train too. So Susan and Mom talk, privately, in a coffeehouse somewhere. Mom comes to report the contents of her coffee discussion with Susan and says Susan says Mack says you were drinking one night and threw up on the porch and Mack helped you clean it up and I say I specifically asked Mack not to mention that to anyone and he obviously told Susan and Susan obviously told you and just because Mack did me a favor means I have to take shit off him? What is the relevance of that to this discussion? Mom admitted there wasn't any. Let's see..there's something about a loud phone conversation..Mack disrespecting my mother to her face..and it looks like that Hemingway thing also happens in a later chapter. So ok I lied. Mack's only claim to fame in life will be having me insult him in this text, and even though I want to pack Mack's assholishness into this one chapter like a mobster wants to get a body into a single suitcase, it's like a PBJ with too much J. You pick it up and all this jelly falls out onto your plate. Because Mack's assholishness—I admit—is truly too epic to lock away into a single chapter. So, feel good Mack (this will be your only accomplishment in your entire worthless life) but you and your Indian elephant-sized assholishness will, indeed, show up in later parts of this book. ### 126 Let's be honest: my talking directly to Mack in this book can never be anything but a rhetorical device, because the longest piece of text Mack will ever read is the current track title as reported to him by his iPhone. ### 127 Toward the beginning of my stay in Baton Rouge, cheese, crackers, and wine with Susan turned into going to the casino to play poker with Susan and Stephen. We waited forever for a poker table and drank while we waited. Susan was really excited about bringing me into her inner fold, her world of poker playing at the casinos, but as you know I have bipolar disorder and gambling is not a good idea for me. Gambling addiction is one of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and I've stayed away from gambling a lot better than I've stayed away from substances. Anyway I felt nervous. My aunt had staked me for the game, and I didn't want to lose her money. But even though I *don't* play poker, it doesn't mean I *can't*. I sat down at the table, doubled my money, got up, and Susan was like shrugging anxiously saying *What the hell?* with her eyes. For her this is an all-night extravaganza. For me I just didn't want to lose my aunt's money—that would have been a disaster for me. Stephen drove me home. Then I got sick for three days, like the flu, I was shitting the bed while I slept, which I've never done before. I think my whole system, from the neurons to the bones, was in bad shape. I'm sweating my ass off at night, not used to the humidity. The hurricane comes. I get the flu. My cousin blames it on cigarettes. My aunt blames it on alcohol. My grandmother, with a few more trips around the sun, recognizes it instantly as a three-day flu. I have fever dreams. > That I and a bunch of kids (young elementary/kinder, but in the dream, Rebecca's age) celebrated RML's birthday party for her ghost. We were the living participants, or the real ones. Her ghost participated with us from the other side. I rode a large inflatable unicorn (pink) to lead the procession, which represented Rebecca, and on her side, was her. All the kids followed. So from her side, she had us all there partying with her. And from our side, we got to celebrate with her. And process our love for her. And if I hadn't been at that party, I would have never been able to process beyond that point of grieving. Rebecca is a friend who died in our early twenties—a girlfriend. There was a tight pull among our atoms and it took me a long, long time to move on after she did. Actually, reading that silly pink-unicorn dream from above breaks me up, so maybe I'm still dealing with it. My thinking is what my old psychiatrists might call disorganized. Notes from that time take the following general form: > Hyper. > > Doubting all diagnoses. > > Able to talk on the phone now, free to speak freely. > > Looking everywhere hoping to see a snake, in my grandmother's back yard, for instance. Haven't seen one yet. > > Dealing with the fact that I'm aging. > > Ate pizza tonight. Sausage and jalapeños. > > Not looking forward to going to sleep. > > Ok with my history. > > Horny. > > Imagining a giant dog attacking me (it just came to mind). Two more dreams. In the first dream I'm a cheetah, or a leopard or some kind of really fast deadly animal with spots who can run at incredible speeds and overtake its prey, biting it in the jugular and ending its life quickly (as humanely) before ripping into its flesh and consuming the muscle within. But there's only one problem: I'm in the middle of a desert and there's nothing there to eat. This isn't funny, in the dream. You and I might laugh about it now that I've woken up, but in the dream the desert has no pumas or elk or desert deer or anything that I might be able to eat. I'm a noble cat—I'm not about to eat bunnies or go digging in snake holes with my paws. Second dream. I'm still a big cat. I'm on a beach—another sandy place a big cat has no place being. I can't run well in that sand just like *you* can't run well in that sand. There's no traction, so I'm reduced to a kind of painful prance where each step involves a strenuous extrication of the paw from the sand only to bury it again in more sand slightly farther ahead—I can't hunt here. I can barely walk! And as if the gods wanted to curse me (and all of us) the beach is littered with dead whales, sharks, dolphins, rotting fish, and some sea creatures that neither you nor I have seen before this dream—huge dragon- and snake-like beasts that must have lived in the deep. And what's so fucked up about *this* dream is that I don't eat seafood, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't eat it while it's rotting. There are other cheetahs here, and we're all starving, but even though the remnants of life are all around us, all we can do is slush through the sand amid stinking carcasses that we wouldn't have eaten if they were fresh. If you thought I was going to interpret these for you, think again. Google that shit or read some Freud 'cause I can't help ya. As Quentin Tarantino's character might say: Did you see a sign in my yard that said *Matthew Temple, Dream Interpreter*? No? You know *why* you didn't see that sign? Because *it ain't there,* 'cause dream interpretation *ain't my fucking business!!* Let's agree on that, right here: this is *Brattleboro Stories*. I'm writing down what happened in Brattleboro, to me, over the course of one year—and the aftermath. Any and all *interpretation* of what happened will be up to *you*, Lebowski—*you*. I'm not here to hold your hand. I'm not here to connect the dots. I don't personally think this shit means *anything*. If *you do*, that's *your* fucking business. ### 128 Susan and I do fun things together for a while, before the novelty wears off. My illogic and optimism tells me the only thing to do is to be in the sun, develop ways to win money at casinos and the stock market (legally, with intelligence) and take over casinos with Susan. That's what I thought was going to happen. Susan takes me for steak at Fleming's, her favorite restaurant. We split a bottle of wine. I get bold while we're telling stories and tell her that I slept with a prostitute once, just to see what it would be like. "What was it like?" "It sucked," I say, and take another sip of wine. Looking back, I was too trusting. I shouldn't have opened up with her. But whatever—what's she gonna do to me? I tell all my secrets anyway. My medicine runs out—I have no psychiatrist in Baton Rouge. We can't just call a place and get an appointment. We have to do it the southern way: my aunt knows someone who knows someone. If you don't know someone then you're shit out of luck. We get a phone number through the grapevine. Even though I'm a bipolar patient off his medicine, it's six weeks before they can see me. I've done all this work to get on medicine—something I didn't want to do for years to begin with—and now that I agree to the medical establishment's suggested course of treatment, I can't get it! I freak out. I think I'll fall apart or die without my lithium. Hearing, from my aunt, that she thinks I seem to be doing ok off lithium, does extremely little to convince me that things are actually ok in my mind. We have an agreement that if she notices me getting wacky, she'll say something, but given that she's constantly drunk and spends most of her time at the casino, I doubt she'll be spending much time observing me. At first I felt left out when Susan and Mack would go to the casino to play poker—Susan had stopped doing social things with me because I wasn't drinking or I wasn't interesting to her or I didn't play poker or for whatever reason. But very soon I came to crave these moments of hours or days where Susan and Mack would leave for New Orleans *because it meant the house would be calm*. Even though it was her house, I often wished Susan didn't live there at all. I relished the time she and Mack were away. What they were doing, what state they would be in when they came back, what I had to say about it..those all became secondary to the fact that when they left the house, so did ninety percent of the chaos. And shades of the spoon psychosis later, months and years after I was out of the hospital it became that I had to pick the *shiniest* spoon in the drawer, but I didn't think the NSA had anything to do with it. And after that, even more years later, when I needed straws to drink because I had a movement disorder, I gave more thought to which straw to pick than most people probably would, but I wasn't overly concerned about choosing the shiniest one and my thoughts about the NSA's involvement in my silverware drawer had faded long ago. Mom lives in Baton Rouge for a while. At my Mom's request (to get me away from Mack), I sleep in Mack's old bedroom while Mack stays in the front room. Instead of putting my mom in her own room (Stephen's room—Stephen no longer lives there), Susan has my mom sleeping in the front room with Mack. I beg my mother to switch with me so she isn't in the same room as Mack, but she won't make the trade. Mack yells about ingredients being put in food. I realize this is difficult to understand. Say Mack was in the front room and he heard Bob in the kitchen say, "I'm putting dill in the cucumber," Mack would then *yell at startling volume*, "WHY IN THE HELL WOULD YOU PUT *DILL* IN THE CUCUMBER?!?!?!?!?!?!" To which everyone else in the house would reach like a grenade had gone off at Mack's coordinates. My mom went into the front room and said, "Mack, you might not understand this, but loud noises like that create an environment of *not-calm* and *calm* is what we're going for in this house." Mack said—motherfucker—"Sharon, I'd love to talk to you right now but I gotta go to work." "But do you understand what I'm saying about a calm home environment?" "Miss Sharon, I gotta be out the door fifteen minutes ago and I still have to shave so as much as I'd love to talk to you about this I just gotta go." "Ok," my mom says, and she literally wipes her hands of the situation. *Oooooh.* Deep breaths. You want to spark murderous rage within a son? Disrespect his mother. Brotha, you better hope you're never on a desert island with me, 'cause I will kill you, dissect you, and set you on fire, just like Ted Bundy. Etc. etc. etc. I allow myself to watch TV for once but my thoughts are so scattered I'm thinking of jacking Mack in an alley in one moment. In the next moment I feel it is absolutely imperative that I do a bold retelling of *The Wizard of Oz*. I think of David Mamet's quote, "Leave the bold moves to the brilliant players." Of course I think I'm one of these brilliant players, and I need to be making bold moves. Next it's a book based on Tori Amos lyrics, as I've always wanted to do. Next, next, next—I'm a firebox of loose ends, ends that will never be tied up. ### 129 Susan would always invent extra work for me to do around the house—work that didn't need to be done—with the intention of "structuring my day." She'd say: "We need to structure your day. It can't be good for you to watch movies all night—though I'm sure that's fun—then sleep all day, wake up at four. I need you to vacuum the house tomorrow." "Ok," I'd say, even though I vacuumed the house yesterday. Then her chores got obsessive. We had three cats and three cat boxes. She wanted me to clean each cat box *every day*, at a certain time of day—this was supposed to somehow give my day structure. In my mind, you can clean a cat box every *few* days—otherwise every single day you're cleaning out *one piece of shit* and *one clump of pee* from cats that mostly pee outside anyway. At first, Susan just told me what chores to do that day: "Can you mop the kitchen today? Especially in front of the refrigerator, I think there's some dried juice spills there from when people have been pouring juice." "Sure, I'll do that." And I did. The verbal thing worked fine—there weren't that many chores. But that was too simple—I think she wanted to formalize it so she could feel like she was *structuring my day*—like that was some sort of benefit she was providing to me—like a manager might do to an employee. *I think your day needs structure.* So next it was a simple whiteboard with a list. If there was something on the whiteboard, it was mine to do. I did it, then crossed it off the list. But that wasn't complicated enough. Susan asked me if she thought it would be better if we had a bigger whiteboard, separated by day, where she could list the chores. I did not think this would be better but I did not want to open up a deeper conversation with Susan so I said: "Sure, whatever you want to do." So she got a bigger whiteboard that was already divided into a calendar month, and in each day she wrote "cat boxes." It was the same thing for every single day!! Honestly, I wonder what is going through someone's head when they have a monthly whiteboard calendar in front of them and they are writing *the exact same thing* in every one of those neat little boxes—it's meaningless!! Clean the cat boxes, blow the pine needles off the porches, vacuum, mop, do the dishes, do the trash, do the recycling—it was the same very small set of chores that needed to be done. I could keep it in my head. There was no need for a monthly calendar except that Susan wanted to *control* what I was doing. Everyone in this family wants *to control* things, people, events, themselves. That's at the root of our alcoholism. Really you're not "making me more productive" or "structuring my day" in some way that's going to give my life meaning, psychologically. You're just a control freak and you're doing all this shit not for *me*, but for *your* benefit. What came next? A Microsoft Outlook calendar that sent me email reminders *every morning* that said the same exact motherfucking thing every day. No, I am not lying. Susan thought adding this level of complexity was going to *solve* some sort of problem—maybe my lack of productivity, probably her lack of control. I don't know about you, but when some system somewhere is sending me the same exact email every day, my mind extremely quickly starts to ignore the hell out of that email. In fact I created a filter to delete it and just did the chores from memory. When Susan asked: "How's the Microsoft calendar thing workin' out for ya?" I said: "Great!" Because I didn't want to get into some deep discussion with her about where my life was going and whether I was spending my time well or not. Some people thrive in structure created by others. My sister Joanne has said she's one of these. My Mom has said she's one of these. They need a schedule. They need structure to their day. I am not that way. I am much less productive when someone else is trying to "make me productive" than when I am structuring my own time. This has always frustrated me at work, because I've had people far less intelligent than me trying to "get me productive." Ray Kramer from Softronics used to say that to me all the time. He wanted to start his day, but first he wanted to "get me productive." Dude, I was *born* productive. And if you think *you* are gonna get *me* productive, then you don't know me and you also don't know that you're *shit* for a manager. When other people micromanage me, productivity slams to a halt. When I'm left to my own devices, I'll get done what you wanted plus *ten times* more stuff you never would have thought of but are grateful that I did. That's part of the problem: people who have less of a clear picture than *I* do, of *their* business, telling me what to do. They're actually wasting my time and underutilizing me by not acknowledging that I know more than they do and *them* managing my day is like me taking orders from a monkey. In the first five years I was unemployed, I wrote ten books. Something like that. Maybe nine, maybe eleven, but it was something like two books a year. I can't think of a single manager or CEO or employee I've ever worked with who is likely to produce one *tenth* that output in their lifetime. Programming is hard. Programming is complex. But I've never worked on a program that is as complex as any one of my novels. Even big programs, like I helped build as part of forty-person teams at Mead Research and Anthem. There is not as much lexical meaning or logical complexity in those entire companies as there is in a single book written by me. If you think that's just ego, let me ask you this: have you ever a) written a novel, or b) worked on a million-line program? Because if the answer to either is *no*, then you're not really in a position to evaluate the statements I just made about lexical meaning and logical complexity, are you? Anyway, whether you, my aunt, or Kermit the Fucking Frog believes me, I don't need anyone *structuring my motherfucking day*. I was happy to do whatever chores my aunt made up for me—even if it was vacuuming the same spot two days in a row—and I did everything she asked cheerfully and thoroughly. But I resent the (probably well intentioned) idea that giving me busywork around the house was somehow going to meaningfully structure my day. If she thinks that, she doesn't even really know me as a person..she doesn't know what's going on inside me..she doesn't know what makes me tick. She never even read my book. I got a book published while I was living at her house. I gave her a copy. She never even read it. I won't go so far as to say that indicates a lack of *respect*, but I think it's fair to say it indicates *inability* and *disinterest* (about having a relationship with me). - - - - Here's a little icing on the cake. Susan and I drive to New Orleans. She puts on earphones and listens to an audiobook the whole time. Eccentric? Maybe. Self-care? Maybe. But it sends a powerful message, especially in a car with just two people in it: *I don't want to talk with you.* If it had been a family of four and someone was listening to music, it would be different if at times some people were watching movies or doing games or whatever else dominates one's attention. But this was just me, just me and her, and instead of keeping the environment open in expectation that conversation might arise—that *I* might have something to say that might interest her more than an audiobook—she closed herself off from me, preferring to finish a book than talk to a real live person. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. But I wonder if she would ever try that around my mom..or hers. I wonder how she would have reacted if I had stood up for myself and told her how that made me feel (it hurt my feelings). But I would never do that. She's my aunt Susan. I'll always defer to her. ### 130 Susan told me to empty out the used coffee from the K-Cups that went with our new Keurig. We bought this thing because everyone thought the old-style coffee maker we had was antiquated and buggy, but no one considered how they would feel about the environmental impact we were making by using the Keurig. Everyone had a solution. GranGran told me to use each K-Cup twice, so instead of throwing away a used one she would set it on on the counter near the Keurig. That made it so we were always having this conversation: GranGran: "Have you used this one?" (holding up a K-Cup) Me: "I have no idea." GranGran: "Well do you know how many times it's been used?" Me: "Actually I don't." GranGran doesn't care if her coffee is roughly the strength of tap water, but I do, so my method was to use each K-Cup once, throw it away, and throw away all the other used K-Cups that were littering the counter. Then Susan told me about this whole reusing system you can get on eBay or Amazon or wherever the fuck, these lids that can be adhesively stuck to the top of an empty K-Cup. So Susan asked me to save all the K-Cups, remove their tops, empty the used coffee grinds, wash out the cup, and save the clean, empty cups for when these reusable lids arrived. When she told me this I thought: *Are you fucking kidding me? Every time someone drinks a cup of coffee, you're going to create a significant amount of work for* me *to do, just so you don't feel bad about the environment.* But what I said was: "You got it, Susan! I'll be happy to do that! Where would you like me to put the empty cups?" The way I see it—and you can stop reading if this just sounds too fucking *simplistic* or *juvenile* or *naive* or whatever adjectives you can come up with—but when you buy a Keurig, you are making a commitment to creating a bunch of unnecessary trash. It's not just a cup of coffee, it's an environmentally irresponsible *way of life*. And in the particular moment, on this particular issue, I'm not saying one side is wrong and one side is right—I'm just saying *if you buy a Keurig*, don't try to be an environmentalist. The old coffeemaker was about simplicity and less waste, with a little more work for the human. The Keurig is about *fucking up the environment to elevate human convenience!* If you buy the Keurig, *go all the way*, baby! But my family wanted both—this impossible contradiction—they wanted the convenience of the Keurig *without* somehow using a shitload of K-Cups. That's insanity. And when you survive a suicide attempt, this is what you are surviving for—when you *don't die*, you don't die so that *this* can be your life. - - - - But the worst insanity of that house—and it's hard to pick *just one*, especially with Mack on the menu—but the worst insanity of that house was getting conflicting instructions from the older people living there. Susan would instruct us all, since it was flu season, that she wanted *every dish* run through the dishwasher, to sanitize it. When I did that, GranGran would get mad at me for having put pots and pans in the dishwasher. "They just take up space in the dishwasher," she'd say. I wanted to tell her that *everything* you put in the dishwasher takes up space in the dishwasher, but I decided to keep that little insight to myself. So if I hand-washed a pot, I was going against Susan's instructions. If ran a pot through the dishwasher, I was going against GranGran's instructions. And that particular lose/lose situation got to me after a while. It did make me angry. I don't like being in a situation where *no matter what I do* someone's going to make an issue out of it. I talked to my mom (the sage) and she suggested I politely inform whichever one of them scolded me next that this issue was really an issue between Susan and GranGran, and had nothing to do with me. I did that and it frustrated the hell out of GranGran, who happened to be the one I mentioned this to first. She was so flustered the only word she could get out of her mouth was: "Well." One time when my mom was at the house GranGran made an issue of a skillet I had run through the dishwasher. "I thought I *told* you not to run this through the dishwasher!" She held up the dish—this supposedly non-stick skillet that was so carbonized that I was the only one who even used it anymore. "This. *Does not.* Go. *In the dishwasher!*" My mom was at the dinner table. She perked up but didn't say anything. "Do you remember me showing you how to wash this?" "Yes," I say. She had dragged me from my room one day to embarrassingly (for her) give me a lesson in how to wash a skillet, to instruct me to use paper towels to wash out the "grease" *first* and throw the paper towel in the trash, otherwise it would clog up the sink. So even though I have a moral objection to using paper towels when I don't have to, even though I know that the "grease" she was referring to was not bacon grease or hamburger grease or something that *would* clog up the sink, but rather, it was olive oil, which will *not* clog up a sink, still I kept my mouth shut. I also wanted to tell my grandmother, while she was giving me this one-on-one lesson on how to clean a skillet the GranGran way, that I was thirty-six years old and had lived in *many* apartments, cooked *many* meals in those apartments with all sorts of ingredients, and I had *never once*, not *one time*, clogged a sink with grease. I have never bought Drano in my life. I have never *once* called Roto-Rooter. I know how to clean a pan and run a household kitchen. In fact I've worked as a dishwasher in three separate restaurants so I think I can handle this little green skillet here. But I took the lesson quietly, and from that point on I washed that skillet *exactly* as GranGran had instructed—even the part where I destroy the environment by using paper towels to scrape olive oil out of the pan. "So *why*," my grandmother says, "is it in the dishwasher?" "Well, for *that* pan, what I've been doing is washing it per your instructions and then dishwashing it to satisfy *Susan's requirement* that all dishes be run through the dishwasher during flu season." GranGran shakes her head. "This doesn't need to be run through the dishwasher!" she yells. My mom jumps in. She says: "Mom, you realize this is an issue between you and Susan, right? You see that this has nothing to do with Matthew? You see that?" Susan comes out of her bedroom. "What is the problem?" GranGran sighs. "This pan *does not need to go through through* the dishwasher," my grandmother says, *so* tense, like we're all doctors in the emergency room trying to decide how to save some fucker's life. "Fine," Susan says. "Just..do whatever GranGran wants." Susan throws up her hands and stomps back into her room. GranGran leaves the dishwasher open, puts the green skillet on the counter, and ambles out of the kitchen, through the living room, and down the dark hallway toward her sitting room. Mom looks at me. I'm looking at the ceiling and scrunching my nose, my lips open, clenching my teeth. "Just stay calm." "I will it's just..I don't see how this is an issue that requires emotion." "What do you mean?" "*She* storms out, *she* storms out. It's a fucking *skillet*." "Do we need to go to Chili's?" Mom asks. Chili's is where we go when we both need a break from the Ranchwood house dynamic. "Yeah, probably," I say. "It's like—" "Tell me in the car," Mom says. My mom is one of the coolest people I know. She knows how to love. She knows how to live. She's a master at group dynamics. She's human, yes, and while she's highly irrational at times, she's still the most rational person I know. She's just got a good machine inside that skull. And she actually fucking uses it. That combination is rarer than you think. Plus, she introduced me to pedicures, so in my mind she's basically a deity. ### 131 Susan, months after getting fired from her job, asks me if I could format her résumé for her. I said *of course*. It took me four or five hours to format the information from her old résumé into a professional template and then also to *rewrite* her descriptions so that they were all in the same tense and then *rewrite them again* so that they were concise, meaningful, non-repetitive. Her résumé looked awesome. It got her the interview. She got the job. She thanked me for making her new résumé. And don't think I'm saying anything near that me making the résumé got her that job..of course not..but I am saying that if I hadn't re-made her résumé she *may not have* gotten that job. What's frustrating to me is this: I help out with all these "little" tasks, from cleaning the cat boxes to creating beautiful résumés, but then I'm treated like I don't matter, like I'm a second-class citizen. Susan asked me to make her résumé. I said yes—*of course I did*, I would do anything for her. But when GranGran asks Susan to tell me not to sit on the couch in the living room, Susan does not have my back. She does not stand up for me. She just demotes me to *house pet who is not allowed to sit on the couch*. Like I have no importance here. It's like how people treat a janitor: they look down on them because they do the dirty work. But guess what happens when someone else is no longer there to do the dirty work. Do you think Susan steps up to do it? No. The cat boxes just pile up and the house smells like *shit*. Susan once had me download every stupid game off some game service she was paying for monthly so she could cancel her subscription. It took me a day. I downloaded all the stupid games that Susan played maybe *one* of *once*. I did it *because I would do anything Susan asked*. But you can't abuse that power and just have people do stuff that doesn't even need to be done—stuff that would never *be* done if you didn't have a slave. I mean, here is a woman who is either unable or unwilling to format her own résumé. And I am able and willing to do so. And that résumé gets you the interview. And you, in that interview, get yourself the job. How do you then treat the person who made your résumé like they're a substandard person in the house, not allowed to sit on certain furniture, not allowed to comment on the behavior of anyone in the older generations? You thought I had value when you needed your résumé done—so where's my value now? I love how people think if you're *disabled, everything* is wrong with you. No. Really there are only a few select (extremely critical) parts of me that are broken. Every other aspect is still smarter and more talented and in general better than the vast majority of you motherfuckers. My teachers used to tell me, "I wish *every* student in my class was like you." I was the politest, the most helpful, and hands down the smartest kid they ever met. So, family, country, world: I hate to tell you this, but if *I'm* the crazy one, then we have got some serious fucking problems. - - - - Then what took the cake, what really took the cake for me, is my local/free/community health clinic needed a statement from my caretakers of how much I was costing them per month. My aunt filled out the paper and said something like $1200. Or $1600. I don't know what it was, but I know it was a hell of a lot more than my groceries and the use of a bedroom that they had previously let Mack sleep in for free. So we're not talking about any realistic loss they incurred for letting me stay there rent free. I don't know if that's the ballpark of what they claimed on their taxes or not. But I do know that the basic idea was to help out your nephew, not use me as a way to make money on your taxes. My food stamps covered most or all of my food cost—I was costing them a lot closer to $0 than $1200. That kind of lie just burns me from the skull to the spine. ### 132 To my way of seeing it, the situation degrades. Bob bugs me for using too much cream in my coffee. But he doesn't just say, "Hey, cream's expensive, could you use a little less?" He says, as I'm pouring cream into my coffee, "Say, what do you call a coffee with that much cream in it?" I said, "What?" He says, "That's not just a coffee. A coffee with that much cream in it..isn't that a cappuccino?" I'm in no mood for this conversation. Again, this is what dead people miss. I got out my phone and looked up "cappuccino." "It says a cappuccino is espresso with a bubbly layer of hot milk on top, so I don't think it's a cappuccino." Bob says, "Well I know it's something. Is it a mocha..or..is it an espresso?" I am committed to not arguing with him, so I continue to merely recite dictionary definitions (which just so happen to shoot down his theory that by using a lot of cream I have somehow transformed my coffee into an otherworldly coffee drink). "A mocha is a mixture of coffee and chocolate." "No.." he muses, as if the correct work for what I drink each day is on the tip of his educated tongue. "Espresso basically means strong coffee," I say. "What about a Frappuccino?" "Merriam-Webster doesn't have it. Looks like that's a Starbucks trademark..for what I would be scared to ask." "I just know that there's a word for that," Bob presses. "For a coffee with that much cream in it. What about a *cafe au lait*?" I skip the dictionary this time. "A *cafe au lait* is half coffee, half hot milk." "So that's kind of like this..you use about half coffee, half cream." "If I'm using too much cream you can just say so—" "No, but—" "I'm not finished yet. I would just like to formally conclude by confirming that I am not making a *cafe au lait* since that would be half coffee, half milk and this is simply..a coffee with a lot of cream." Fuck. You. You little. Passive-aggressive. Nitwit. - - - - Or how about this little maneuver? I'm in the living room watching TV. The overhead light is on. People (GranGran or Susan) come into the room, do their business, and when they leave the room, they turn off the light!!! To review, that's when they leave a room *when I'm still in the room*. I have to get up and turn the light back on to remind myself that I still exist. - - - - But the killer one to me (see someone disrespecting your mother, above) is when my mom comes up from New Orleans once a week to visit, she comes through front door and says, "Hello! Hello family!!" (so innocently, with such unabused expectation), and her sister and her brother-in-law don't even get off their asses to come out of their room to say *hi*—they lie in bed and don't even greet their own fucking sister when she comes to town for a few days. To this day, my indignance on this subject is replete. I am up against a wall. My understanding is blown. To not even *yell* a hello from your bed into the main room when a close relative walks through the door—it's past my comprehension. Bob, Susan: that was *bullshit*. ### 133 Once you get a diagnosis, everything you do is seen through the lens of that diagnosis. Same thing with being a patient in a mental ward: if I wear two different-colored shoes to work at Mead Research, they just laugh and say *That's what programmers do* or *That's what young people do* or *Matthew's trying to bring some of that California vibe to the midwest*. But if you do that shit in a *hospital*, your psychiatrist'll probably keep you there another *week*. They'll analyze it down to the marrow of the bones, try to figure out if this is a sign that you're going manic or developing some new disorder. Consider a simple mistake in the home: leaving the oven on after you're done cooking something. My mother does this sometimes, and when she does, I don't go up her butt with a microscope. I just say, "Mom, can I turn this off?" She says yes. I turn it off. And we go about our business. But what if *I* were to leave the oven on after cooking something. It would start an *invasion* of analysis. Does this mean I, Mom, can't go out of town without taking Matthew with me? That I can't leave him at home by himself during the day? Is he safe? Is he psychotic? Is he spiraling down? Should we call the doctor? *Be sure you mention that to your doctor.* Ok, I'll mention it to my doctor. All of this is done with the intention to *help*—of course. But leaving the oven on from time to time isn't a sign of mental illness—it's a sign of being human! The same thing happens with the old. At my grandmother's house, if aunt Susan leaves raw meat out on the counter for eight hours, no one says: *Gee, we need to get Susan checked out by a psychiatrist.* We just collectively assume that Susan doesn't give a shit about her own or other people's health, and we move on! She's just an inconsiderate person! She expects other people to clean up after her! She's in her own world—whatever! But if *my grandmother* leaves a burner on after she makes a grilled-cheese sandwich—which happens twice a month—it inspires an all-family *meeting* where we figure out if she's developing Alzheimer's and who needs to take her to the doctor and whether we should allow her to do gardening by herself anymore or drive or OH MY GOD SOMETIMES PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES!! Yes, all the "normal, healthy" people want to look out for the marginalized (old, sick, eccentric) but *my god* sometimes when people use the stove they forget to turn it off afterward. *It might not mean a thing.* ### 134 Or the time GranGran came running from her back room to the front door to display her racism when Hank was telling me a story about a stolen bicycle seat. First thing you have to know about Hank: Hank doesn't have enough to do, apparently, because Hank constantly insinuates himself into other people's business. Like when we had a sinkhole in our back yard and people came to work on it. I looked out the window and Hank had *let himself in our gate* and was talking to the workers!! He went in our back yard without asking us. Some places I've lived, that'll get you shot. Down here it's just, "Oh, that's Hank." Well Hank comes to the door one day and I answer. "Kid stole a bicycle seat," he says. "Hey, Hank, how's it going?" "Black kid, black as the bottom of my shoe, beside your house, took a bicycle seat!" "Where was he?" Hank points. "With all them bicycles y'all got." *Oh, you mean the rotting, ivy-covered relics of bicycles we have along the side of the house?* "I'm sure it's fine, Hank." "This kid was as black as my shoe polish, musta had hisself a screwdriver, ran off down the street—I told him to get out of there." "So you were in our yard?" "Little black boy," Hank says. That is the conclusion to and the extent of his storytelling powers. "You like this cooler weather, Hank?" "Kid had a—" "Well we don't care about those bicycles. If somebody wants to take a seat or any other part of those old bikes that's ok, it's not a problem, it's not something I'm going to be worrying about and I don't recommend you spend too much more time on that one, either, my friend. You take your walk today?" "I'm about to. But I figured I should tell you about this first." "And now you have. Enjoy your walk. I'll see you later, Hank!" I closed the door. I saw my grandmother had come out of her room and was listening to my conversation. As soon as I close the door Bob also comes out of his room. "Did he say that kid was a black kid?" GranGran asks. "Well, that depends on what story you think he told," I say. "What is that supposed to mean," says this crotchety, hateful old woman. "It means is Hank telling me a story about a kid who stole a bicycle seat or is Hank telling me a story about a black kid in a white neighborhood where he wasn't supposed to be." "Well just tell me, was the kid black?" "GranGran, I'm not going to discuss that because the only reason that matters is if you're racist and I know no one in this room cares whether our junk bicycle seat was stolen by a white kid or a black kid." "Well it matters to me," she says. "I know it does," I say. And the rest of that conversation occurs between my uncle and my grandmother. My uncle stands up for the non-racist position and, frankly, my grandmother stands up for the racist position. It is not a proud moment for her, or for my family. And all this supposedly over a rusted bicycle seat that none of us would ever use if we lived to be a hundred—not even worth discussion. - - - - And, you know, my cat died. Mom and I happened to be the only ones home when she walked out to her favorite spot in the porch sun, laid down, and died. That's the second cat I've buried with my mom and we cried both times. After that, smoking on the porch was a lot lonelier. No one to pet. No one to rub her lovely face against my skin. - - - - I called Stripes a couple of times when I got up the nerve. She had voicemail but she never returned my call. Then one time she called me but hung up before I could answer. I called her right back and it rang and rang and rang. That could have been the mouse whimper of our ending. But I hope not. Stripes, if you're reading this, do me a small favor. Leave whoever you're with, move across the county, show up on my doorstep, come inside and make mad Stripes/Matthew love for the rest of our tortured lives, ok? I could use you. And I'd let you use me for anything. ### 135 When I go to sleep this shit will never stop. Story ideas. Thoughts about relatives. Fears. The television. I can't stand TV and I live with TV freaks. For them, that level of noise gets processed right out—they don't even know if the TV is on. But for me TV—especially commercials—have been taunting me since I was a little kid. They're an oppression to me, a hell to escape or avoid. I can't stand uncoordinated noise—and that's what ads, TV, and most movies are to me. It's either the fakest, cheesiest military, mythological, or historical film (that's Bob) or like Rambo I-XVII (that's Mack). Or police procedurals (that's Susan). Or hate news (that's GG). Full volume. Late at night. I can hear every explosion, every line of dialogue, in my bedroom, under my covers. Honestly what bothered me most wasn't being kept awake by that trash—it was that my relatives and their friends had such poor taste in programming. I lost respect. *Idea for a pub story. Something that takes place in Athens, Ohio. Channel some of the Flat Iron energy (a bar), but something that takes place in the underbelly of a college town of the first order: Athens, Ohio. The Gyro Buggy. Those who work within. Character sketches. A whole chapter of depth on the guy who works the gyro buggy (for example).* This is me trying to sleep. It's impossible. *An idea: something that takes place in my impression of the world of* Dark City*..a criminal who comes around..who ultimately comes around to the light.* It never stops. I could be up till 3am with this shit. I could be up till 6. I could be up till 9. I could be making coffee, the next day, in the kitchen with groggy relatives and I'm wide, wide awake because no coffee is needed for this machine—it has no effect—either way, I'm bright and energetic and rubbing all the sleepy folks the wrong way. To them it's normal to be grumpy in the morning. To me all that is weakness—needing coffee and time to wake up—I'm awake all the time, and anyone who isn't is a lesser human being. ### 136 Stephen getting a job dealing craps, moving back in, buying a PC, and playing *Assassin's Creed* late into the night with the sound on full volume, subwoofer turned up. I guess it runs in the family because Bob would do the same thing with movies: watch some part of the *Hobbit* trilogy at extra loud, starting around 10pm. I just knew on those nights I couldn't go to sleep early, and I stayed up, preferably drinking, Tweeting for a few hours until whichever one was done and the sound was not washing through my bedroom. I guess it's just part of a general über individuality that runs in our family. No accountability. Bob and Susan leave the house while my mom and I are sitting in the living room and they just wave and smile at the door and say, "Bye!" not telling us where they're going or when they'll be back. I remember us having the same issue when I visited Baton Rouge that Christmas before I went to Vermont. It's certainly not that I give a *fuck* about what you're doing..it's just common courtesy among housemates to let people know approximately where you're going and approximately when you're coming back so those still at the house know when to start worrying, when to report a missing person, etc. It's not about getting in other people's business, it's just part of common living. But no. I never got that respect. Susan could be going to Biloxi, Mississippi for a *week* and she'd never mention it to me. She'd just stand in the doorway with her unzipped travel bag showing a half-drunk bottle of wine and she'd smile a wide-teeth smile and wave where the only moving joint was at the elbow and that was her nonverbal *Bye!* and a night would pass, and another night, and on the third night I'd just slip it in to a conversation with Bob: "So where's Susan?" "Oh, she's playing some poker." "Cool." "In Biloxi." "Oh, great." "With Mack." "Nice." "She'll be back..actually I'm not sure when she's coming back." I'd nod, eating my dill pickle with cheese—something Bob taught me which is actually great—and I'd wonder about my own illness. *Am I too involved in other people's business?* But I didn't think so. I think I view it as an issue of safety. Like what if something bad happens to Susan in Biloxi—or to one of us here—don't we want to know roughly where each other are in case of emergencies? I knew where some of this came from: GranGran. GranGran was always prying and spying and turning down the volume on her TV when she wanted to overhear one of our phone calls. My dad was the same way: always in your fucking business. And when you have a busybody like that around the house, other people tend to shut down on revealing information about themselves and their plans. Susan's guardedness with her comings and goings had nothing to do with me, in essence—it was between her and her mother. - - - - We were always keeping secrets from GranGran to avoid confrontation. Like when Susan got in an accident on her motorcycle, I was instructed strictly not to mention it to GranGran and lie to my grandmother if she asked where Susan's motorcycle was—I was not to reveal it was in the shop because that would lead to questions from GranGran which would unravel the truth of Susan's accident. Or my food stamp card. "The magic food card," as my uncle called it. We physically hid it from GranGran and I was likewise instructed not to mention to GranGran that we were using food stamps to buy a large portion of the groceries for the house. Her politics, it was feared, if mixed with the knowledge that she herself was consuming food bought with government assistance, would cause some kind of rift in the fabric of space that would make a Hadron Collider mishap look like a mouse fart. I never argued politics with my grandmother—I hardly ever spoke with her about them. When I was watching the news in the living room and GranGran came through to get to the kitchen, she would stop walking, look at the screen and shake her head at the channel I was watching, then continue on her way to the kitchen. Sometimes she would express her views. "*[omitted](#)*" I was going to write some of the statements she made but my fingers won't let me type them. My grandmother's brain works fine—she's a sharp woman, even in her eighties. But, simply, she believes what she sees on hate TV, hate radio, and she doesn't read news from the internet. So that bright mind of hers has been warped by a diet of propaganda that makes her unaware of what her own governor is doing. She asked me why it took me so long at the community health clinic one day. "I had to fill out extra paperwork so they'll treat me because I lost my insurance." "Well, honey, why did you lose your insurance?" "Because the governor of Louisiana cancelled it." "*No he did not.*" "Yes. He cancelled the whole Medicaid disability program, so all the poor people with disabilities in Louisiana who had Medicaid lost their insurance as of the end of last year." "Well I never heard anything about that." I wanted to say: "That's because you watch Fox News." But I didn't say anything, because my grandmother is eighty-three and I'm not going to argue with the eighty-three-year-old matriarch of my family, my last living grandparent, about which news program she chooses to watch. She did not extend me the same courtesy. She daily vocalized hate for the news I was watching, muttering or speaking so that I could hear her while she cooked her dinner. "Well, I just think she's a hateful woman. I heard her say the most hateful thing on TV the other day." In my mind, I was all: *That's because they selectively edited what she said.* My grandmother is in the kitchen frying an egg. "That woman must be the most ignorant person they have on TV." In my mind I'm all: *She's probably the smartest person on TV.* Then my grandmother would go on, as was typical in that age, to blame Obama for things that the President doesn't even have power over, things the US Congress does. But to her and those like her, everything was Obama's fault. And of course for people like GranGran or my uncle Perish, they just didn't like Obama because he was black. Not long after this pattern of GranGran dissing whatever I was watching on TV—movie, news, or whatever—started, I would just mute or pause the TV as soon as she came into the living room/kitchen area and keep it muted or paused for as long as she was in there. The first couple of times I did this, she said: "Oh you don't have to pause that on *my* account." And I would say: "I'm just pausing it to Tweet for a second, I'm not pausing it because of you." Lies, lies, lies. I learned very well from the other members of this house that was the way to get along with everyone. We're like a house of cards, built on secrets and lies. One little bump in the system and the whole thing falls apart—but pretends not to. ### 137 Music is my major coping skill. Like today. Music saved me from so many cravings of the bipolar-mania style: food, drugs, spending money, sex. It makes me think of Faith, from the Refuge, with the ward radio set on one of the tables in the room in front of the nurses' station, and Faith, peaceful for once, lying her head on the table next to the speaker, With Adele's *Someone Like You* playing, and there was a ripple effect, Faith's calm echoing through everyone in the room. And no one would even talk during that song, it became sacred, a sacred four minutes, with Faith quiet or singing off-key to her favorite parts. Of course that song still soothes me, and makes me think of the ward, Tyler 2 during a certain fall of 2011. I'm sure everything's different for all of us now, doctors and patients, but we helped each other there for a while. *Shhh: I actually hate this world.* And nothing about me is as sane as I was, then, in that controlled environment, with regular access to a psychiatrist and to meds. I heard recently Louisiana was voted worst state in he union in terms of medical care, access to food stamps, and just care in general for the non-rich. And I know I've been falling apart a little without my medicine. Or maybe a lot. And from drinking. And from being in such a hectic environment. So..well..I'm doing my best to keep this narrative alive. Which, actually, brings us nicely to: ### 138 The nigger pussy incident. This is going to be a short chapter. It's going to be mostly nonsensical due to the the fact that is consists almost entirely of a monologue my uncle Perish presented to me at the Ranchwood house while I was trying to write. His dumb ass planted it in a seat crosswise from me at the dinner table, apparently because my aunt and uncle and grandmother wanted nothing to do with him—none of them even came out of their rooms when their brother/son walked through the door after he drove here from Asshole, Florida or wherever this asshole lives. He sits down. His wife doesn't even come in the house—she's outside smoking. I give Perish a skeptical look. He speaks in this booming voice. Fucking *Hank* across the street can hear every word. "Matthew! My nephew!" He reaches out for a handshake but I don't give him one. "I see how it is. Well. There's been a lot of water under that bridge..a lot of water." I assume he's referring to the time he misattributed a quote to Abraham Lincoln on Facebook and I corrected him. Extremely harshly. Embarrassed the hell out of him in front of his honky friends. "Well, what's been going on? Florida is crazy, man—crazy. We've got the air show coming up—you're always invited! You seemed so excited about the idea on the cruise, man, what happened? Bygones, right? I was all excited, you could have come to church with us. Have you found yourself a church in Baton Rouge? We've been going to this Christ Almighty church or it might be Christ Almighty The Redeemer—tell you the truth the sign is so goddamn big I can't read it without my glasses and when we get out sometimes I'm helluva damn *mad*, you know? I mean this pastor, it's like I *like* him, but why does he have to be so *political*? Your mom's a preacher. Does she get political in her sermons? It's important to have a church to go to—you go to your mom's church? Anyway I thought we had a good one but this guy has to talk about Obama this and Obama *that* and I'm like are we here to worship God or am I watching the news? What's your political persuasion these days? Did you vote for the ol' blackie or did you go for the other guy." I look up from my MacBook. I look Perish straight in the eye. "That's ok, we don't have to talk politics. What are you doing for work these days? We have this new manager, and to tell you the truth he is the most incompetent manager I have ever had the misfortune to work under. I don't think me and that job are long for this world, if you know what I mean. I mean this guy, he comes in, he thinks *he's* gonna reorganize the place and I'm like, slow down there, stallion, I've been working this business for twenty years and I mean this *new* guy thinks he's gonna come in and tell *me* what to do!? Fucking Obama. Do you know how far into our business Obama's fingers are reaching?—and *we're* not even a health care business. I hate to imagine what it's like to be in the medical field right now. Fucking ObamaCare—can you believe that shit? So this boss starts hiring computer programmers and he's hiring people *based on their color!!* Are you a fan of affirmative action? You're prob'ly too young to remember affirmative action. But your parents aren't. I *know* your mom voted for that communist bastard." I'm squinting at Perish now. "*You're* a computer programmer. I mean, I've looked over the shoulder of our programmers—it looks like all you have to do is string a few words together—would you say that's about right? You prob'ly worked with a lot of Indian programmers—that's where it's all going these days, isn't it? Fucking free trade agreements. You know this used to be a country I could be proud to live in. You're prob'ly happy with ObamaCare, aren't you? Well, either way, this new manager—he *thinks* he's a manager—I told him straight to his face *Just 'cause you went to Yale doesn't mean you know shit down south. You in Bible country now*. You're not an atheist, are you? Tell me, at least, Matthew, tell me you're not an atheist. I saw some of your Facebook posts and it looked like you and God were headed in different directions. I'm worried about you, Matthew. You need God in your life. We all do. And all this mental illness—what you call mental illness—that's the devil. It's nothing but the devil. In your mind. And this lithium, pills, all that crap—you don't need that. You need God in your life and until your *have* God in your life your mind *will not be* right, I can guarantee it. So anyway this manager is hiring all these programmers, *and they're all black*, and that's not the kicker! The kicker is this negro *asshole* I have to work under now is paying these guys like eighty..a hundred grand. That's what *I* make. And I'm trying to tell this guy—business degree from *Yale*—I'm like: maybe if you were hiring *white* programmers, then *maybe* they're worth a hundred grand. *Maybe.* But black programmers, in south Florida, them's as cheap as nigger pussy. You can buy two, three, maybe *four* programmers for what this Yale nigger is paying for *one nigger programmer*. The first computer programmers were white—were they not? *You're* what I think of when I think of a *programmer*..white dude. Fat. Doesn't know how to take care of himself. Kind of *stinks*, you know, doesn't shower all that often. A guy with a messy cubicle, for sure, but a *white* guy, with like Pringles crumbled all over his desk and fingers covered in Cheeto dust but he still types with them anyway!! I mean, wash your fucking hands, man!!" Perish is laughing and slapping his knee. "Actually," I say, "the first programmers were female. It wasn't considered a status job, it was considered a clerical, kind of custodial job so men didn't want to do it, so. The first programmers were women." "Is that right? Well aren't you just a fountain of information." He starts talking again but I stop him. "We're done here Perish." "What did you say?" "You heard me." "I heard you I just didn't *like* it." "I don't give a good goddamn *what* you like. You see I'm sitting here writing, don't you? You see my laptop? Cover is open, fingers are on the keyboard. Now, you can find *another chair* to sit in, in *another room*, but the minute you say the phrase, 'nigger pussy,' our conversation is over." I'm nodding at him like trying to get him to nod back, like you would try to get a dog to nod back to prove he understands you. "I don't think I like the way you're talking to me, Matt." "It's Matthew." "Well, *Matt*, I think I have exhausted all useful possibilities with you." "Yeah, that happened when I was about five." "What does that mean?" "Perish, I'm trying to write. Why don't you go say hi to GranGran?" "I'll say hi to GranGran when I'm *ready* to say hi to GranGran," he says. And I say, "You should be aware that I'm going to report your 'nigger pussy' remark to the family and ask that you not speak to me when you're at this house." "Is that so?" he says. At this point I put in my earbuds and go back to writing. Perish sits there, looking at me, talking, saying who knows what for a full five minutes before getting up and slamming the chair back under the table. He walks real close to me on his way back to my aunt and uncle's room. My heart is racing. I breathe. To me, my uncle has always been subhuman, a mad dog, the only useful thing to do with him would be lock him in a cage and throw away the key. And stop feeding him. My first software CEO, Jim, used to say he could work with anyone as long as he could see signs of improvement. That's the problem with Perish. He's—what, in his fifties?—and there are no signs of improvement. He obviously gets off on being a racist asshole and provoking people who aren't, especially my mom, especially me. And it's been that way forever, just a constant stream. No signs of improvement. He's a black hole—any effort you spend on him is wasted. If I was fifty years old and acting that way, I'd consider myself a failure. But I guess if you still get high off hurting other people and you like to spend the majority of your time angry, then Perish is a success. And I lied about one thing: I did hear some of what he said to me while I had my earbuds in. It was just fragments, competing with Basshunter, but what he said to me while I was stonewalling his dumb ass had to do with the fact that I didn't have a job, didn't seem to be looking for one. He said explicitly what a lot of people are probably thinking: that since I'm no longer pulling down the big bucks programming computers that I have just become a bum living off government entitlements, taking advantage of my aunt and uncle and *his* mom, with no motivation, unwilling to work a forty-hour workweek like a real man, and all I do is jerk off and watch Netflix 24/7. Those were the bits and pieces that came through. Really my only reaction to any of that is to laugh at the implicit assertion that my uncle Perish is a real man. I'm gonna have to beg to differ on that point. - - - - A few days after Perish leaves, when my Mom comes up from New Orleans, I get her, Susan, and Bob together in the living room and I tell them that Perish imposed himself on me conversationally when he was here earlier in the week and that I was going to tell them the phrase that broke the camel's back.. "..the phrase that makes it an imperative for you to support me in blocking Perish from speaking to me when he's at this house. I can't have this type of language assaulting my brain. This might be a surprise for some of you, since I write raw and disturbing things in my books. Those things in my books are designed to mirror the real world—they are reflections of people like Perish, who I find absurd. I find it absurd that a person like that exists, and that's why I write about him. But in my own life, in my own head, I like to keep things calm, believe it or not, especially after my Vermont psych hospital experiences. I have learned that I am a very angry person. And I am making the choice not to be angry *as much of the time* as possible." "So what's the phrase?" "I don't believe I'm repeating this to you but I do think it's important for you to hear it. The phrase is, 'nigger pussy.' The context was, 'in south Florida such and such is as cheap as nigger pussy.'" Susan's eyes go wide. "That's clearly a racist phrase," I say. "It's sexist, too," says my mom. "Yes it is." "How did you react?" "I didn't react much. There was no shouting or anything like that. Honestly it makes me so mad that I don't remember the details. I put in my earbuds and he eventually left." "I think he was trying to push your buttons," my mom says. "Really?" "Oh yeah," she says. "I guess my evaluation gives him more credit than that, but I just think that's the way he is, and whoever he was talking to, that might have come out." "You think that if he was talking to GranGran he would have said that?" "Well, that's an excellent point. But I will tell you all now with no uncertainty that I will not hesitate to relay to GranGran that he said that to me, and nothing you say is going to change my mind on that, so don't even try. I realize I'm a guest in this house but I will not be treated that way by anyone. I've been homeless before and I'll be homeless again—" "*Don't say that*," my mom says. "Please don't say that." "Ok but this is a serious issue to me and I consider all of you, as his sisters, as his brother in law, to be involved, responsible parties—" "What are we supposed to do?" Susan says. "That's just the way he is. I'm surprised to hear *that* phrase come out of Perish's mouth but I'm not surprised to hear that he said something racist." "I think this is abuse toward Matthew," my mother says. "But what are we supposed to? Tell him he can't come over to see GranGran? That he can't take her to lunch?" That was Susan. "All that needs to be done," I say, "is for you all, plus GranGran, to get together as a unit and tell Perish to watch his fucking language while he's in this house." My mom says, "Why don't you watch yours?" Susan says, "Yeah, really." "I'll you why. Because this is a serious issue to me and I need to express myself in a way that communicates to you all that if this happens again we will have World War Three." My mom gives me a threatening look. "What is that supposed to mean?" "It means we want to stop this problem *before* it happens again and not wait to see what happens if it does happen again." Susan gets up. "Y'all can deal with this yourselves." And on that she gives me a special look of disbelief/disgust/disapproval—you choose. She's headed back to her bedroom, to her comfort place, sedentary, in bed, in front of the TV. "So, what?" I say. "You just deal yourself out of any responsibility for what goes on in your house?" "I can't control Perish," she says. She slams the door. Bob gets up, goes to the dishwasher, opens the door, pulls out the top tray, and starts rearranging the dishes, optimizing their layout in a pointless gesture of kindness to the machine. "You need to keep yourself away from Perish," my mom says. "You understand me? If he comes over, you go to your room. That is *not* just how Perish behaves with everyone. He is pushing your buttons, mark my words. You just..*stay..away..from him*." "Ok," I say, and in this case that simple little word is a *promise*. I don't know many things, but one thing I do know is when my mom gives a warning, you should *heed* the motherfucker. ### 139 And here's an even shorter chapter. The time I was five and uncle Perish took me for a walk around the block and told me what a man should be. He started in on this values and morals lecture, responsibility, values, work ethic. Generic terms he couldn't even define if pressed. And it was ludicrous, and scary, and I knew that even though I was a child and Perish was an adult, that compared to him I was wise and compared to me he was a fool. I turned around halfway up the block and walked back to GranGran's house with Perish tagging along behind, appeasing me, telling me that what we said was between us, and me knowing that this is someone I could never ever trust my whole life. And that has remained true to this day. He continues to this day to abuses my mom on Facebook—says things that make her *cry*—and when I, or his daughter Lily, or my mom, asks him to stop badgering his own sister, he stops—oh, he stops for a while—but he always goes back to his old behavior, getting drunk and wheedling his big sister about politics and religion until he makes her cry. He's a real motherfucker. And after I instructed him not to speak to me at the Baton Rouge house, of course the next time he comes over, as soon as he gets in the house he speaks to only me without stopping and when I say, "Perish, can you honor the agreement we made?" Susan and GranGran back Perish up and make me the enemy. Then Perish says he's going to be moving nearby and "the problem" (me) needs to be taken care of, moved out of the house, before he gets here, so he won't have to deal with me when he comes to visit GranGran. GranGran says nothing. Susan agrees with him, says "It will be taken care of." There's a touch of evil in all of 'em. But when me and Perish took our walk around the block when I was five, at his suggestion, we only made it partway down the first street before I turned around and went back. Perish was acting like he was the adult and I was the child, but I could tell from what was coming out of his mouth that really it was the other way around. Even though he was big and I was small, I knew more about life than he did, when I was only five, and I resented being spoken to by him as though he had a vast store of wisdom about life when I could tell he was bad news, an idiot, and he was trying to be parental toward me and I did not like to hear his voice and I did not want to hear it one second longer. I left and went back to the house, with him first standing there yelling for me to come back, and I was back at the house before him, with the safety of my Mom's presence, then Perish comes angry through the door. My mom says to her brother, "What did you do?" Perish says, "Nothing!" My mom asks me if everything is ok. I tell her yes, but the walk is over. My mom glares at Perish. He puts on this mock-innocent face like *What?!* - - - - As a kid, my dad started my skepticism of men. Perish fanned the flames. And many a boss and friend have added their log to the fire. I have met abusive women; I have met gentle men. But largely I prefer the company of women—they do not compete with me, they are more mature emotionally, and they tend to support me rather than try to tear me down. Just generalizations, not hard and fast rules. But yes, many of my experiences with men—younger, older, gay, straight, coworker, boss—have left me with the instinct to distrust men initially. I'll never forget walking one fourth of the way down the block with Perish, at his suggestion, and him starting in on the manly advice right away and me being like, I'm *five* and this idiot doesn't know that I know more than him about life! And *the walk with Perish* has been over ever since then. In recent years, after we made up to each other for Facebook conflagrations in order to set my mom, his sister, at peace, Perish non-ironically wrote to me and offered to be a male role model in my life. I politely refused his offer, giving no reason. But inside me, I was thinking: *You* think *you* can be a mentor to *me*? *Do you have any idea of who you are and who I am and how those things relate?* I refrained from insulting him there but I won't refrain from doing so here. It was a well-intentioned offer. From a buffoon. Even if both of our current life trajectories were to change drastically, Perish will never be equipped to be a mentor or a role model for *me*!! It would be like a fly being a mentor for a tortoise. You live 28 days—I live a hundred and fifty *years*. When Perish was 30-something, and I was five, there was nothing he could teach me. Thirty years later, *Perish* is going to be my mentor?? *Perish* is going to teach me about how to live life? I don't think so. Sorry, sir, but you are clueless about you and I. ### 140 In the summers I get crazy. In the summers it's the worst. > **Saturday,** **August** **10, 2013** > > regular paper/paint hallucination is in normal places but is now also inside the computer > > object-moving hallucination > > bug hallucination > > light hallucination (moving points of light) > > tactile memory hallucinations (iPad, cat, sitting on me and I feel them like they're still there) > > peripheral hallucinations > > skin/muscle chills and sensations—overwhelming sense of ecstasy > > am I imagining the beginnings of kidney stone pain? > > bizarre belief that music is transmitted through tattoos > > belief that my heart is going to stop or beat too fast (ocd obsession/compulsion checking my pulse) > > I'm extra sensitive to sounds..not hallucinating them, but being surprised by them and hearing them extra loud > > Having problems with the directions of sound..which direction is a sound coming from? > > attaching extra significance to digital clocks and LED lights > > it seems a page is missing from my notebook > > I'm inside the rhymes Yes, the feeling, when listening to rap, that I'm not only listening *to* to the rhymes, but that I'm *inside* the rhymes. It's weird, I know. ### 141 Knowing things are getting worse. I'm grasping. I write this letter to my psychiatrist: > Dr. Narra, > > I'm making these notes because I have a hard time remembering things, keeping it all in my head at the same time. > > These are some of the damaging things I've done that I think are related to my bipolar disorder. > > Once, on a whim, I quit a very nice ($80k) job and moved across the country to live in a tent in my friend's back yard. I've quit other jobs "for no reason" when in manic states. > > I've abandoned three apartments. Just gave up my home and my possessions because I was in a manic state and didn't think I needed them anymore. > > I've abandoned two cars. Just got it into my head that I could not drive them anymore, and left them behind. I was unable to get to work after this, because I had no transportation. > > I've telephoned both the NSA and CIA, believing I had unique and amazing software that was going to save my country from spies. (I did not.) > > I've threatened suicide at work. This cost me time off work and the respect of my co-workers. > > I have bought hundreds of glow sticks (all that were available in the camping sections of several stores) which I then passed out to everyone dancing at a nightclub. Spending money like this damaged me. > > In an attempt to get a gallery show, I mailed the contents of my kitchen (as well as original art) to a New York art dealer. I even sent my spice rack. I couldn't function in my own kitchen because I had given away all my dishes. > > Back at a time when I used to sell paintings I had made, in a manic state I gave away all my unsold artwork to people I hardly knew. When I came out of the state I thought, "What have I done?" *[Ok, I exaggerated here a little bit. I wasn't upset about giving away that art.]* > > There are so many "crazy" things I've done due to this illness. I can't remember them all (I've heard mania affects your memory), but these are a few that I wanted to mention. > > I want to work again as a computer programmer (the work I did for more than ten years before my illness worsened). But to get from here to there, I think I need some financial support, while my medicines are being adjusted and while I'm stabilizing. Because of that I'd like to file for disability. Will you consider my case and think about whether you could support me in this? Thank you for all your understanding. > > Sincerely, > > Matthew Temple Music sounds different to me when I'm manic, out of tune, like I'm in between the voices, the notes—it almost makes no sense to me. And I remember having that experience as far back as high school, a decade before my first diagnosis. I think I've been having this experience for a long time, it just didn't have a name, I hadn't learned to recognize it. I didn't differentiate between states. It was happening without me being fully aware. Also, that was at a time before I drank or did drugs, and it eases my conscience a little to know that I didn't bring this on myself. - - - - Dr. Narra supported my case for disability—in theory. In actuality it took her and my social worker a full year to shuffle papers between them, each passing off responsibility to the other, to get my disability advocate the one-page form that they had requested from my doctor, that the disability advocate needed to get started representing me. Ultimately, it took my psychiatrist and social worker so long to fill out this one-page form that my disability advocate dropped my case and declined to represent me. > **From:** Matthew Temple > > **To:** Capital Area Human Services District *[a community health clinic]* > > **Subject:** CAHSD evaluation > > Please forward this to whoever is in charge over there. > > I am a patient/client of your clinic and I am glad that for two years I've been able to be seen by a psychiatrist and get my medicine through your pharmacy. > > That said, many aspects of your organization are functioning poorly—to the level of barely working. > > First of all, the computer system, as reported to my by the receptionists and other workers, is slow to the point of often being non-functional. This has cascading effects for doctors and patients, it helps create long lines in the lobby and forces the receptionists to make pen-and-paper lists of patients they need to call back to schedule an appointment once the computer system is running again. This frustrates the receptionists and patients. If I was a receptionist forced to deal with such shoddy systems, I wouldn't want to work there. This computer systems issue is a serious problem for you and I suggest you put whatever time, resources, focus into upgrading your systems to something that works. > > Secondly, your walk-ins only, no-appointment policy is an embarrassment. You're wasting the time of everyone who comes in to see a doctor by having them sit in the lobby for hours—sometimes up to four hours I've waited. Will you please consider the impact that has on someone who has a job? Just to see their doctor they have to take off half a day of work to allow enough time to be seen. One social worker told me that he advises patients to take off the whole day from work when they have an appointment with CAHSD because in general that much time may be taken in order to see a doctor or social worker. This is SO wasteful of people's time. I realize some people don't keep their appointments, but for everyone to have to use half a day or a whole day to accomplish a one-hour visit is nonsensical. Please switch your doctors and social workers to appointment-based scheduling to increase the efficiency of your organization. > > Next, I'd like to talk about a social worker: my social worker. Issue one: he is not trained as a talk therapist. Therefore: he is not qualified to do counseling with me. Our conversations mostly consist of him telling me to wait while he types things into the computer. He does not provide insight into my problems, nothing he says is original, and he lacks in-depth knowledge of my illnesses. Our sessions are a waste of time; the only reason I keep going is that I am required to do so in order to see the psychiatrist and get my meds. Additionally, my social worker will not give me his office phone number or his work email address. The same goes for my psychiatrist. Of course you want to have a level of screening so your patients aren't bothering their caregivers too much, but there are cases where I need to get information to my care team and I am unable to because of these policies. For example, I needed to give the address of my disability advocate to my social worker so that he could send them a one-page form signed by my doctor. He wouldn't let me send it to him in email (wouldn't give out his email address). He begrudgingly gave me his office phone number. I left the information in his voicemail. The next appointment I asked him if he got the message and he said he doesn't have time to check voicemail. It took a year of foibles like these to get my social worker and psychiatrist, both, to fill out a one-page form to send to my disability advocate. A year. To fill out a one-page form and mail it. That's an extra year of my life that I will have to wait on the possibility of getting disability, just because my doctor and social worker couldn't get their processes worked out to sign a simple form. My doctor was complicit in this as well: every time I brought up the form with her, she said to talk with my social worker. Every time I brought it up with him, he said to talk to the doctor. > > Your organization is operating at the most basic level of functionality. The only reason I continue to use you is that you seem to be my only option. Please take this critique as information you can use to improve. Have some pride in your work!—you can do better! Of course I knew they would never write me back. The fact is there are a lot of mediocre people in this world who are perfectly content to do mediocre work and live through day after day of mediocrity until they die. ### 142 I end up in the mental hospital due to my reaction to thinking about James even shaking my hand, much less touching me, during their upcoming visit. Learning that James would be coming with Leona and Daniel to the Baton Rouge house for vacation made me feel so angry. And after the way James had dumbly backed up his wife while she kicked me out of their house when I had a plane leaving *in the morning* made me not want him to ever touch me, even shake my hand, for being such a wimp while Leona yelled at me and kicked me out that critical *one day early*, like she couldn't take me sitting in a room sleeping for twelve more hours. James didn't temper his wife, try to diffuse Leona's rage, he just followed behind her like a custodian with a mop. My anger was so severe, then turned inward, I felt homicidal and suicidal and I went to a psych ward over that shit. For everyone else, it's a *la la life*, fuck with people with completely unreasonable behavior and *they* don't pay the price. Rose was right about us being the weight-bearers. James didn't have to lie on airport carpet all night and not sleep. Leona didn't. I did. Part of why you're mentally healthy is you don't care about other people's feelings. And those of us who do care, who care too much, end up spending time in psych wards because *your* behavior, Leona, *your* behavior James and Dad and Mom, is so harsh and inconsiderate that I can't take it. I can't live around you people because you don't know how to love. You'll probably laugh and think that's a ridiculous statement, impossible to defend. But when I say, "I like spending time with you, Mom, just hanging out in the same room," and you say nothing in return—I get it, you're just so in your own world on your device that you never even heard what I had to say—but that's the problem. Or Dad, when you cut me off, choose not to call me for years and years and years—a decade?—how can I consider you my father in any meaningful sense? I understand some aspects of mental illness from my own experience, so I know it's sometimes hard to see things clearly, but Leona and James, do you realize you kicked me out of your house when I was already planning to leave the next morning and you did it, Leona, by YELLING: "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!!" And your reasoning (the reasoning stated to me) was that I had been slacking off on running the dishwasher, when I told you that I had been running it as usual as often—once or twice a day—and you had no evidence, only your own impressions and suppositions, to back your position up. Do you see how that's asymmetric? Someone who's already leaving your house tomorrow, who never raised his voice at you, and you continued to converse with me about the dishwasher situation with you yelling and me speaking in a normal voice—which of course made you very angry. Like Dad, Leona, you get more and more upset if you've gone wild and the person you're flogging doesn't jump into the ring with you. I guess that mixes metaphors. Maybe you *were* really dealing with a Dad issue, and I reminded you of him, like I remind Mom of him sometimes, and you know what I have to say to that? Stop. It's not fair to me. I am not Dad nor anything like him. To punish me for his wrongs is senseless. The other day I asked Mom a question and she said: "You're reminding me of your dad. I feel like I'm being interrogated." I said: "Dad doesn't ask one question. He asks you unlimited questions until he gets to one you can't answer. That's interrogation." I know I have been less than the brother, less than the son I could have been to all of you. I know there are always good reasons you have, your own disorders and histories and personalities, and I know that sometimes a person isn't even aware of why their behavior is the way it is, or why it has changed. But we're all in a web and you may not know this, but I need you. I need your support and I need you to love. Without you, my mental health falls apart. Without you, I feel lost and disconnected. Sometimes when we're together I still feel disconnected!—but that's ok, it's better than nothing. I'm thirty-six and in many ways an adult but Dad, do you know how hard it is to know that you're alive, out there, consciously making the choice not to call your son. Every, single, day. Really thinking through that—thinking through what that means—has put me in the hospital before. Thinking about a father who has the ability to emotionally cut off his son? I don't know, man, I think you and I are cut from different stuff. And he has his reasons, too—his parents, his sisters, whatever..*call your fucking son*. Did you ever think that part of why I don't have kids is I'm scared I would parent like my dad and I would never want to do that to someone else. - - - - It's not your fault that I end up in a mental hospital, that I have bipolar, that I'm chronically suicidal. But we don't exist in a vacuum. I can only imagine the effect my illness has on you. I'm sure it's at least half horrible. And I know it's at least half wonderful. Joanne is right, though, this isn't a family—it's a collection of individuals. We call each other rarely or not at all. My dad denies me the simple love of a call—I believe that is criminal. My aunt and uncle lie in bed watching police procedurals eight hours a day while my grandmother sits alone, at the opposite end of the house, her usual company nothing more than a cat—I believe that is criminal. My mother doesn't like to touch..to get a hug I have to go to a 12-step meeting—I think that is criminal. I'm a huge fan of therapy but I don't think it takes the place of the people who are supposedly *in* relationship *actually talking to each other*. If you and I have a problem—yes we want to call in the experts—but we're gonna have to talk to *each other*, too, work things out, be honest, touch, love, learn something new about each other. Counsellors can provide a magical nudge, but you can't outsource the whole relationship to professionals. In the end, it's just you and me babe. My relationships, people I guessed in my mind I might be close to, my aunt, coworkers, my dad—they're dropping like flies. Maybe it's because I'm crazy. Maybe they're not up for me. Maybe they just don't want me in their lives because I don't provide something they want. At my current rate, though, by the time I'm forty I'll have no one left. Dad will have nothing to do with me (which in the past has made me want to kill myself). He and Mom are the ones who have given me the most in this life—especially Mom. I live in fear, each day, that I will do one last thing—something attributable to my illnesses or something not—but something that will make my mom cast me off me forever, like my dad has, and if that happens I don't think I will be able to live. If my Mom died, it would be the hardest death I could imagine. But if she was alive and refused to speak to me, the weight would be too much to bear. - - - - So, because I got irrationally mad and ultimately suicidal over the thought of having to pretend that James and Leona and I were all one big happy family at GranGran's, I checked myself into The Worst Psych Hospital in the World..because I take suicidal thoughts seriously, like my doctors tell me. I stayed at the most horrible, horrible mental hospital in the country—the worst of five I've been in. It did more harm than good for me. Complete incompetence, negligence, lack of training. It wasn't a healing environment at all. You had to ask every single time you went to the bathroom, you *weren't allowed to write*. Writing is the single most common and useful therapeutic activity that takes place in a mental hospital—over doctors, over medicine, over safety. But not in this place. No paper, no notebooks, no pencils. They had some elementary-aged coloring books with a bunch of 1/3 length colored pencils—try to write a journal entry with that. Once I got there I realized I made a huge mistake: this was not to be a healing time, but an endurance test—don't act out, act normal, so you can get out of here as soon as possible. Our medicine was administered at all times of the day except the times we were scheduled to be taking them. The psychiatrists did not consult with my outside psychiatrist—too much work—and they changed *all* my medicine. It took months for my outside psychiatrists to get me back on a reasonable cocktail. The worst part was we were marshaled around the ward in one large group. You could not spend quiet time in your room. Bedrooms were for sleeping only. The rest of the time we were forced to sit in a room with a TV running daytime, mainstream television—this was hell for me. But you always make friends. My favorite was the Lortab girl—she was detoxing off taking like 40 Lortab daily and after that she would go to some rehab center in New Orleans and somehow start a new life. To me it seemed impossible (the starting a new life part). I told her about seeing computer patterns on the wall and when I stared off she would ask if I was seeing my stuff again. You know, we took basic psychological care of each other. I had this schizophrenic woman talking to me and it takes a while to figure out that her whole story is bullshit. She had me feeling sympathetic for her at first..then she was related every US President and I was like, I gotta go. I'm crazy enough without having my head messed with (totally unintentionally, of course) by some schizophrenic in total fantasy land—I've only got one foot on the ground myself. I'm trying to keep it there. One day a guy tries to make a break for it but he just falls down when he runs into a huge plastic window that he must have thought was an open space. We all kind of laughed at his attempt. But he had spunk, he believed in his plan and he gave it his all. I think he was in a wheelchair. - - - - I said "Yes, sir," and agreed to all the psychiatrists's ridiculous medicine changes and got out of that hospital in a week. Coming back from the hospital, I walked into my room and instantly realized Bob had gone through completely everything in my room—all my clothes, all my possessions—cleaning it wonderfully, but rearranging everything. It was his way to show he cared, but it also showed that it wasn't *my* motherfucking room. He and GranGran often entered my room to collect an empty glass or two—if they had simply done nothing and *not come into my room*, I would have brought those glasses to the kitchen within a day or two. Also, some of Bob's bookshelves were in "my" room and he went in there from time to time to re-shelve his books. I know I was living in their house but I was contributing my entire food stamp card to the house groceries, my mom was paying the entire phone bill for all of our shared cell and data plan, so I was contributing financially, even if it wasn't apparent that I was contributing in other ways as well. My grandmother was caring but clueless. The last thing she would ever think to do would be to *educate herself* on—say—what bipolar disorder is, or why her grandson wanted to kill himself and had to go to a substandard red state mental hospital to supposedly prevent this. The way it was at GranGran's house, because we lied to her, she never had to face the political fact that some people have no money, no car, no way to get a job, and are mentally or physically disabled. Now it becomes a personal issue. It's not just some vilified mass of losers living off the government dole. It's her grandson. That makes it real. It's just like the gay rights issue. Predictably as the rising of the sun, *before* people know close friends or family who are gay, they can afford to be against gay rights. *After* they know close friends or family who are gay, their position changes, one-hundred percent, *every, single, time*. ### 143 I ate macaroni and cheese for the two and a half years I lived with my aunt and uncle. My uncle did all the shopping. No one else was invited or allowed to go with him. I just had to put grocery items on the refrigerator whiteboard and hope for the best. About once every six months GranGran would cook some food she bought off QVC and we would eat together. On these rare occasions she would open up to me and have me look up the meaning of a word for her crossword on my iPad dictionary. Or she'd tell me about Phillip Phillips' "Home," and we'd listen to it together again and again. It was precious time. As of this writing she is still alive, but I haven't been back to Baton Rouge since we moved away and the last time I said goodbye to her, for all I know, it might be the last time I *ever* say goodbye to her. So Bob himself only ever went to the grocery store—only he ever went to get groceries. That's just the way things were done at that house. At first when I asked Bob if I could help him put away the groceries, he said no, but I persisted until we always put the groceries away together. And the cupboard was wonderful. I was conditioned by my father to dread helping him put groceries into the cupboard—in our house the cupboard wasn't quite *alphabetized*, but there were definitely certain places you put certain things, and if you put something in a new place it was *wrong*. Dad would get frustrated and angrily move the item to the correct place, pushing me out of the way. But with Bob, it was very relaxed. I'd say, "Where do pickles go?" And Bob would say, "Wherever. It's not like we won't be able to find them." And with a feeling of lightness that I had never felt before helping an older man put away groceries, I chose a place on the shelf that I thought was *perfect* for the pickles, and I put them there. And no one got gruff or scolded me or moved them from the place I put them. I mean there was plenty of OCD around that house—and I fit right in with *that* disorder—but somehow the pantry had escaped this ordering fetish and putting jars and cans and bottles away there was anxiety free. When Susan left food out after she used it, GranGran (even though she had presumably been living with Susan for a decade or two before I arrived) GranGran always asked *me* if I left whatever food out and I gently said no without ever mentioning Susan. I never knew what was most helpful and less codependent—putting the food away or leaving it out for Susan to do later in the day when she realized it had been out all day. Seeing raw meat left out on the counter was the hardest for me to do nothing about. But I dared not say anything—I didn't want to accidentally assert that I had any power to suggest a change to Susan's behavior. That assertion in that house would have been like setting off a bomb. There was a day when Bob was making his famous chili—the chili that mostly Bob ate and everyone else ate half a bowl of topped with mountains of sour cream and cheese just to be nice. So he gathers all the ingredients—on his bike, being very environmentally responsible—he puts the ingredients in a giant pot (like two feet tall), he turns the burner on low, and he goes to work. Me, Susan, and GranGran are at the house. I was in my room with the door closed. Susan was in her room with the door closed. GranGran was in her room with the door closed. At some point I realize this chili is burning. There is smoke filling the entire kitchen and living room. For some reason the smoke detector is sleeping. I go to Susan's door, about to knock, and then I think: Susan is gonna get real pissed about this chili thing. She might—not saying she will—but she might even hold me or GranGran responsible. And then I asked myself: do I want to put myself in the center of this problem by being the messenger of bad news. And I decided the answer to that question was no. If Susan was less cocooned in her room, she would already know about this problem. And in my mind, this burning chili problem became more about the fact that everyone in this house holes up in their rooms talking to no one, aware of nothing..or even, it becomes about someone who put something on the stove and, without telling anyone, goes to work. So I take that hand that was about to knock on Susan's door and I go back to my room, close the door, and go back to watching movies on my iPad. Periodically I check to make sure there isn't an actual fire that might burn down the house, but every time I check it's just smoke, smoke, and more smoke. So there's no real danger. An hour or two later, Susan comes out, goes ballistic, turns on the attic fan, calls Bob, complains to the security system company. Bob is extremely pissed..at what?..that he left something on the stove and went to work and it burned? I hope he wasn't pissed at anyone at the house for not doing his cooking for him because I for one can say *I* was never asked to look over a pot of chili. It's like the meat-on-the-counter thing. Why should I stick my neck out with Susan and say, "You're leaving raw meat out on the counter?" when I'm likely to get my head bit off? We weren't a community—as I've said people didn't even tell each other where they were going or when they'd be back when they left the house. So fuck that. I'm not sticking my neck out to possibly get blamed for someone else's failed cooking project. Bob was a weird guy. Like he thinks he can cook but he can't. His coking is awful. Or he'll say, "Susan and I are probably going to retire in Arizona." Then a month later I'll say, "Are you and Susan still thinking of retiring in Arizona?" Instead of saying, "Oh we're thinking differently now. We're thinking more Oregon," he would say, "Arizona? No, we like the weather but we would never move there because of the politics." Like? You just said you were going to move there. You have to link the two ideas, conversationally, to showcase the change of position, or else it doesn't make sense. Or his debugging of the cable/TV/remote situation. If some of the buttons on the remote were working, but others weren't, he'd immediately conclude that the batteries on the remote needed to be replaced. Instead of: maybe the cable box is broke? If a battery—even a weak one—has enough power to work one of the buttons on a remote, it has enough power to work all of them. I wondered, frankly, how he managed to get paid as a computer programmer for his entire career—someone with his debugging skills, at one of the companies I worked for, we would just fire. - - - - I cooled down enough to be around James when they came for vacation. James totally told me Leona and Joanne a story in the living room of my grandmother's house and—lol!—James did not look at me for the duration of his entire story. He gesticulated! He used verbal emphasis! He made eye contact with..Joanne..Leona..just not me. Not a single time. But I still text him from time to time. After interacting with Daniel and Joel, I'll say things like, "Your sons are delightful and that reflects so well on you and Leona!" James doesn't respond. Whatever. You know? I'm living my life and when I want to say nice things to people, I will. Their response or lack of response has nothing to do with me. He told me once he reads everything I send but is too busy to respond. That's bullshit, bro—I hope you're reading this and let me repeat that for you—that's bullshit, bro. If you want to be in a relationship with someone, you gotta respond. Without two-way communication, there *is* no relationship. It's a world filled with weird-ass people like that, that makes me want to kill myself. I mean what type of bullshit are you selling yourself, James? I communicate with you but you're too busy to communicate with me—but you want me to keep communicating? That's nonsense, among other things..it's disrespectful, it's idiocy, it's insulting. And at the time it made me mad. So I got mad at James. Then my internal rule fired off: I'm not allowed to be mad at anybody else. So I got mad at me. Then I felt suicidal. I wasn't drinking at the time. See, when I'm using and I get depressed, mad, whatever, I drink or drug. It distracts me from my feelings, and I wake up the next morning feeling fine. However, when I'm clean and sober and I get depressed or mad, I make plans to kill myself. There was this NA group leader in Tucson who said he would never go back to using—that if he ever got in that cycle again he would take a bullet to the head. Those were his two options, as he saw them: stay clean (and he didn't seem very happy clean), or die..literally die by suicide. He moved to Tucson to work for a company that was supposed to make him rich. It didn't work out. He became homeless. He started using. This is a middle-class person whose life was destroyed by capitalism and then he took it upon himself to destroy it further with drugs. You don't start out homeless—you start out in a cubicle in a high rise in New York. ### 144 I recover from my one-week stay at The Worst Mental Hospital over a period of six months. At Leona's house, someone had agreed to publish *Things Said in Dreams*. Leona and I fought about the cover photo. She wanted one more smiley and I wanted one more serious but she couldn't frame a picture so I went with my serious but well-framed one. Editing took months. I got bored waiting for my book to "come out" on the publisher's schedule. It came out of *me* three years earlier. When I got the box of author copies, I broke out my aunt's gin and celebrated with a tall glass. I published my first book. I wasn't even sure what that meant in the internet age, but I celebrated anyway. A year later I deciding to unpublish TSID and give all my books away for free on my website. My friend Davina helped me through the process. It took some mental contortions on my part but in the end it felt so right. It was a cathartic process and a bold decision and I'll never forget that day. I wrote on my whiteboard (and it's still there) "That's what I need. Not the good choice. The brilliant choice." My ideas about selling my books go through a rapid transformation. I'll share them here in two posts: > **March 13, 2014** > > Why I am unpublishing Things Said in Dreams > > Simply, because the publishing industry is bullshit.  The author gets 10%, while the publisher gets 90?  It's unacceptable. > > I'd rather give my books away for free than go along with something like that.  So until a publisher is willing to give me at least 90% of the proceeds of my books, I won't publish with them. > > The author does the crucial work.  For a publisher to get most of the money is robbery.  I'm done with it. > > I've deleted my list of literary agents and I will no longer send query letters or try to be published by the traditional route. > > Who benefits?  You do.  The reader.  And that's the whole point.  People write books so that people can read books, and it's a beautiful thing that—with the advent of the internet—simply doesn't need publishers anymore. > > So..sit back and relax, and read my books for free. And number two: > **May 13, 2014** > > Why I am giving my books away for free > > For a while now, the way to get a book published has been to submit query letters to literary agents and hope to find an agent who will make your case to a publisher.  You can't submit directly to publishers—they don't accept submissions.  You have to go through a literary agent if you want a shot at a commercially successful book. > > Query letters are evil.  They consist of a description of the plot of the book and a blurb about the author.  Agents read thousands of these every year and decide, based on these letters, which books to read.  The vast majority of query letters are ignored or result in a rejection.  Think about what this means: it means that books are being rejected by agents without the agent ever having read the book.  I understand that agents can't read every book that everyone submits to them, but a query letter is a feeble tool for understanding what is in a book.  A book is its text, not just its plot.  The fact that agents rely on query letters to select books tells you something about what they value in a book.  They value the book's salability based on market trends.  Is this book enough like other commercially successful books in terms of subject matter?  They do not value the writing itself—or they would request a writing sample (the first page for example). > > Feedback from literary agents is frustrating.  When they deign to respond, they often say something like, "We like this but couldn't publish it in today's climate."  This is a common theme in my rejections and the rejections of my author friends.  Tell me this: if you like a book, isn't that the book you should be backing?  Isn't the job of the literary agent to champion an author whose work they like?  Apparently not.  Literary agents also want to rewrite your book.  I've had agents tell me that they could publish my book if only it had a different ending.  My book wouldn't be my book if I let others write the ending!  I don't contact an agent to get advice on how to write.  I contact them seeking representation for my book, which I wrote.  Yet another thing you'll hear from agents is that your book isn't right for "their list."  They're looking for particular books that fit their wish lists, instead of reading the books that are actually being written and picking the best of those. > > To make matters worse, if you do publish a book with a traditional publisher, the publisher will take 90% of the money.  That's right.  The author creates the product—and gets %10.  The author develops, over a lifetime, the sensitivities and skills needed to write a book, and produces a rare product that people want to read.  What does the publisher do?  Have a connection with Barnes & Noble?  The publisher offers editing assistance and a way to get your book onto the right shelf in a bookstore.  Is that worth 90%?  I don't think so.  Those percentages should be reversed. > > I had a book published, my novel *Things Said in Dreams*.  It was published with a small press that treated me well and gave me a slightly higher royalty percentage than usual.  I was very excited to get my book published.  But after a year or so, I developed a moral objection to the basic arrangement.  Even if it's a small amount of money, I just can't feel right about someone else getting the bulk of the proceeds from my books.  I'm not writing my books to make money.  I'm writing because I love the process of writing, the act of writing—and because I love reading books.  But the money is important.  It reflects where we think the value lies.  And to go along with a system that suggests that the value lies more with the publisher than the author is wrong to me. > > So I got out of my contract with my publisher.  I was already giving away all my unpublished books for free on my website.  This was just that final step towards giving away absolutely all my books for free.  I had heard of Radiohead giving away an album with a pay-as-you-want model, and that example inspired me.  I put a donate button on my website and started submitting my books to free book sites on the internet. > > I stopped thinking in terms of reaching agents and publishers, and started thinking in terms of reaching readers.  People write books so that people can read books, and with the internet, I can reach readers everywhere.  This has been a major shift for me.  I sent query letters out for ten years.  I got into the mode of thinking that in order to reach readers, I had to first reach agents.  Agents became more important in my mind than they should be.  I never wrote to please agents, but I did want to please them.  With giving my books away for free, that has all shifted.  The most important person for me to reach is the reader.  The agent is irrelevant. > > Giving my books away hasn't been without hiccups.  One editor of a free book website rejected all of my book submissions.  He said, "If you ever find yourself writing anything a little more 'mainstream' please feel free to email me."  As if it's the author's job to write to the editor's specifications. > > The author's job is to have a vision.  A singular vision, that only they could have.  And to write based on that vision.  It is not the author's job to write commercially successful material, or mainstream material, or to please literary agents and editors.  Writers do something that neither literary agents nor editors nor publishers do: they write books.  They go into the wilds of their imagination and observation and they construct something that can be read by others.  A person who does this earns, on their journey into those wilds, the wisdom to know what to write and what not to write.  A literary agent has not made this journey.  A publisher has not made this journey.  It is the author's place, and the author's place alone, to decide what to write.  For agents and publishers to act like it is the author's job to cater to their whims is nonsensical. > > When it comes down to it, it's not about agents and publishers.  It's not even about authors.  It's about books.  People love to read.  As writers, I think we need to aim to increase the amount of reading that happens.  For me, right now, that means giving my books away for free.  That way people with no money can read them and people who can and want to can donate. Take as needed, give as able. I think that maximizes the value I can provide through my writing, and that is why I'm doing it. With those two transitions, my thinking about books and writing them had changed forever. ### 145 Where do you get your good feelings? That's a question you need to ask yourself. Maybe you get your good feelings from your job (your "career")—from doing good work and making money in return. From feeding your family, feeling like you're needed—that feels good. Maybe you get it from your belief in god or the belief that when you die, there will be something after—maybe you get it from religion. Or maybe you get it from your art, from saying something and feeling that people are listening to you. Or playing with your dog. A lot of people get their good feelings from exploring and expressing their sexual identity—it's important for humans to have a sense of their own identity, who they are—and our identities are complex and changing. Maybe you feel good when you fuck—when you make your girl cum. Maybe that look on her face when she hits the top, loses all control, and her pussy runs hot and she looks you in the eyes like she's so *grateful* that you can rock her world—maybe that's part of where you get your good feelings. But what happens when your ability to do those things goes away? Maybe you get old. Maybe you get sick. Maybe you lose all your money and all the relationships you had before *that can only take place within society* are lost. What are you then? What if you can't work? What if you can't make your girl cum? Then your identity is less stable. What if you're diagnosed as *crazy*. Yeah, that's not the technical term, but what if your diagnosis is so serious and so stigmatized that your family members, your friends, your lovers, your employers, your coworkers *don't trust you anymore*. They don't trust your veracity. They think that mentally ill people are dangerous. They think that because you're ill, their thoughts always trump your thoughts *because you're crazy* and if you're crazy, how can you be making any sense? Suddenly no one regards you as the expert on *anything*—at work, school, home. Everyone *doubts you* because your illness overshadows everything else about you, even things they've known about you for a long time. Like this one time, my grandmother stomps into the room where I've been talking to my sister on the phone—GranGran was eavesdropping from the hallway and I said something she found so unbelievable that she was forced to break her cover. What I said was something along the lines of: *Uncle Perish is a loose cannon and I don't want to be in the same room with him when he might have a gun.* My grandmother busted in the room and said: "That's my *son* you're talking about." "I'm fully aware of that. And my point stands. He's a drunk, he's a loose cannon, he's a racist, he's a sexist, and I don't know if you know this, but the last time he was over here he used the phrase 'nigger pussy' in a conversation with me. I know he's your son. I respect that. I'm not trying to hurt your feelings, but based on Perish's politics and things he has said I think it's reasonable for us to stop him at the door next time he comes over and one of the adults can frisk him and make sure he's not carrying a gun." GranGran looks at me in the most derisive way possible and hisses at me like the serpent from the Garden of Eden. She says: "*Perish doesn't own a* gun." Then she disappeared back the way she came. Later, someone—either my mom or aunt—asked Perish if he owned a gun, and lo and behold, that drunk, racist, sexist, Tea Party motherfucker *does own* a gun, and he keeps it in the glove compartment of his truck. So when Perish is visiting the house, being hateful and out of control and drunk and angry, we're all just one trip to the driveway away from having a family shooting. But the point isn't how ignorant and irresponsible my uncle Perish is, the point is *I was right* about Perish owning a gun and even after my grandmother spitefully, dismissively, disrespectfully *hissed* at me: "Perish doesn't own a *gun*," she still gives me no regard, whether I'm talking about Perish or a roach. That's fucking rudeness, I don't care if she *is* my grandmother. Did she ever come to me and say, "I'm sorry, I was wrong, you were right, your hothead uncle is packing heat and I'm sorry for *hissing at you* like a snake." No. She never mentioned the incident to me again. She never came back and corrected the wrong. She never gave me a simple apology. She gets a pass because she's eighty-four—and because she's my grandmother—but even *at* eighty-four, that woman is still sharp. She knows what's going on. Most of why she never apologized to me is not because she's senile—because she *is not* senile and she *does not* have Alzheimer's—most of why she never apologized to me is because I'm not a real person to her. I'm someone to be pitied or feared—not an equal. Almost no one understands mental illness, but old people are the worst—when they hear the term *mental illness* they think you're a vegetable or a murderer and either way you should be locked up for the betterment of society—and by *society* they mean white supremacists like my loving GranGran and her precious little gun-toting white supremacist son. A lot of people think mental illness means a person is dangerous—even when science shows that mentally healthy people are more of a danger to mentally ill people than the other way around (this should make us all question our terms). Even if you've never thrown a punch since the moment you came out of your mother's womb, some people get scared around you even though you're acting *just as they are*—breathing slowly, talking gently, eating, laughing, joking. Who are you when you can no longer do anything *silly*—because when a normal person does something silly, it's funny..but when a crazy person does something silly, it's scary, somehow..scary that I sent you a text message that stated your daily fortune in emojis—the only thing scary about that is that you didn't think of it first. Truly, even among supposedly civilized people, we simply fear what we don't understand—and we're not *embarrassed* by our ignorance, we *revel* in it. Sometimes I think it's not really that most people are sane and a few people are crazy, but rather that most people lack imagination and *fun!* in their lives and a few people have imagination and fun *coming out their ass*. I know this is judgmental and I know from therapy that it's a mistake to *compare my insides to other people's outsides* but I really do believe—as a result of all my experience and all my observation and all my thinking on this subject—that you have to come unhinged *at least a little bit* to fully enjoy this life. ### 146 I went into Susan's bathroom to get the hair clippers and this time when I opened the drawer where they were kept, I paid a little more attention than usual and noticed Susan had syringes. Guess I was weak on the drug front 'cause the first place my mind went was: *I wonder if I can shoot some of Susan's hydrocodone for a more immediate effect?* Crush up a hydrocodone. Dissolve it in water. Shoot that motherfucker. Luckily, like a good drug addict, I looked it up first because according to the internet, shooting hydrocodone doesn't get you any higher than swallowing it and it causes liver damage or kidney damage or some shit. So of course I didn't do it. I never told anyone that, even Davina, 'cause I knew it was crazy scary and indicated I had worse addiction problems (and was in a worse addiction state at that time) than anyone knew. The was the same day when, earlier, I had discovered, after a couple months sober, a bottle of gin in the back porch freezer and you better believe I popped that open. I was so excited when I opened up that door and saw that giant-sized bottle of Albertson's gin. The excitement was instant. And that was the day I told Davina I thought she was my soulmate. Three days later when I told her I was drinking, she thought that meant that I didn't mean what I said. But I did. ### 147 You know when I started drinking again, the last time? Davina asked me to write her memoir. I started taking notes as soon as I said yes, not waiting for the interviews to start. I raised the level of sexual intimacy between us to help her feel comfortable with telling me her deepest secrets. I also told her my most intimate stories to encourage her to do the same. One day, on a lark, I told her about the time I mauled that snake in the woods when it had surprised me and I said I felt horrible about it. And—like magic—she told me the puppy story from her youth and it turned out to be the lynchpin of her whole book (read *Davina* if you want the details). But yeah, I sent her dick pics and videos partially for fun and partially because I like talking sexy with her and her talking sexy with me through text and phone, and she did get me turned on with her dirty texts, but it was also a way to increase the intimacy of our relationship in order to increase the intimacy of the interviews..and it worked..and once the interviews were over, the sexiness subsided and eventually went away when she found another boy to be sexy with. But I kept taking notes on everything she said, Tweeted, texted, posted before during and after our twenty one-hour interviews, for over two years, until about a month after I finished the first draft. This was a gray area, taking notes on what someone says outside the context of the formal interviews, using material she told me before she ever asked me to write the book..but I had dual goals: 1) Treat my friend fairly. 2) Write the best book possible. They were only sometimes at odds. I felt at the time I was in a moral gray area, taking notes outside the interviews, and at times I felt I had crossed the line. I am not generally an *ends justify the means* person—quite opposite. But in this case, in order to make the best possible book, I went against my own morality a little bit. Davina and I never discussed this. When she read the book, she never mentioned any distinction between content that was gathered inside the context of the formal interviews and content that was gathered outside that context. I don't know if she remembers what she said when, if she cares, or if perhaps she knew all along that anything she said was fair game. But: drinking. I had stopped to do interviews on Davina's memoir. Then I stayed sober for a while and I was on a good path. I worked on the outline to that book, watched movies every night till 2am, and listened to the DJ Baby Anne station on my Pandora. I had a new iPhone, and I even stopped smoking the day I got the iPhone, which only cost my aunt twenty-six dollars with taxes and activation and everything, because of some promo. So I was doing alright. And what happened next I can't *blame* my drinking on, but at the very least I can say it was my excuse to drink again. And once I broke the seal, I was done. I only drank for one or two months, but it was the heaviest drinking I've done in my life. - - - - What happened was this garage sale. And if you're already congratulating yourself on how psychologically robust you are that you would never drink over a garage sale, pipe down a minute, we're not all as well adjusted as you are to living in this hideous, backward world. I'm too sensitive a person to live in the reality that most of you love and call home—it's a miracle I've lived this long here, to be quite honest. Right. We have a bunch of stuff in the house, my aunt uncle and grandmother's house where I'm living after I tried to kill myself in Vermont, moved to Portland, got kicked out of my sister's house, and moved to Baton Rouge where my aunt kindly took me in. There were problems. First, everyone in my family, not just me, has problematic OCD. I basically couldn't do anything in that house without someone correcting me. I took their correction quietly and adjusted myself to them—I was the mentally ill one who needed a place to live, so I decided to make myself as conforming as possible. Second, you might recall my aunt has this weird love affair with a moron named Mack, and Mack was staying at the house. For a while Mack and I stayed in the same room. Recall that Mack and Susan would come home drunk from the casino, screaming obscenities at each other at 4am. That does not equal *safe living environment* to me. Mack physically threatened me, he yelled for no reason when cooking smells from the kitchen bothered him, he disrespected my mom when she asked for some of his time to talk about how yelling was raising the anxiety level in the house. (Strike *infinity*, motherfucker.) He camped out in the living room watching *The Expendables* (every sequel), dumb-ass high school pseudo-comedies, Eli Roth films—films for morons. I mean if Mack had the tiniest taste in movies, he would have been less annoying camping out in the living room while I was trying to write. He disrespected my grandmother by wearing earbuds when she was talking to him. When he did that I wanted to slap the shit out of him—my Mom also, naturally, didn't like it when Mack showed disrespect for my mom's mom (in fact if you think *I* hate Mack, check with my mother—her vitriol for the motherfucker is greater than mine). And he made fun of me—uncalled for, dude. When I poured myself a glass of wine and sat down at my laptop, he said, (imagine this in a disdainful southern accent) "Did you just pour yourself *a glass of wine*? It's twelve o'clock. Who do you think you are, Hemingway?" Yeah, Mack, compared to you I'm a thousand Hemingways. Anyway one night this insect said some critical shit to me and I snapped my fingers in his fucking face—like right in his eyes, an inch from his head. My aunt called us both outside for a conflict-resolution session. As you recall, she was always making excuses for Mack ("Well, he's untreated bipolar"). *Then treat that motherfucker!* And she was always comparing me to Mack, which, I mean, was ridiculous. We both have forty-six chromosomes—that's about where the similarity ends. The conflict-resolution session didn't resolve shit. Mack insincerely appeased Susan but he continued to insult me and my cousin. Stephen and Susan's MO was to let Mack do whatever he wanted. My MO was to lay down the motherfucking law. One night, late, my mom was sleeping in the next room and Mack was having a loud telephone conversation. I was in a different room by this time. I could hear every word he was saying. I went to his room, opened the curtain, and said: "Mack. It's late. My mom is in the next room trying to sleep. Will you please quiet your voice?" Mack handled this in the typical bullheaded ignorant male style, coming up to me and stepping to me like we were about to have a fight. Hey Bobby Fischer, my fucking *grandmother* is two rooms down, do you really think you're gonna *fight* me? How many moves ahead did you think that one? Words were said. I don't remember what they were exactly but the gist was me telling him to shut the fuck up and go to bed and him threatening me in vague and unlikely ways, since he was a foot shorter than me and I was so mad at him that I could have bitten his face off like Hannibal Lecter on bath salts. The scene ended with Mack in his room being very very quiet and my aunt and mom (who was already awake due to Mack's loud phone call) standing in my room and my aunt crying, which broke my heart on one level and made no sense on another—really she was just re-living some fear from childhood when her drunk father was yelling in the middle of the night. But Mack was gone the next day, and—regardless of Susan's infatuation—that's exactly as it should have been. - - - - I get delight in thinking of eating Mack's face off and serving him a glass of my "Hemingway" wine through his lipless mouth. He prob'ly never read a Hemingway book in his life. If Mack had been stupid and benevolent, we could have lived peacefully. But he was stupid and malevolent, so that bitch had to go. My objection to Mack is probably what ended my aunt's relationship with me. But it wasn't just me who hated Mack. My other aunt, both her children, my grandmother, my mom. None of us felt safe around him. And yet Susan chose to make us all uncomfortable in order for her to play Good Samaritan to a loose cannon who picked fights at casinos by calling the black employees *nigger*. It's obvious why she liked him—she likes the excitement (the chaos). Anyway that's the house I was living in. And Susan and Mack would watch TV both lying in Susan and her husband's bed. Even when Susan's girlfriend came over to watch TV, Susan lay in the bed and her friend sat on a reclining chair beside the bed. I confronted Susan about this and she never shared openly with me again. My mom confronted Susan about Mack and Susan stopped sharing openly with my mom, her sister, from that point on. ### 148 But Susan did let me do the garage sale. We had a bunch of stuff from my aunt and uncle, my mom's storage unit—the house was filled with junk. Aunt Susan came to me and said: "How would you like to be in charge of the garage sale?" I said, "Fine. I'll do anything I can to help." She said, "You can do it any way you want. You can set the prices. Basically everything in the front room is for sale." I said, "Sweet. Just tell me the date and I'll make it happen." She said, "Ok, Bob and I are working out the date. It'll either be the weekend a month from now or the weekend after. You can keep the profits. I just want all this stuff out of here." I said, "I would have done it for free, but I'll be happy to take your money." I smiled. She smiled. "I know you would have," she said. "But this way you'll have some money for cigarettes and stuff." The date of the sale approaches. We all gather our junk and put it in the front room. We're a family of junk, furniture, and book collectors just below the level of hoarders. We watch *Hoarders* to feel better about our own lesser level of hoarding. The front room used to be a place where we hung out when guests came over (I was a guest at that time). We played Pong in there when Atari first came out. Ornate, antique cabinets contained decks of cards and poker chips from another time. Now, the front room is an untraversable junkyard of books, suits that were only worn to one job interview, and tons of plastic bins—who knows what is in them. On the night before the garage sale, I imagined us all kind of doing a party atmosphere like we did when I first arrived at that house: cheese-and-olive plate, all talking and joking. No. Susan grabbed an overnight bag and went—somewhere—she never tells anyone where she's going and she sure as fuck never told *me* after I confronted her about Mack. So Susan is *gone*. When she said I was going to be "in charge" of the garage sale I didn't know that meant she was going to be unavailable if I had questions..but..this was ok. I hoped she had fun and I started making signs to place around the neighborhood to lead people to our house. Susan's husband, my uncle Bob, moved everything from the front room and placed things in categorical piles in the living room. I had imagined myself doing the moving of the for-sale items, since I was in charge of the garage sale. I was happy to do all the work so Susan and certainly Bob didn't have to do anything. But I was never really "in charge" of the garage sale—I was just there to be the guy who priced the items, got up early, and dealt with the customers. I wanted to organize the items, but Bob had already pre-organized them! He gave me a speech: "This keyboard..I'm not sure if it works. If anyone asks if anything works, just tell them yes, that we tested everything. This TV..I'm guessing you could get fifty..a hundred..one-fifty? And maybe these books could be like..five dollars a piece? I got them from book sales but they're duplicate copies." (Bob has a five-thousand book library in that house.) "And these cable modems..I think I got these out of the trash heap at the old library..they were just throwing out all this equipment and I was like..some of this stuff has value." Don't hear me making fun of my uncle. That five-thousand (at least) book library that has grown to occupy every room in the house—that's hoarding. He hasn't read a tenth of those books. So in that sense it's sickness: the need to categorize, collect, database thousands of books that even an avid reader will never get round to reading. But it's amazing, too. If I ask Bob for a classic, something I want to re-read, there's at least a fifty-perfect chance that he has it (and knows exactly where it is). Bob goes through everything in the garage sale and tells me how to arrange it and he sets up tables on the patio and for most items, he suggests prices and I'm starting to wonder how exactly I'm *in charge of* this garage sale. I would have loved to do it *with* Susan, *with* Bob, but before tonight the only communication I was aware of was between me and Susan. Now Bob is directing me *down to the detail* about what to do. And he tells me he'll be sleeping in in the morning, missing as much of the actual action as he can. I felt used. When Susan said, "Will you be in charge of the garage sale?" she meant *Will you run the cash box for the garage sale while Bob sleeps in and I'm playing poker at some hotel in Mississippi?* - - - - And what does an alcoholic do when he feels used? Does he call his aunt and talk about his feelings? Does he say to someone, *This is not what I signed up for, I'll be in my room, goodnight.* No. An alcoholic takes on the disappointment, feels hurt by being clearly misled and miscommunicated with, and he takes the remaining garage sale work upon himself while everybody else in the "family" is nowhere to be seen. Oh, and he procures some Evan Williams and drinks half the bottle. He arranges everything meticulously on the patio, setting up a cove at one end of a long table that contains his cash box, an iPad with earbuds and music, and a glass of whiskey. He starts pricing but it's too late so he makes the decision that everything, including a huge-screen TV, will be priced at one dollar. The exception will be books and music, which (in the interest of promoting learning) will be free. Yeah, I nursed my overreacting feelings with whiskey that night and the next morning all through the sale. With my genius pricing scheme, every motherfucking thing on that porch sold and we made more than we had made at any previous garage sale. With the proceeds, I drank every day until I was begging for help from the heavens to *please let me fucking stop*. If you're still enjoying drinking, you're not an alcoholic. If you have ripped all the skin off your own body and written *I am in hell—Help me* on the wall, with your fingers, in your own blood, then you might want to get yourself to a meeting. I drank like that. I had gotten sober to do Davina's interviews, stopped drinking wine even though she was drinking wine to loosen herself up. Let's say that was fair since she was the subject and I was the one "on duty"..let's just say that was fair. So I sobered up and did her interviews sober or drinking a little wine and not telling her about it. I borrowed money from GranGran to drink jug wine from Walmart..I could drink one of those in two nights. Then I sobered up completely. Was about to start writing Davina's book, then found that bottle of Albertson's gin in the outside fridge and tore through it with some codeine from my aunt's room (which just made me puke—it was designed to lessen pain without getting you high =( I was so obsessed with drinking that I would drink on the back porch, puke in the garden, then pour another drink, knowing I couldn't keep that one down, either. I had fun drinking with Davina. Sometimes I'd tell my family, often I would go out under the pretense of buying Burger King and set the Rite Aid Evan Williams in a hidden spot somewhere in the front yard, then when the front room was clear of people, I'd go out and sneak in my alcohol. One night Bob was watching some hobbit movie at full volume so I took out my trash, emptied it, put my whiskey in it, and carried the trash can in as if it were empty. Then I was free to drink. I drank in secret at night in my mom's living room on our trips to New Orleans. Having gotten a week clean and not even having an immediate emotional reason to drink, I poured myself a drink at Mom's house and set it beside my iPad, Tweeting, deciding whether I was going to drink that night or not. Forty-five minutes later I finally convinced myself to take a sip. I drank for another month. I would drink in my room and watch *Flight* all day and all night—I obviously related to the story. It made me want to stop. It made me want to drink. It underscored my drinking. I used it as a justification. Over a year and a half sober now, I finally dared to watch it again and it was a totally different experience. Then came my final drinking days of traveling with Mom to New Orleans and making screwdrivers with our Wendy's breakfast orange juice and I'd sit in the balcony of her church drinking and emailing my cousin Kristi while they did church below. I finally started going to meetings. I went through four sponsors in a year, finding them all lacking. I went to a hateful men's meeting in Baton Rouge, then a good meditation meeting but it was peppered with events like a guy named Chris raising his hand when the questions was asked, "Is anyone here willing to be a temporary sponsor." After Chris raised his hand, after the meeting, I went up to him and asked if he would be my temporary sponsor and he said, as he walked past me, "I don't do this temporary sponsor stuff. If you're ready to get clean follow the steps, and live by a higher power of your choosing, then call me." What an asshole. Maybe next time don't raise your hand when the moderator asks who's willing to be a temporary sponsor. I finally settled on a sponsor named Glory. Tradition says that in sponsorship men stick with men, women stick with women, but Glory was a perfect fit for me so we broke that rule. Glory was so generous—she talked with my for 45 minutes after the meeting where we met. But she was also really pushy—coming over to swim in the pool at me and Mom's new apartment and talk AA. I was telling her my clenching was acting up too much and I was in pain and I needed to go inside in ten minutes. I had developed tardive dyskinesia from one of the psych meds I was taking—my antipsychotic—and I could barely sit or stand. I still have to spend most of my day lying down. Anyway in the pool, Glory is like, "You don't *look* like you're clenching that bad." Wtf??!!! Like many AA/NA people, Glory was pushy enough to come to our freaking apartment without calling first..unbelievable. I dropped her as a sponsor because of some AA bullshit that I'm about to get into in a minute, and Glory just marched herself over to me and Mom's apartment to bark about it. I'm glad for Glory's sake and my own that I was in my room with the door closed when she came over 'cause I would have closed the front door in her motherfucking face. You don't come over without calling unless you think there's a physical emergency—in which case you still don't come over without calling..you call 911. But it was a sign of my pocketful of serenity that I didn't leave my room. I let my Mom handle it. And LOL. Glory thought that my mom was going to totally side with her, and Mom was like, *No, you all have made it more difficult for a person with disabilities to come to that meeting*..and Mom made an analogy to her churches where some adult members have had a problem with children wearing street shoes to church or using their devices on silent or with headphones during the service..Mom says these adults think they have a really good point but that they're missing the point of why we're here in the first place..to welcome God's people! Anyway she handled Glory. And when things got really good for me, around the one-year mark, Mom and I started having daily arguments. We were moving, but Davina suggests it might be because I'm improving myself. I think that's a good theory. Why isn't Mom in therapy, you know? Does she think I'm the only one between the two of us who can improve. On the phone Leona suggested Mom and I do couples therapy and asked me if I'd be willing to do that and I was like: *Yeah!* (I love therapy.) But it took me asking three times and many more months of our fighting before Mom said "yes" to couples therapy. - - - - But before I got better, I got worse. A month clean, I relapsed. Every day I told Davina that today was going to be the last day, and I was always wrong. She stopped wanting to hear it because it was always a fucking lie!—And I stopped wanting to say it for the same reason. She lost me for a while there. I never came out of my room except at night to drunk-drive in a blackout using one of my relatives' cars to a gas station to buy vodka and cigarettes. I switched to the cheapest vodka. I drank one bottle a day. I was horrified, each day, to wake up and see that I had bought more, while I had *absolutely no memory* of leaving the house to get it. And, each day, I drank it anyway. There were nights when I only wrote poetry because I was drunk. Feeling like I'm on a surf board, in life—and I can't surf. I enjoyed writing for no one, for myself, for a while. It was like a lullaby: *no one is reading what I wrote* :that pacified my mind. I wrote on Twitter and was ok with what I wrote—no matter what I wrote. I went on night walks. Tolerated a small mosquito. Returned without my sandals. I needed another pair, but was too embarrassed to tell my mom how much I was drinking or how I had lost my sandals. I missed my Vermont psychiatrist, and thought I might be in love with her. I planned on robbing a Mexican restaurant (not for cash—just for margaritas) but lucky for me it was 4am and the restaurant was locked. One night Davina texted me that her son had gotten in a car accident. I didn't know this till the next day when I scrolled back through my text history, and in shock I saw that my response to her was, "Hahahahaha." This next thing might seem minor, but I'd wake up and my iPhone would be on the floor. I would have no idea if I had gently dropped it? Thrown it? I treat my devices preciously—the idea that I had dropped my phone was scary to me..because what else had I done? Every morning I had to check Facebook, my blog, texts, Twitter, and my call history to see how far my drunk expression may have gone the night before. I called my cousin. We drank together over the phone for a full week and had hours-long intimate soul-baring conversations that neither of us remember. This is when I went to visit my mom in New Orleans. I sat in the balcony and drank improvised screwdrivers and hoped I wouldn't throw up during the service. Someone from Mom's church—let's call him Milton—saw right through me. How could he not?—He's an alcoholic, too. This kind man shared a cigarette with me and talked about his journey and how wonderful his life was now that he stopped drinking—and how it got better *every single day* he stayed sober. He didn't tell me to stop. No. Milton is too smart for that. He put a hand on my shoulder and he said, "Enjoy your drinking. You'll stop when you're ready." - - - - That's something AA's twelve steps don't quite capture. Yes, the first step says, "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable." But there's something else that happens, that's really when you change. I've only heard Milton and one other person say this, but, there just comes a point when you're ready. I wasn't ready. I decided in my crazy mind that I wasn't getting nearly as much *bang* out of cigarettes as I was alcohol, so I quit smoking and doubled my alcohol consumption. I'm lucky this strategy didn't kill me—but I did quit smoking. Then the weight of drunk driving hit me one day. Waking up to phantom bottles of vodka that certainly hadn't delivered themselves, imagining the very real possibility of waking up out of a blackout drunk *in jail* after having killed someone driving my mom's car..that was too much for me. I couldn't let that be my life. I couldn't ever again write my best friend, "Hahahahaha," after she told me her son had been in a car accident. That was too much for me. I couldn't let that be my life. I had two nephews now—my sister Leona has two boys. I couldn't be their drunk uncle—I have a drunk uncle and I've hated him since I was about five. I knew there was something wrong with him. I knew I couldn't trust him. And now I had the power to choose whether my nephews have a sober uncle or a drunk uncle. Letting down my sister's kids by being their drunk uncle that they hate, that they distrust? That was too much for me. I couldn't let that be my life. I told my mom I was drinking again and needed to go to a meeting. She asked no questions—she just made it happen. That day. After my first meeting, I cried. After my second meeting, I wailed. I sat in the car with my mom in the driveway of my grandmother's house and I wept for the me who had for so many years *estimated myself so low* that I was willing to do drugs that can kill you the *first* time you shoot them, *every* time you shoot them. This was not sadness. This was grieving and lamentation—I felt the *soul ache* that one feels when something of such high value *as a human life..my human life*..is held so low. How could I have ever let myself get to the point where I cared so little about myself that I would gamble with my life?—flash to this one time, driving like a maniac on the 101, weaving in and out of cars—it's basically a miracle I never got stopped for drunk driving. And all through this, my mom sat next to me and listened. Then she drove me to meetings for a year. I have been sober since that day. I do it the way the wise ones do it, the hard way, the only way that works: one day at a time. I can't manage the future. I can't fix the past. I am in this tiny shell of consciousness that lasts two seconds, or twenty minutes, or one day. I have made a decision to stay sober *today*—that is the limit of what I can do. When I got sober off that two-month binge, Susan was sympathetic when I stated to her that I had been drinking too much and had started attending AA meetings. She drove me to meetings on days my mom wasn't around. She let me use the car. She came home early so I could use the Prius to get to night meetings. Totally supportive. But she said—and these are almost her exact words: "I know we don't spend much time together anymore—I hope you know it's nothing personal. I'd like to do more things with you, Matthew, but I can't think of anything that doesn't involve alcohol." This didn't just mean she and I wouldn't be going out to bars anymore to watch the game. It came down to family dinners, for example the one where Susan put tons and tons of wine in the spaghetti sauce, so much that my mom could taste it. I ate something else of course. But it's like: I'll support you by driving you to a meeting, but I won't take into account that I'm excluding you from eating dinner with the family by pouring more than one bottle of wine into a pot of spaghetti sauce when there's a recovering alcoholic in the house. - - - - And I remember when Rebecca died her mother asked me if I was suicidal and I said yes, I told the truth. When she asked me if I was doing any drugs or drinking, I said no. But I lied. I was drinking after Rebecca died. I had to. Rebecca's mom was an alcoholic. She knew what question to ask. And I remember Matt, the stupid substance abuse counsellor who had obviously never had any personal experience with substance abuse himself, detained me for half an hour as I was about to leave the Refuge for the last time, to print out a list of 12-step meetings in Portland, ask me for my sister's address, and highlight lists of meetings in my area. I knew this whole time I was not going to be attending any AA or NA meetings in Portland because I was burned out on the bullshit but I smiled as this happy-go-lucky asshole pleasantly lectured me on the relationship between mental illness and substance abuse. Believe me, buddy, the amount of fucked up that I am is such that your lectures won't make a dent in my psychology. ### 149 Perish getting all friendly and drinking while I was sober and him sitting next to me at a restaurant talking about some job he might be able to offer me, remote, contract work. I always knew it wasn't going to work out, I just entertained his lengthy proposal over lunch out of politeness. Then a week later he's on Facebook insulting my mom over some political shit. She asked him behind the scenes to remember that she's his sister and he's attacking her in an entirely personal way in an arena *where her work friends can see it*. The minute I found out this was happening I wrote Perish an email saying, *No, I will not even* discuss *with you further doing work for you. You are harassing my mom*—*that is not the type of person I want to do favors for.* He wrote back and reminded me they would be paying me, so it would be *him* who was doing *me* the favor!!?? *!@#$^%&$* I wrote him back and said, *Perish, 1) Refer to my previous email. 2) You're not doing me a favor!! I don't need the piddly little hourly rate your three-man consulting company can afford to pay me!* What the fuck. It's like the guy is clueless. But not too long ago, I was drunk off my ass, calling Joanne, calling Leona drunk. Joanne mentions she's deleting her Facebook account—I decide to do the same. And I delete all email from Perish, and his contact record, so I won't be able to contact him if I'm drunk in the future. Leona and I apologize to each other over the phone about the way Portland ended and have a divine make-up session, most of which I do not remember. I realize, looking at my own behavior, that Perish is probably drunk when harassing my mom on Facebook. Before I delete my Facebook, I'm sending Perish messages like "I'm *instructing* you to stop harassing my Mom" and "If your drinking is part of what is making you think it's ok to make your sister cry by sending her personal attacks on Facebook, then your drinking has to stop" etc. Parental, patronizing, I wanted to make him feel as small as an gnat. Which is fucked up of me, since that's probably how he feels anyway. I just couldn't see that at the time, that someone who felt good about himself would never make my mom cry. I make a deal with my cousin, Perish's daughter Lily to ask Perish to stop harassing my mom on Facebook and she is in Florida (where Perish lives) at the time. She writes me back and says stop sending messages on FB. I say ok, and I do stop. Five minutes later and says it's taken care of..and do you know what?..for a whole year Perish doesn't harass my mom on Facebook. Then he forgets or decides to break the deal he made with his daughter and goes right back to the same asshole behavior. - - - - I didn't even know I was an alcoholic until I had been drinking for 18 years. Well, that's not exactly true. I had some ideas here and there—some hints—but not until this last time did I really *want* to stop drinking. Once before I quit because my boss put me on half salary and I could no longer afford to drink all day. I didn't *want* to quit, though, I *had* to quit. AA doesn't work for people who *have* to quit, it only works (sometimes) for people who *want* to quit. This time around, the whole first year I didn't have a single craving for alcohol—that's how bad I wanted to quit. For a while I was still drinking during and between meetings. I switched to the cheapest vodka, drunk drove to get it, called my cousin's friend to buy drugs..asshole never responded. I went to a meeting where if anyone picks up a white chip it turns the meeting into a beginners meeting..I picked up three white chips at that meeting, listened to good and ridiculous advice (including an addict who suggested they get me a bottle and get me drunk on the way to detox). I drank after the third time I went to that meeting, a smaller quantity than usual, and stopped drinking from then until now, over a year and a half later. - - - - Right around the time my drinking stopped, the pain of my muscle clenching caused by stopping the antipsychotic that I had been taking for three years..that pain increased to the point I couldn't sleep, my shoulder hurt so much. The muscles were clenching more than they were designed to and so they hurt. My aunt Susan dropped me off at the hospital and I went into the ER while Susan did her thing elsewhere. This incensed my Mom. "What if you needed me to take Stephen to the hospital and I *just left him* there in the ER by himself?" "Matthew's almost 40 years old." "No he's not—he's 36!! How would that feel to you if I just dropped your son off while he was in excruciating pain?" Susan thinks. "I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one," she says. But that was just an expression—she never actually did get back to my mom on that one. - - - - Intelligence and overthinking puts you at a critical disadvantage as a drug addict. Addiction is a problem whose solution requires action, not thinking. As one addict I met says, *I didn't have a theory of addiction, so I don't need a theory of sobriety. I had a* practice *of addiction; now I have a practice of sobriety.* That's the kind of thinking that will help you in recovery. If it sounds too academic, then you can be sure it will mislead you from sobriety. A lot of people like to share that high-class recovery, but what you're looking for is horse sense. Like my sponsor Tom from Tucson. Tom would sit through about 3/4 of a meeting filled with high-class recovery, then he would speak up and say: "Hi. I'm Tom, I'm an addict, and I'm happy not to be smoking crack today." When it comes to recovery, Tom is a *genius*. See, you can eat a desert if you have the patience to eat only one grain of sand each day. But an alcoholic doesn't have that patience. We just can't stop at one grain of sand. We just can't stop at one drink or one line. I learned workaholic patterns from my dad. I can find peace at an AA meeting, but I can get just as much peace meditating on an idea like: My value is not in my work. My value is that I can sit in the sand and smell the ocean. My consciousness is its own value. - - - - Let's say I'm walking a path, and little pebbles keep getting in my shoes. Well, if they're small enough, I might finish my whole walk before I empty out my shoes. But even though those pebbles weren't very big, they affected every step I took..they were hurting me a little bit. So let's say, instead, I came across a boulder in the path, blocking my way forward. I would have to deal with that boulder right away before I took another step along the path. Everyone has their own arc—or slope—of addiction. And a high slope of addiction kills many of us..the addiction beats us. But in a way, those with a high slope of addiction are at an advantage, because they have the chance—just a *chance*—that they might find a sober way. Do you understand what I am saying? - - - - And sharing doesn't make me high—it sets me at peace—but sometime after the meeting is over and I've gone home and all is quiet, I yearn for Amanda to be sitting two seats to my right, doing her forward stretches on the meditation cushion while we do the standard readings, Chris to Amanda's right, leading the meeting. I don't know if Chris even likes boys, but I love them both, as sobriety mates, as women, and I know everyone gets all disappointed when men make everything about sex, but I want to know Amanda, to please her, to touch her deeply after a four-hour conversation because she makes sense, somehow I am tuned to listen to her frequency..and I would never mess up the Platonic relationship we have as recovering alcoholics..but I want to real bad. - - - - And when I went to AA, and the most important part of AA for me, this time, wasn't the community, it wasn't sharing my story, it wasn't listening to the wisdom in the rooms. It was hearing the Serenity Prayer over and over and over again. I'm a collector of wisdom, of quotes, of adages, and the Serenity Prayer has to be the single most useful piece of operating wisdom I've ever heard. Basically: understand what is within the realm of your control and what is not, forget about what you can't control, and focus on what you can. It's so simple, and yet how much worry is spilt over things we can't control. I'm back in a bathtub, in the eleventh grade, after my morning run, after my morning novel read, and one day I have the realization *that everything I control is within the space of this bathtub.* And later, by years, I realize further that I can't even control everything in my body—I don't control my stomach, for example. So I learned that a) yes, everything I control is within the space of a bathtub, and b) most of what's in the bathtub I don't control either! Even my brain is mostly outside the realm of what I control—there's only a tiny bit of my mind that fits with this paradigm of control or change. And probably, there isn't even such a thing as control—it's just a paradigm that's developed to protect us from the fear (and the rollercoaster blast!) of knowing that *we don't control anything, we can't change anything*..that life is a vivid movie and our consciousness is just strapped to one of the seats. AA has helped me. Not drinking has helped me more. But living my life with a more realistic idea of what I can change (hardly anything) has helped me most of all. The Serenity Prayer is about serenity and courage and wisdom, yes, but it's also about efficiency. Today, I waste less of my time engaging in battles I cannot win, and almost of all of my time giving myself to projects and people with whom I *can* make a difference. That is a gift of enlightenment right there. A gift of *lightness*. Because it's tiring to beat your head against the wall, and it warps you to battle monsters you can't defeat (to borrow a concept from Nietzsche). But to let go of all the heavy, impossible, undefeatable, unchangeable things—things that are outside of your control—that is freedom born of *honesty*. The Serenity Prayer asks for *the wisdom to know the difference* between things we can change and things we can't. To have that wisdom is the truth I am talking about. To not have the wisdom to know what we can change and what we can't, is to never be able to act truthfully—in that state I find myself trying to change things that truthfully I can't change. That is foolishness—and how many years of my life could have gone better if I had known this truth: the boss, the coworker, the girlfriend, the father, the company, the law, the government, the fact that I'm an addict..I can't change. But I can quit the job, ask my girlfriend to go to couples counseling, I can break up with her, wish her the best, and never speak to her abusive ass again. I can decline the strip club invitation from my coworker—even though not being friendly with him will interfere with my ability to advance within the company, regardless of the work I do. I can stop trying to change something I can't change: that I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. I can't change that. But I can change my behavior of taking that first sip, doing that first line. I can *almost* control that first sip or that first line. Once I take a sip or do a line, though, now we're in the realm of what I can't change (that I'm an addict and there's no such thing for me as one drink or one line) and I am Alice tumbling head over heels down the rabbit hole, once again in Wonderland, and there is no telling how deep that rabbit hole goes or how long I'll be down there or if I'll *ever* get back. *That's* the truth. As long as I keep that truth in mind, and believe it, I can stay up top with Dinah the cat in the green grass with my elder sister reading me fairytales. But the minute I lie to myself, the minute I stop having the wisdom to know what I can't change, the minute I deny that I'm an addict, I am as lost as that little girl in the blue pinafore dress with the white apron, and I am dealing with a Queen of Hearts who really can say, "Off with her head!" and it's not a cute but spooky little Disney cartoon where Alice always wins by just knocking over her enemies like a pack of cards—it's some deadly chemical that I've decided to swallow or snort or inject and it's killing me by my heart, my liver, my brain. ### 150 I say life is simple but it's hard. It's simple, not complex, to know that it's dangerous to shoot cocaine into your veins. Everybody knows that, even people who are just about to do it. We know what we need to do, in relationships, with food, in our jobs. It's simple to know that stealing software is illegal and wrong, but it's hard to say to your boss: *I'm not going to do that.* It's simple for an addict, if they listen to their life, if they honestly observe the big picture of their addiction, to know that the need to stop using. But it's hard to do. Oh yeah. Most people never stop. That's how hard it is to stop: you know you're killing yourself and you still can't stop? You're destroying your relationships? You're rolling the dice with your life? And you still don't stop? *That must be some hard shit to stop.* Yeah. If it was easy to stop drinking, do you think there would be a hundred thousand AA groups across the world? No. We'd all just stop drinking and be nice to our families, start loving ourselves spontaneously. But that's not the case. It's *hard* to do what is *simple* to see we need to do. We need help. We addicts need help. We all need help. So, at thirty-six, I have learned *a little* to just relax. I'm not in the driver's seat. Life's movie is playing on largely oblivious to me. I'm not important, even though my bipolar grandiosity sometimes tells me I am. I am loved by my family and friends, but let's be honest, I'm not even as important to my own mother and father as I'd like to be. Yes, we do connect, in this life, and yes, we even have intimate connections and soulmate connections from time to time, but this is a trip each of us takes alone. There's nobody else inside your head but you. There's no personality-oriented God who speaks English and listens to your prayers. I'm not saying stop praying!—Keep praying, but not because anyone is listening. Pray because of the states it puts you in: ideally, gratitude and humility. That's how prayer works: it works by changing your state into a state that is appropriate for the truths of this world: namely, that *you are a tiny ball of flesh in an infinite multiverse of possibility*, as my old friend used to say. Those trite fuckers in AA call this getting "right-sized." Essentially: realizing that you have a little bit of importance *but not that much*. Having some way to remind myself that I'm not the center of the universe has been very helpful. Manics think they're Jesus, think they're God, think they're Buddha. Addicts have a best/worst self-esteem model—they think they're the best person in the world or the worst, depending on the time of day. That's a lot of tempest to have going on inside your head, so I find, personally, I need help from wherever I can get it. The rare wisdom spoken in AA rooms, the Serenity Prayer, stuff from Helen Heller, Gandhi, Einstein, the fucking Sufis—I take it all. And, while it might be hard for you to believe my (probably psychotic) sometimes belief that cellular automata have reprogrammed my brain, it won't be difficult at all for you to imagine that the Serenity Prayer, or some piece of wisdom from Helen Keller or Einstein, is like a little piece of programming code, and simply by reading it and repeating it, a mantra does infiltrate my brain, and reprogram me, change my very neurons and therefore my very actions. It is not so hard to imagine a program infiltrating one's brain—in fact there are easy examples of this all the time. In school, it's just called learning. What about the twelve steps? That's a program with twelve instructions. Millions of people all over the globe follow the twelve steps as a program for living. Even more follow the Ten Commandments. What are those but programs? Simple programs for living. We reprogram our brains *constantly*. Advertising reprograms us. Propaganda reprograms us. Drugs, food, love—they all reprogram us. I view as holy the knowledge left behind for us by Helen Keller and Einstein. To be able to embody a complex piece of wisdom that reflects and works in our world as a simple guide to action—that is the work of a programmer. The two of them did it brilliantly—and perhaps that's no surprise. We think of Einstein as a genius, but did you know that he and Helen Keller shared the same IQ? Yes, that outdated metric. But whatever it had to say, it said the same thing about these two misfit children who grew up to be—or maybe always were from childhood—two of the world's greatest programmers. ### 151 I've spent so much of my life drunk. The only time I ever signed up at a gym, I was drunk. I was going to go directly from work to the gym, but I was nervous about going there so I hit a couple of bars on the way. I signed up for so many personal training sessions that I couldn't pay for them and I had to change my debit card number to stop them from automatically billing me to the point that I couldn't buy groceries. It's the same thing with my passport photo—I was drunk when they took it. All I could do was drink myself into a frenzy and imagine that someday I could leave the hedge fund and move to Morocco or at least visit there—that's what the passport was for. I remember having sex sober—in the beginning most of the sex I had was sober. But since becoming an alcoholic *I can't remember the last time I had sex sober*. I think back to all the most recent sex I've had and I was drunk or on drugs every time. Really, the only sober sex I can clearly remember happened about ten years ago. There must have been some sober sex in there somewhere, but I don't remember it. (In case you're wondering, the emotion you're supposed to be feeling now is sadness.) I couldn't even get a haircut without being drunk. I went to a certain hotel in LA that had a bar and a tiny hair salon with three seats in it. You could bring your drink *into the salon* and drink for the fifteen or twenty minutes it took for my favorite girl—I forget her name—to cut my hair. We'd talk about her Mini Cooper, which she was very proud of. And she told me about the work she did raising money for breast cancer awareness, and I was like: *this girl is deep*. I loved talking to her, I loved getting my hair cut by her, but even that twenty minutes of human interaction—with someone I liked—I greatly preferred doing drunk. I'd sit at the bar drinking gin martinis until my favorite girl called me in for my turn. I'd set my drink in front of the mirror and look at myself, pathetic. Fine on the outside but at the very least I knew I was spending too much money on alcohol—that was a perspective I understood. I owed people money and I was buying ten-dollar drinks and leaving ten-dollar tips just so I could be fucked up while I got my hair cut. A sip of the martini helped me think less about this and listen to the woman who cut my hair tell me about her life—and I just knew that my life would never be like that. I could never *buy a new car*—I had done that once when I was nineteen and that was never going to happen again, my credit was too fucked and my mind was too fucked to fix it. One day I went to a different location of that same salon because my favorite girl was working at the different location and I wasn't about to risk having someone else cut my hair. When I sat down, we looked at each other in the mirror and she saw something different about me—she didn't even have to ask, she knew. As the was putting the apron around my neck she said: "I think this is the first time I've seen you sober." We both smiled. "You look happier." "Thank you. When did you quit?" I lied. I said a week ago, when I had drank last night. "That is amazing. And you won't believe what today is." "Tell me." "It's my one-year anniversary of stopping smoking." "Nice!" "Yeah! I decided I would celebrate it, just, you know, in my own mind and by telling you, but I told myself that once I hadn't smoked for a year I wasn't going to keep track of it anymore, no more anniversaries, like you're the last person I'm going to talk to about it, because, I think, continuing to celebrate *not* doing something is just another way of keeping doing it." "Yeah. I know exactly what you mean." "I thought you would." She cut my hair, I sat there deluding myself that me and my favorite girl were on parallel paths of healthiness, when in reality, I couldn't make it through the day without drinking. When she was done cutting my hair, I went to the ArcLight and drank gin and tonics for the rest of the day. My perfect girl was out curing breast cancer—I was sitting at a bar inside a movie theater daring my liver to kill me. That's the level I was operating on. - - - - Carl Sagan said, "An organism at war with itself is doomed," and for a long time I was mostly at war with myself. I wanted to stop drinking but I couldn't stop drinking. I wanted to undermine my uncle Perish in every stupid thing he said, but I also wanted the peace of never hearing his voice again. I wanted to take the next step in life, but every step I took landed me in a psych ward or a medical detox or jumping off my balcony, running across the street hallucinating, walking the streets of LA at 3am with a Special Forces murder knife at the ready, not even looking for trouble, just wanting the police, night scum, gas station operators, security guards, drunk motorists, pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers who were having their own altercations in 7-Eleven parking lots..just wanting them all to know that *I didn't give a fuck* about them, that I could *walk* around with a Special Forces murder knife because *I was fucking crazier than them*..I was out of my fucking mind. So I wanted everything to work for me the way it did when I was twenty-two, but *nothing* worked, no matter what I did. I was an organism at war with itself, in Carl Sagan's words, and I couldn't accept what friends and relatives and doctors and psychiatrists had told me for years. I didn't really think the words *major mental illness* applied to me. I felt fine. Everything I did felt normal. I don't feel the shift between depression, normalcy, and mania—because a mind that shifts between those states is the only mind I've ever had. To me, none of those are danger states. They're just where I live. And becoming willing to take medicine for bipolar required me being committed to locked psychiatric wards. What can I say?—I'm adaptable. Even on my first psych ward trip, I didn't think I belonged there. I flirted with the El Salvadoran health tech, watched *I Love Lucy*, played Yahtzee, and sweet-talked my way out of there as fast as possible. Even when those three LA psychiatrists gave me my first diagnosis of bipolar, I didn't think it was that big of a deal. I didn't think "it" was responsible for my chaotic life—I didn't even know my life had been chaotic..I thought it was normal to quit a big-money job and move across the country to live in a tent in my friend's back yard. That made sense to me. It still does. In fact I think it's a big mistake to spend your whole life living in cubicles doing Dilbert-class computer programming with a bunch of fucking tools. I spell that life like this: l-o-s-e-r. But that life is just right for so-called mentally healthy people with so-called normal minds. People who write spaghetti code, are unable to construct a working project schedule, who can't write a one-paragraph email..these people sit in the offices and cubicles of every company I've ever worked for, producing nothing, and taking home a fat check for it. Repeat. Your whole life. Then you're dead. Personally, I've got no use for those people: they're unsatisfying as lovers, useless as friends, counterproductive as collaborators, deathly boring as conversation partners. The only thing they're cut out for is factory work. Whether making Apples or the software that runs them, it's all either a literal assembly line or the assembly line of whatever software development methodology is hot at the moment. They'll spend their whole lives sailing the seas of development paradigms and new languages. Just to keep their jobs, over a lifetime, programmers will learn dozens of languages most of which are so similar to existing ones that they never should have been invented in the first place. Companies hire the youngest, dumbest programmers they can find because they can pay them less!—it's that simple, fools. At twenty-five you think you're riding high. Now welcome to the rest of your career, which will be spent trying to make your slowly rising salary a necessary evil as you get older and harder to justify when there are recent college grads who don't have kids yet and haven't thought far enough ahead to realize they can't survive on ramen, espresso, and adrenaline for their entire lives. Soon raising kids becomes an end in itself. That justifies working the inane job. You convince yourself the job isn't inane, that you're learning things, inventing things, but if you're honest you're stuck in an intellectual cesspool just re-coding the same ideas over and over. You're not making an impact. You're not leaving your mark. The only reason you got the job in the first place was to attract a mate. Nobody wants to go out with someone who's broke! That's universally accepted. Think of how *shallow* that is. Your relationships are based on money, security, going out to eat at restaurants, buying expensive rings. You're just a rat in the maze, bro—it's all designed to keep you working so the Federal Reserve can make interest on your tax dollars. Money *is* evil, I'm telling you—you just don't see it yet. - - - - I used to drink at this bar in California, near work, and the bartender Willie would make me these amazing margaritas with orange juice and Don Julio tequila. But I stopped going for like six weeks, just got tired of drinking, knew I had to stop at some point. One day I decided to walk back into that bar—to test myself, for sure, but also because I missed the people who worked there!—so I take two steps into that bar and Willie beams at me and holds out his arms and he says: "Matthew, you look so happy!" And I smiled and shook Willie's hands. Then I turned around and walked the *fuck* out of that bar. Yeah, six weeks of a bipolar drug addict not taking massive daily amounts of a powerful, legal depressant—*of course* I'm fucking happy. ### 152 I went to my grandmother's room one day and said: "GranGran, I'm going to stop drinking and I'm going to use AA meetings as a way to help me stop, so if you see me leaving the house more than usual, that's where I'm going." And GranGran looked at me, surprised, and said: "Well Matthew, I didn't know you had a drinking problem." That's how well we know each other. I live in the same house as her. Her husband, my grandfather, died in his fifties of alcoholism. When I stopped drinking in my thirties, I was drinking as much as he drank at his worst. I only have vague memories of him in the hospital. He was abusive when he drank. Alcoholism, mental illness, suicide—they go back far and wide on both sides of my family. I was hiding my drinking from my family—but no one can hide that well. For me to be drinking that much, all day, every day, and no one notice, there has to be another ingredient. And that's that my grandmother, my uncle, my aunt, are either clueless, completely self-absorbed, or they were looking the other way. ### 153 Once I sobered up I became more unruly. For instance. Me GranGran and Mom were having lunch. Mom said, "Well at least we aren't one of those families that talks about each other behind their backs." And I looked at my mother and I said: "Oh. Yes. We. Are." She was shocked at what I said. But *I* was shocked at what *she* said. We most certainly talk about each other behind each other's backs!! Not just a little, either! In every pairing I've been in, this has happened. It runs rampant in our family! And here my mother is casually saying, over lunch, that we don't do this????????????+1 This shit sent me spiraling. I couldn't be around the two of them, plus we were about to go to a movie which would put me in my worst position: sitting. Guaranteed clenching and uncontrolled movements for two hours. Which I would try to stifle for the sake of my company, which would only make me hurt worse. Conversation escalated. We went to the movie. I doubled over in pain the entire movie sending a zillion angry texts to Susan while I sat next to GranGran and Mom, livid out of my mind that I would be visually and verbally reprimanded by my mother for *saying something that was true!* I felt like this was not my family, not people I could relate to or trust—I still feel that way, verbatim, to this day. But this was also irate bipolar mania on my part—these people just want to have some Mexican food for lunch, spout some casual lies, and watch the latest by Pixar. They're not trying to maintain personal authenticity. They're just going to lunch! It sucks that I let loose on Susan, but, if I'm honest, she trashed our relationship long ago. It had been years before that that I respected Susan for the last time. Everything offensive she did since I moved to her house just slid her further down the landslide. She saw me weeks later and gave me a sad hug—sadder for me, sister. This I wrote to Joanne and Leona after they said I am a good brother, even after a possible bipolar mixed episode where all I did was speak the truth in front of GG and Mom: > Thanks for saying those things. I'm controlling what I can but I can't control everything, which is hard for everyone, and I don't hesitate to speak the difficult truths, which is part of why I have very few friends or family. I welcome the truth, even when it's hard, but I find that is a one in 100 sort of trait. Most people just aren't strong enough to talk "on the level" and I like to give them chances and invitations to talk on that level, occasionally, and it is always met with weakness, fear, unwillingness. So I find I have very few peers in that particular way. ### 154 I correspond with a writer doing an article about bipolar. > **From:** Kirsten > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** Bipolar interview > > Hi Matthew > > Thanks for reaching out. As I mentioned before, I'm writing about various subtypes of bipolar disorder for U.S. News & World Report. I've already spoken to two women—one with Bipolar I, the other with Bipolar II—but I wanted to dispel the misconception that mostly/only women have bipolar by speaking to a man about his experience with the condition. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself—full name, background, profession, diagnosis, etc—before moving forward? > > Best, > > Kirstin > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Kirsten > > **Subject:** Bipolar interview > > Kirstin, > > Of course I'll provide those details. > > I'm glad you're dispelling the misconception that mostly/only woman have bipolar. My understanding is that unlike major depression, which affects more women than men, that bipolar disorder affects women and men at equal rates. > > My full name: I was born Matthew Temple but changed my name when I was in my early twenties to Inhaesio Zha. So that is my legal name. But on the internet, and as the byline for my novels, and in interpersonal communication, I use Matthew Temple exclusively now. That is my preferred name and I hope we can use it. > > I started experiencing symptoms of bipolar disorder in the tenth grade, although I didn't know it was bipolar at the time. I had crying spells in school because it seemed like *such* a lonely place. Instead of just thinking about things, I had feelings about my thoughts..when people were assaulted at school I felt extraordinarily deeply for them, even if I didn't know them. I was of high intelligence, and I've now had the chance to read many studies that link bipolar with high intelligence. I did well at school, but was sent to the counsellor often because I would say or do things that disturbed the class. I was just doing what came normally to me, but my teachers found my behavior psychologically disturbing. Senior year, I just went to my computer science teacher and wouldn't stop crying. My parents put me in professional counseling after that. > > I went to college for two quarters, then dropped out. I made friends well, as I always had, but there was no deeper connection. I found my classes ridiculous and stopped going. I dropped out and went back to my home town. I had always been into computer software—programming. So I found a small software development company and worked for them for a few years. I was generally in a good mood, I maintained a relationship with a girlfriend. Then after a certain point I just flipped. I told the secretary goodbye, went to lunch, and never went back. > > Since then has been a patchwork of working well-paying jobs and then freaking out as manic people do, suddenly quitting a job for no reason and moving across the country to sleep in a tent in my friend's back yard (for one example). I went to film school in Los Angeles, then while my peers were making it in LA, getting movie jobs, I was homeless in Tucson, Arizona. I don't know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do. > > I drank alcohol about half this time. I did cocaine in Los Angeles for about two weeks. I've tried other drugs but other than alcohol and cocaine, never did them for more than a day at a time. > > My diagnoses are: Bipolar I Disorder Most Recent Episode (Or Current) Mixed, OCD, and tardive dyskinesia. I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2007 or 2008. I had what I now know was a manic episode. I stayed home from work for a week, doing my own programming, staying up all night and day, drinking, watching The Truman Show on repeat. I thought I had come up with a new way to find terrorists using a software algorithm I had developed. I called the NSA and tried to sell it to them. They wanted nothing to do with me, even though years before I had made a similar call to them and been invited to go present technology to their engineers and done so. Then I called a suicide hotline, cops picked me up, and I had my first trip to a psychiatric hospital and my first bipolar diagnosis. > > Since then I've been inpatient at five different mental hospitals around the country, made a suicide attempt, hardly worked a job. I live with my mother now. > > One of the antipsychotics I used to take has given me tardive dyskinesia, which is uncontrollable muscle movements of the mouth, neck, shoulders, arms, torso. This has taken me from partially functional to not very functional at all. It's hard for me to coordinate cooking a complex meal, for example. > > I'm going to send a second email with links to some more detail. If it's too much, I apologize. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Kirsten > > **Subject:** Bipolar interview > > *Kirstin,* > > *Answers interleaved. I didn't proofread this, so please forgive my errors.* > > *Matthew* > > 1. How do you control your symptoms? Do you take medication and see a psychiatrist regularly? If so, what kind of medicine and what type of therapy? Do you see a therapist/use lifestyle elements (diet, exercise, schedule, etc.) to also help you with your bipolar disorder? > > *I take medicine. I currently take lithium as my mood stabilizer and escitalopram as an antidepressant. Taking an antidepressant (especially by itself) can cause mania in a bipolar person, so I take a low dose of the antidepressant and for me, right now, the lithium counteracts any mania the antidepressant might cause. Until recently I took risperidone, an antipsychotic that is used in schizophrenic and bipolar patients. In bipolar patients, this type of drug is used to manage manic states. I took risperidone for three years with good results (low mania, feeling mentally solid), but my psychiatrist discontinued it because she observed signs of tardive dyskinesia—a side effect of antipsychotics that cause uncontrollable muscle movements in the mouth, tongue, jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, and torso. Now I take three additional medications to manage the symptoms of dyskinesia, and I still experience shaking and clenching all the time except when I am lying down.* > > *I see a psychiatrist anywhere from once a month to once every six months depending on how she thinks I am doing.* > > *I would like to do talk therapy but the public clinic I go to does not provide this. I see a social worker there but he is not qualified to do therapy, so my visits with him are a waste of time.* > > *I've had trouble getting health insurance since my state (Louisiana) declined the Medicare expansion, so I'm stuck dealing with this free clinic for now.* > > *As far as diet, I no longer drink alcohol or do any other drugs (except those prescribed to me). I take a number of dietary supplements. I drink a reduced amount of caffeine. I don't smoke because that has a stimulant effect. I haven't exercised in a while but when I do run, running helps calm me down. As far as schedule, I keep regular sleep hours from 12pm to 10am. Missing sleep is the first sign of mania. If I go three days without sleep, I begin to be overwhelmed by ecstatic sensations, I am very excited about communicating with and being with people, I can't shut up and am excited about everything, and this drives those around me crazy.* > > *Another tactic I use is lying down for ten minute periods throughout the day. A mental health worker who I met in a psych hospital suggested this: to go into a quiet, dark room ten minutes out of every hour. She said I have enough going on in my head that over-stimulating environments can agitate me quite easily.* > > *I also listen to music to help regulate myself closer to normal mood—it's my favorite drug!* > > 2. Can you describe what your depressive periods feel like, along with your mood swings? What about hypomania and a mixed episode? > > *In a depressive period I feel I have no future, that I am worthless, that my family would be better off without me. I have no assertiveness. I can't believe anyone would want to hire me or be my girlfriend or friend or anything. I hate myself. I can only see the faults and horrible things I have done. I can't see myself as love-able or useful. I feel like killing myself, not to die but to end the pain. I don't reach out to anyone, I burn bridges between associates and friends, feeling it's useless to maintain relationships. I think everyone else's life is better than mine. I become destructive and disrespectful. One time I was depressed and I was going to this outpatient class at the mental hospital in Vermont, and I don't know what I said but the facilitator pulled me aside at the end of class and said, basically, "We think you're suicidal and would you like to go inpatient for a while?" I didn't even know I was suicidal! I thought I was just mad and bored at everything being so pointless. Apparently those are conditions under which people sometimes kill themselves.* > > *A depressive period ends slowly. You might take a walk one day, then a bike ride the next, then you're grocery shopping more regularly and taking showers every day and it starts to feel good to take care of yourself again. And then at the end of a therapy session (back in Vermont where I had health insurance), your therapist says, "You seem like you're back into life again." And you smile and say, "Yes, I am."* > > *I feel hypomania all the time. It feels like being excited about everything, wanting to be friendly to everyone, but you're still in control. When hypomanic, you might say hello to a table of people you don't know in a restaurant. When manic, you'd pull up a chair, start talking, ignore your friends and still be there two hours later when you're the only one left at the table. When hypomanic, you might think of moving to Australia. When manic, you go to the airport, buy a ticket with cash, never even pack a suitcase and you call your husband from the terminal telling him you're leaving. (That's an actual example involving a relative of mine who is bipolar.)* > > *Bipolar cannot be viewed separately from drug use. Bipolar people typically use alcohol and cocaine—the perfect downer and upper to accentuate or offset bipolar moods. Hypomania feels great. Mania feels great at first and shortly thereafter you don't even know that you are manic. It's like a trance that is broken by medicine or disaster. One time a couple years ago I knew I was getting manic. I told my family who I lived with. They didn't know what to do. I said, "Take me to the hospital." So my mom took me to the hospital, I consulted with the ER docs, and they gave me a shot of ziprasidone. Half an hour later I felt normal again. So you've got to know the signs of hypomania so you can deal with it before it becomes full mania.* > > *My diagnosis is currently: Bipolar I Disorder Most Recent Episode (Or Current) Mixed. In a mixed episode you feel elements of depression and mania at the same time. It is the most dangerous of the bipolar states because part of what produces suicidal feelings is a manic feeling followed by a depressive feeling. People like mania and hypomania. Bipolar people don't go to their first psychiatrist because they feel GREAT! They go when they're depressed, because depression feels horrible. Manic people don't feel there is a problem with their behavior that needs to be solved. The most dangerous moment for a bipolar person (in terms of suicidality) is when they switch from mania to depression. They go from feeling super good to feeling really shitty in a short amount of time and they feel the loss for that manic state. It's as difficult as losing a loved one. That might sound extreme but the transition from mania to depression is so jarring, so horrible, that it suddenly seems reasonable to commit suicide. You've tasted such a bright and energetic and possibility-filled world and then are thrown into what seems dark and pointless and already dead.* > > 3. Have you ever reached a period of remission, or a prolonged period of time without depressive episodes/mania? > > *Yes. The last year and a half I have not experienced depression or mania. I attribute this to 1) being on the right dose of lithium combined with a low dose of antidepressant and 2) using skills learned in the hospital to minimize my anxiety. I meditate once a week—not very often but it's better than nothing. I stay out of family or political arguments that would otherwise cause me anxiety. I skip family functions that would be extremely stressful to me. To be smart as a person with bipolar, I have to view myself as an extra-sensitive machine, as well as the caretaker of that machine. My bipolar self is too sensitive to take on drugs or alcohol, so I just don't do those things. My bipolar self is too sensitive to miss sleep, so I keep regular sleep hours. And 3) I live with my family. I'm around people who love me and I don't work, so that keeps my anxiety down. It's maybe not the best long-term plan, but it's what I've got for now.* > > 4. Do you go to a support group? Do you know anyone else with bipolar disorder? Anyone with various types of bipolar? How do their versions of the illness differ from yours or are similar to yours? Do you have a family? If so, are they educated about the bipolar disorder and supportive toward the ways you choose to stay well? > > *I went to several bipolar support groups in Portland and they were not the greatest. But I feel optimistic about finding a bipolar support group that works for me and am looking for one in Baton Rouge.* > > *I knew some bipolar people from the Vermont mental hospital, The Brattleboro Refuge. We corresponded for a while and then fell out of contact.* > > *There are other people in my immediate and extended family that are generally suspected to have bipolar. They are either undiagnosed, or in at least one case, have been diagnosed as bipolar but refuse to accept the diagnosis for fear of how it might affect how people see them, that it might raise their insurance rates, etc.* > > *I was hospitalized with a woman who had bipolar disorder who in a mixed state grabbed a police officer's hand—with his gun in it. She pointed the gun at her head and begged him to shoot her. Even though she and I have the same Bipolar I diagnosis, she and I act very differently. We have different secondary disorders. She has ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder). I have OCD. She's a woman. I'm a man. We have entirely different upbringings which makes our bipolar symptoms different. It makes the way we are seen by doctors different. When you talk in a low-class way and don't have insight into your illness, the doctor takes more charge. When you present yourself as smart and insightful about your illness, the doctor involves you more in your care. This can be a bad thing. When you seem like you have it together mentally (in some ways) it can be harder for your doctor to treat you like you have a serious illness..which you do.* > > *Bipolar mania takes two forms: euphoric and irritable. Bipolar mania can present hallucinations and delusions to the sufferer. So while one person has a euphoric mania where she thinks she's the Dalai Lama, another person might get so angry at his racist uncle that he stays angry for a week, destroys his own property, and otherwise acts out his anger in non-proportional ways.* > > *I have a family. I've given some concise pamphlets to them and I think they read them. [Update: ehhhh..not so much.] My immediate family (excluding my dad) is supportive of my treatment plan and they help me recognize when I might be symptomatic. My dad uses my illness against me. For example, if I want to talk about something painful that happened between us in the past, he denies it ever happened and claims my memory is simply a bipolar delusion. My extended family doesn't have much knowledge about my illness but my mom has gently encouraged them to do a little reading so they can understand what I go through.* > > 5. I know a lot of people see several mental health professionals before achieving *[Level Unlocked!!]* the "bipolar" diagnosis. How many did you see before you found out you were bipolar? > > *I was sent to school counsellors in the eleventh grade for my "disturbing" behavior (using school photographic equipment to take and print pictures that looked like me and my classmates were masturbating in a local church—we weren't, it was fake). I started professional therapy when I was a senior in high school. That therapist suggested I see a psychiatrist but I didn't go because I was opposed to taking medicine. I saw many therapists after that but it wasn't until I was 29 that I had a week-long manic episode, crashed from that and called a suicide hotline. Police came to my apartment, cuffed me, and took me to a mental hospital outside of LA. A team of psychiatrists observed me for a week, asked a lot of questions, and diagnosed me with bipolar disorder.* > > 6. Did you have any idea that you were bipolar, or did you know anything about the disease? If so, why/how? If not, how did you learn? > > *My girlfriend in the 10th grade told me she thought I might be bipolar. At the time, I didn't really know what bipolar meant. Didn't think about it for years, until I was 26. A second girlfriend suggested that the problems we were having might be caused by my craziness and she suggested that I might be bipolar. I didn't think she was right—I thought she was crazier than me. When I lived with my dad for a while his wife gave me a book on bipolar disorder as a subtle hint. My dad's doctor gave me a mood stabilizer and said he thought I had bipolar. But I didn't seriously listen to any of these people, who were all right, because I had a simplistic misconception of what bipolar was, and I thought that even if I did have it, it was no big deal. Until the last four years, I didn't realize at all that my behavior was making me impossible to date, to employ, to be a family member of. So no, not even after my first psychiatric hospitalization which came with my first diagnosis of bipolar disorder, did I think it would change my life. It took years to pass, and me to attempt suicide in the small town of Brattleboro, Vermont, to wake me up to the fact that this disease was killing my jobs and relationships, creating waves of emotion that were too easily fought with alcohol and cocaine..and, ultimately, in mixed states and depression, a disease that made me want to—and made me try to—kill myself. Only at that point did I start taking this illness seriously.* Then I sent her another email: > I think one more thing worth mentioning is that the antipsychotic-caused illness of tardive dyskinesia can be permanent..so—no shit—I may have these uncontrollable muscle movements for the rest of my life. I'm staying optimistic and working the problem, but I think that's a great example of how high the cost can be to treating bipolar disorder..a pretty high rate of bipolar patients who take antipsychotics develop TD. If you want the actual percentages I will look them up for you..I just remember that they seemed like a lot of risk to take for the [considerable] benefit of taking antipsychotics. TD, like bipolar, increases the incidence of suicide, makes people antisocial because their movements are embarrassing, causes constant pain because your muscles are always flexing, etc. If you want statistics or supporting material for anything I've said, I'll be happy to find that for you. I hope you have a good night, and I am wishing you the best with your article! =) And another: > Allow another thought from a hypomanic bipolar source: I was only ever taking antipsychotics to get rid of a hallucination that I had never experienced before going into that psych hospital, where I was put on a number of serotonergic medicines all at once. The point being that nobody knows what these psych meds do, how they'll affect a normal brain, a bipolar brain, or in my case a bipolar brain that had done hallucinogens. It is reasonable to question whether I would ever have had a hallucination that warranted antipsychotics if I had never been given so many serotonin-tickling drugs by that hospital. > > Anyway, thanks for listening. You've got my thoughts going on all this. And another: > Something I think is interesting about bipolar disorder is that some people are diagnosed after they're prescribed antidepressants by their doctor. The person goes to the doctor because they're not feeling well, their doctor diagnoses them with depression and gives them antidepressants. The patient goes home and takes what was prescribed, and in a few days they become manic. The latest DSM says that mood elevation as a result of antidepressants justifies a bipolar diagnosis. I just find it interesting that in some cases bipolar people either never knew they had a manic episode before taking antidepressants or perhaps they never did have a manic episode before taking antidepressants. I have similar questions about the genesis of this "texture" hallucination I sometimes see. It seemed to be caused by all those serotonin-regulating medicines I was talking at the hospital. But working with doctors I have never been able to isolate any particular medicine that causes it. So maybe it's caused by a combination of medicines. Or maybe it's a feature of my mania—manic bipolar people can have hallucinations, especially visual ones. Maybe the reason I first saw it in the hospital was because I was manic then. > > Forgive the detail, > > Matthew > > ---- > > **From:** Kirsten > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** Bipolar interview > > Hi Matthew, > > Thanks so much for the reply. Sorry it wasn't sooner—my cat knocked some liquid onto my computer, and I've been scrambling around for new technological accommodations while it dries out. I'll let you know if I have any additional questions, and please let me know if you have the same. I'm so sorry to hear the sadder parts of your story, and I appreciate you opening up to me and telling me about it. If I do end up quoting you, you're still comfortable with me using your full name? > > Best, > > Kirstin > > ---- > > **To:** Kirsten > **From:** Matthew > > **Subject:** Bipolar interview > > Kirstin, > > I'm sorry about your computer woes—may they be fixed soon! Thank you for your sympathy, a kind ear is always welcome. But I'm doing pretty well now, getting back into writing and I'm on meds that work so my mood swings are pretty smooth now, I haven't been to the hospital in a year and a half, and I'm in good spirits most of the time =) You are welcome to quote my full name, my writing name "Matthew Temple" not my legal name. Wishing you well with your article. Would love to read it whether you use my info or not—please send a link? > > Thank you, > > Matthew I never heard back from her. ### 155 Learning to live with bipolar is like learning to surf. First, you've got to realize you're in the ocean. You're not one of those dry-land creatures with two feet on the ground. No. You're in the waves. And, for instance, I was just in the living room watching game shows with my mom. And I realized, before she even had to tell me, that my humor was getting inappropriate, my responses to the shows had become outbursts, and through some kind of miracle I saw this myself and came into my room. In surfing, that's like feeling the waves, seeing which waves are coming in and knowing which ones are surfable and which ones to let go. Because my inappropriate humor around my mom is totally appropriate in my books. That's the surfable wave. I can't write at any given moment. You can't surf just any wave. Well, you can, but it'll suck. You have to know when you're in control and when you're wild, when to paddle and when to stand up on the board. But it's hard to get right all the time—actually it's impossible. You don't know what that wave is gonna do. It might be perfect fucking pipe—your creativity might be *on fire*. And that water, and that fire, might carry you a long way. But eight pages later, or a hundred pages later, sometime that wave is gonna dump ya, that fire that kept ya hot is gonna burn you through your skin, and as you travel through the great Pacific at eighty miles an hour, all the sharks you pass will say, *That's one deadly motherfucker—we thought* we *were badasses*, and then you'll hit your head upon the reef and bleed to fucking death. Or within a pinch of your life. Rolling with the deep. Seaweed, hair, body—everything intertwined. One arm operable, circular motions, like you learned as a kid. Foot after foot, coming through the shallows with a gash on your head. And everyone is standing around looking at you like: *Dude, you've got a death-sized gash in your head.* And you're like: *I know, this is what it's like to be bipolar.* I'm not appropriate for anyone. When I'm normal, I'm lucid, I can program computers, deign to carry on what intelligent people call *intelligent conversation*. But then the big waves come. And my words, And my actions, Are not appropriate for anyone. You know what you hear when you're bipolar? You hear: *You're scaring me.* Oh yeah? Does it scare you that I talk about death like you talk about chocolate ice cream? Does my hyper, open sexuality scare you? Does it scare you that I think of cocaine as candy? Does it scare you that I tell you, my co-worker, that listening to you talk makes me want to shoot myself in the face? *Listening to you talk makes me want to shoot myself in the face?* Is that not appropriate office conversation? No? Then why don't you *hire more intelligent people??!!* It's not *my job* to put up with subpar individuals. Ok? Are we clear on that? You want to know what the rules are with me? I'll tell you: *There are no rules.* *Those* are the rules, motherfucker. Those are the rules when you're dealing with me. It's out of favor to use the word "crazy" in conjunction with mental illness. It's pejorative. It's dismissive. But if black people can call themselves *nigger*, can *reclaim* it, can use it in certain contexts as a word of power, then as a mentally ill person I can use the word *crazy*. Yeah, it's inaccurate. Yeah, it's unhelpful. But you know what, sometimes *crazy* is exactly what I want to say. Because *I am* fucking crazy. Yes. That's right. I've been in mental hospitals *eleven times*. How many times have you been in mental hospitals? None? One? Well maybe I've seen a thing or two, or had a mental experience or two, that makes my humor inappropriate to your vanilla fucking ass. Maybe *you will never understand me*. Maybe I will never make sense to you. Maybe, on first dates, I will always get the door for you, then *walk over the top of my car* and around the back to let myself in the driver's side. And to me that'll be funny, exuberance—and to you it'll be like *oh my god is this guy fucking crazy.* And what's wrong with saying *crazy* there? If I'm scaring young ladies in the passenger seats of cars on first dates by stepping on the hood and the roof and the windshield of my car, *ain't that fuckin' crazy, Miss Mary?* Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? I'll lick your garden till you water my face with your cum, then I'll lick it off you right as I turn you over, stick a thumb in your butt, and fuck your little pussy so right you won't care if I'm crazy or not. In fact when you cum you'll pull my finger out your ass, lick your own shit off of it, and say: "*Fuck* me. Is that how a crazy person fucks?" And I'll whisper in your ear: "*Shh.* *You're* a crazy person too." 'Cause what kind of person licks their own shit off someone else's thumb. *A crazy person*—that's who. Now try replacing the word "crazy" with the phrase "mentally ill" in that last sentence. It doesn't work. *Therefore*, you're going to have to endure me saying *crazy nigger faggot* all I fucking want. *There are no rules*—remember? *Those* are the rules. Hahahahaha. Basically you're living in a world that was designed to cater to the squeamish. People who are squeamish about life. I can't stand those fucking people. And I've spent *decades* dialing myself down just so I won't get thrown out of every establishment I've ever set foot in. I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm just being myself. I wore a dress to church when I was a kid. Back before any of these terms trans, queer, gender fluid, pansexual, skoliosexual were mainstream. Everyone got real pissed and talked to my mom (who was the pastor of the church). I didn't do that to piss anyone off—it didn't have anything to do with them. I wanted a dress, I asked my girlfriend to give me one, she did, I wore it, it happened to be a Sunday, I went to church, and suddenly..controversy. Look, some people are so narrow-minded it's a controversy for them every time I get out of *bed*. Sound grandiose? Egomaniacal? Narcissistic? It is. Every bit. Every byte. Every word. And apparently there's a right and a wrong time to bring up *suicide?* Like, when I think of a girl who I grew up going to conferences with who killed herself, and the news goes around in secret email lineages—*hush, hush*—and everyone follows the rules: Don't ask how she did it. Don't ask what her diagnosis was. Don't ask when the list time she was admitted to a mental hospital. *Give her some dignity.* Oh. Uh-huh. 'Cause there's so much dignity in killing yourself *because you're crazy*. Crazy people have so much *dignity* in our society. Right. Like the dignity not to be hired *because you're crazy*. All the mentally healthy Grand-Poobah CEOs of three-person companies (it was five but the woman quit so she wouldn't be harassed and the *crazy* person, well, we had to let him go). So you're on the phone with the other mentally healthy small-time millionaire CEO and you're like: "So is this guy *crazy* or what?" And the other small-time millionaire CEO says: "He's crazy as a bat is blind but he programmed stuff for us that our Chief Software Architect couldn't program, stuff that *I* couldn't program, so." And I pop in on a second line and say: "Bats aren't blind. Look it up. Wikipedia. 2015. Out." *Fuck* your metaphor. And for those of you with problems with *tangentiality*, I'll return to a previous subject because it will make you feel comfortable by creating the illusion of *coherence*. You're at dinner. Everyone is having polite dinner conversation. "What did you do today?" Hmm. Hmm. Yes. *Amazing.* And then I say, "How did Sarah kill herself?" Everyone will look at everyone, trying to figure out where to look. It's a simple question. Different ways of killing yourself express different feelings you had about yourself at the time of death. I am interested in this much the same way as a dog is interested in smelling another dog's butt—I am checking the state of the society around me for various signs of health and sickness. Don't be *squeamish* about life. Some socially inept relative will say, "How well did you know Sarah? When was the last time you contacted her?" And I will say to this socially inept relative *asshole*, "When someone I knew kills themself, it affects me. I am concerned. It doesn't matter if the last time we saw each other was in a *sandbox*. I am particularly interested in suicides because *I* am suicidal, and I am particularly-squared interested in suicides by people I knew, even if we weren't *asshole fucking bosom buddies* at the time of their death. I'm not claiming to be *bereaved*. I'm just asking *how she killed herself*. I'm perfectly aware that it isn't kosher to talk about, but I am asking you if you know. So, I mean, how did she kill herself?" My sister quietly says, "I don't know." I decide against speculating openly, based on Sarah's likely diagnosis, how she did it. But I do engage in this analysis internally and based on her age, gender, and my own informal diagnosis of major depression, suspect that she hung herself, likely in a private place, like a closet. It's so *dignified* to be mentally ill, isn't it, to be *crazy*. To hang yourself with a belt from a clothing rod in a closet where you have pulled the door all the way closed, so you can be in darkness, so you can be alone, when you die. So *dignified* to live with your parents, your sisters, your aunts and uncles—whoever will take you—because *you no longer fit in a work environment* and everyone in the interview can see, from the graphic designer to the owner to the CTO. They can tell that *you know your shit* but *you're not going to fit in*, and when it comes to corporate America, conforming, talentless individuals make up the mass of the population, and non-conforming individuals, talented or not, do not get hired. So *dignified* to have *no money* for five years, to have to ask your aunt for five dollars for a pack of cigarettes and your grandmother to drive you to the store to get them. *So* dignified. So "mentally ill" is just a small concession, as if I robbed a man of his house but left him a blanket. And now he's leaning up against one of the posts that hold up the Santa Monica pier, and I'm towering over him, saying: "Aren't ya glad I let you keep that blanket?" With a big grin. And a million dollars in my account. I'll kick sand in your face, But do you the service of calling you "mentally ill" because it's *so fucking dignified*. But I take back *faggot*. And I take back *nigger*. And you can call me *mentally ill* behind my back—but by Shiva the Destroyer and by Shiva the Transformer, if you want to live—you call me *crazy* to my face. ### 156 So I'm sitting in the living room. Movie on in the background. iPad. Twitter. It's about five o'clock. Then I hear a booming voice. The door opens. Who is it?—Perish. Wife Janelle beside him. Perish goes straight for me, conversationally. "Matthew! How *are* ya, buddy? Whatcha doin' there? What movie is this? Looks like you need to shave that beard—don't tell me they let you go to *church* like that." "Perish, we had an agreement. You're not to speak to me. Ever. Understand?" Instantly my grandmother and aunt Susan are in the living room. "I don't think I heard you." "Perish, if you need me to repeat it for you I will. *We have an agreement..*" —I say it real slow— "*..that you don't speak to me.* I've asked you for that and I think it says a lot about you that you won't honor that simple request." "And what is that, that you think it says, do you think?" "Perish please stop speaking to me. There are plenty of other people here to talk to." Everyone else in the room is silent, stunned. I look at GranGran and Susan's faces and they are *mortified*—mortification-level shock that this type of conflict is taking place in the living room. Janel just looks like she wants to smoke. Janel is cool. She's never done anything to me except not keep her husband in check—but honestly how could she. "Well I asked you some questions, now, and I expect my little nephew to answer." "I'm thirty-six years old so I'm not your 'little' nephew anymore. I've asked you politely, in writing, not to speak to me when you come to this house. You come in here, you go *right* for me. I assume you're here to take your mom to dinner so *why don't you just do that*. Or do you want to play games?" This whole time, no one—not Susan, not GranGran, not Janel, not Bob in the other room—no one says anything. No one comes to my defense or even just says *hey, why don't y'all leave each other alone?* Big time conflict avoiders. Maybe it's because all their dad and GranGran's husband was a drunk who was always making a scene and they just don't like to *make scenes* anymore. But that ain't me—I'll go head to head with fucking Perish any day. Perish points his finger at me. "You and I are gonna have a talk one of these days." I shake my head. "No we're not." "Come on, GranGran, let's go to Chimes. I'm tired of farting around with this nonsense." "It certainly *is* nonsense," GranGran says, looking at me. Right, GranGran, blame me. "Well," Perish booms, "y'all have fun tonight. Looks like a regular frat party around here. Susan, Bob, you sure you don't want to come out to dinner tonight?" He's looking straight at me while he says this, underscoring that he's invited everyone in the house but me—what a fucking toddler. "Bob's a vegetarian," Susan says. She goes back to her room and closes the door. Perish, Janel, and GranGran go out the front. GranGran goes out last and while she's twisting the lock on the inside handle, she looks at me and blows her breath out in a sign of exasperation. Happy fucking family. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan, Bob, Sharon > **Cc:** Joanne, Leona > > **Subject:** personal safety around Perish > > I need a break from Perish. His use of the term "nigger pussy" harms my ears, it harms my soul, and I don't like to be surprised with hateful language and emotion when I'm in a casual conversation. > > I don't like to be surprised by Perish when he shows up at this house without me knowing he's coming. > > I need to be protected by you all, people of a higher generation. When I remind Perish of our agreement that he not speak to me, and he lays into me, and no one present of the older generation comes to *my* aid, that shows me that I am on my own, and that no one there is looking out for *my* safety. > > I have asked Perish, months ago on Facebook, not to speak to me when he sees me. Tonight he didn't just speak to me, he went out of his way to continue speaking to me after I asked him to stop. I don't have much leverage in this situation, but here's what I am going to do: if Perish speaks to me again, I am going to have conversations with Paula, Janelle, and GranGran in which I report to them the conversation in which he used the racist, sexist term (nigger pussy) and I am going to tell them that that is why I don't want him to speak to me. If he continues speaking to me, I will expand my reporting of this story to the cousins, yes, the younger cousins. > > I do not have any malice toward Perish, but I do have boundaries, and my current boundary is Perish not speaking to me or touching me. If this boundary is not respected I will make a stink of things by spreading the nigger pussy story. I see the best I can in people, and I wouldn't have said this before this moment, but I saw Perish's eyes tonight when he looked at me, when he was speaking to me, and it's a look I see very rarely in a person's face—malice. Based on his behavior and body language, I believe Perish does not have my best interests at heart. > > I need your help moving forward. Please advise. No one responded to this message. Why would they? It's just a major family issue that needs to be dealt with or else it will just get worse and worse. Putting your head in the sand will not make this one go away. But that's exactly what everyone in the family (except me and my mom) does. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan, Bob, Sharon > **Cc:** Joanne, Leona > > **Subject:** re: personal safety around Perish > > Always trying to improve my approach here.. > > Perhaps instead I'll: > > - leave the room when Perish enters > > - let him play the fool all he wants (and hope he doesn't have a gun) An hour later I write: > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan, Bob > **Cc:** Sharon > > **Subject:** Living with you.. > > ..has been wonderful for me. Thank you both SO much. I don't know what's going on with Mom and me getting an apartment, and it's very difficult for me to think about making a change from living here, but hopefully whatever we all do will allow us to, you know, be family and love each other and shit =) > > I am sorry for the confrontation between Perish and I tonight. I didn't know he was coming or I would have arranged to be in my room. Perish received communication from me several months ago insisting that he not speak with me when he sees me. Tonight he blatantly and I think intentionally violated that. The silence contract between him and me is something I need in place for my psychological well-being, and I will enforce it legally, lovingly, and firmly. > > I think we need to make sure Perish isn't bringing guns into the house. It bothers me to wonder if he is coming into the house tonight to drop GranGran off..because I don't know if he will knock on my door, continue conversation with me, or what. And if he's been drinking, with a weapon..I have serious concerns there. > > I realize my opinions and approach on some of these things might seem strange. But even as a person with bipolar disorder, I am lucid almost all of the time. Please consider that what I am saying here is reasoned, even if it's not where your thoughts would initially go. No response, verbal or written—not just *that* night—*ever*. No acknowledgement of the communication whatsoever. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan, Bob > **Cc:** Sharon > **Bcc:** Leona, Joanne > > **Subject:** I'll just move > > I've thought a lot about this tonight and the bottom line is I don't have time to deal with Perish's breaking our agreement and going out of his way to talk to me while he's here. I'm actually doing things with my life, like writing novels and memoirs. Time spent listening to Perish is, for me, time wasted. > > I also feel betrayed by those in the older generations who were present tonight not coming to my defense *[Susan, Bob, GranGran](#)*. Imagine if it was one of your siblings harassing your kid—would you say nothing? Some trust was broken tonight that I don't believe will ever be repaired for me *[It's a year later and I still agree with this statement. What was broken that night will never be repaired](#)*. > > I need a safe, quiet, loving place to live. Perish's promise of his increased presence here, while he acts decidedly unloving toward me, is itself a deal-breaker. The arbitrary restrictions from GranGran on where I can and cannot sit in the living room, the ridiculous rule that I can't put a saucepan or bowl in the refrigerator to save my leftovers, and other factors, are just nails in the coffin. > > I deeply thank you for giving me a place to stay when I desperately needed one, and I deeply love you all. I will always remember this time with fondness. > > I'll find a new place as soon as possible, whether it be with my mom, a halfway house, or some other arrangement. No response, written or verbal, ever. No one comes to my room and says, "Hey, are you ok?" No one does anything except lie in their beds and watch TV. That is the capability level of my family: either being drunk racist assholes or having their eyes glued to a television every free hour of the day. Conflict avoiders, all. Even my mom—sorry, but my grandmother and all her kids prefer to live in denial than actually confront issues, communicate, and build relationships. It would be my granddad's responsibility to confront Perish normally—but my grandfather is dead. He died of alcoholism. So the next person in line to put the reigns on Perish is his mother, my grandmother, but that won't happen. She worships her one male child. Mom tells a story from their childhood where the kids would come home from school and GranGran would ask Perish what kind of sandwich he would like for a snack while leaving the girls to make their own food! I disagree with almost everything my grandmother says and does, but you can't really blame her—she's from three or four generations ago. She asked me, one day, what I had been doing. I said, "Working on my website." She said, "What's a website?" That was in 2014, so websites had been around for over twenty years. And it wasn't that my grandmother didn't know how to *make* one, or how to *use* one—but in 2014 she apparently didn't know what one *was*. The woman is like eighty-five years old, and she's my grandmother..so..I give her a pass. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan, Bob > > **Subject:** re: I'll just move > > Most of all I'm sad. I wanted to live here forever. I really like living with you two and GranGran. I thought we had a good thing going. This is the only crazy email in the bunch—obviously I wasn't going to live there forever. Part of me wanted to, though, or wanted to live in *my idealized version* of what living there *could have meant to me*. I don't have to tell you that no one responded to my message. *Why would they?* Interact with me on an emotional level?..*pshftt*. ### 157 Susan dealt with me in the early periods of this latest sobriety—hats off to her for that. It's not easy to be around a bipolar alcoholic drug addict. You can trust me on this—I'm around one all the time. The texts between me and Susan are crazy. I describe them as consisting mostly of my arbitrarily alternating angles of approach (or moods), Susan's single but significant antagonistic dig (or sour attempt at humor), her ignoring most of what I say, and us occasionally happily collaborating on a joke. We're best keeping it surface. A joke is ok. Feelings?—Not so much. But like my grandmother, I can't blame my grandmother's kids too much. They grew up with an abusive, alcoholic, probably bipolar father, and each of the four of them have managed to heal and survive that experience with wildly varying degrees of success. > **Susan:** Perish will be picking mom up to go to dinner tomorrow. I don't know what time. When I find out I will let u know. > > **ME:** Thank you for telling me. I'll plan to be in my room so there's no interaction. > > **Susan:** He should be there around 6. > > **ME:** Tyvm. I'll plan to be in my room so we avoid the interaction altogether..When is he leaving? Is it a dinner thing or is he staying overnight? If it's an overnight thing I can go to New Orleans. > > **Susan:** Just dinner. > > **ME:** Ok thanks! Do you mind texting me when I can leave my room? > > **Susan:** I'm sure you'll be able to hear when they leave I'm not home right now. *[three hours later](#)* U can come out. > > **ME:** Ok thanks! Yes, seriously, this is me and my aunt arranging for my uncle and I not to see each other when he visits the house. I know, healthy, right? I'd bet my left testicle the situation between me and Perish will *never* be resolved. I hope I never see the bitch-ass pussy again. He's what my sister's guru calls *a non-rent-paying tenant*—the only thing to do with 'em is kick 'em out of the building. They give you nothing of value, yet take up your resources. Evicting them is a no-brainer. When they come back from Chimes that night, GranGran, Perish, Janel, Susan, and Bob were in the room. They were in the living room. I was in my bedroom, with one thin wall between us. I couldn't hear *everything* that was said but I heard Perish say he was taking a job in the area, he was going to be around the house more, and "that problem in there" needed "to be dealt with" before Perish moved to Baton Rouge. "I don't know if that means he needs to find another place to live, or what," Perish says. And Susan says something affirmative. I don't remember whether it was a "Yeah," an "Uh-huh," a "Yep, that's right," or *what* it was but I *think* I remember Susan agreeing positively with—or *at least* not *disagreeing* with—Perish's demand to *kick me out of the house!* Just fuckin' run me over with the car, like that bee that Dad killed when I was a little kid. I must have been five. This bee stung me while we were driving, and to make sure it was dead I made my dad run over it with the car and I observed the carcass before and after, and he kept running over it, until I was satisfied. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan, Bob, Sharon > > **Subject:** White racism against Black people in the US > > I have learned some things recently in interacting with and mostly listening to Black people who are discussing White racism against Black people in the US. One of the most important is the idea that this racism is a White problem: some of us do it, we all own it, and we're the ones who can stop it. > > Fast forward to our family situation. Perish. An overt racist who makes a point of saying racist and sexist things in front of those he knows disagree with him. I have rarely in my life stood mute about justice issues when by saying something or doing something I could make a change. After what I've heard from Black tweeps over the last few weeks, I realize I have allowed our family tradition of non-confrontation to pull me into a zone of inaction that goes against my morals. > > From now on, I am going to insist that Perish remain silent on politics, religion, race, and sex because in these areas he has shown himself to be irresponsible and, frankly, hateful. I will no longer abide by the policy of non-confrontation that allows Perish to be a bigot in our midst. If Perish asks on what authority I make these requests of him, I will put each of you on the spot as either condoning his language and action, or supporting his language and action. This is so important to me morally that I am willing to lose my relationships with any of you if you decide that you don't want to be in relationship with someone who is going to take a very active stand against racism from this family member. > > By remaining silent (even to avoid confrontation in the family) we are allowing racism to live in our family. Your choice is your own. I think I've made mine clear in this note. > > **P.S.** A related issue: to those of the upper generations who stood by and in one case acquiesced to Perish's statement that since he's going to be coming to the house more often, that "that situation" (me) "needs to be dealt with" before Perish moves to town: you need to know that I felt you majorly sold me up the river. Perish has it out for me, for a couple of reasons. One is that Lily and I worked together to get Perish to stop harassing my mom on Facebook some months ago. Ever since then, he's had his sights on me, for removing one of his outlets of hate. Obviously I'm moving anyway, but for you all to allow Perish the power to upend my living situation..or even think he has that power, is doing me a disservice. It's also doing Perish a disservice, if you think it through. I will live civilly with you for the next couple of weeks but I need you to know that that really hurt me, and broke my trust in you. I mean you all showed, right then, that you don't have my back against Perish when he is clearly attacking me. That is a hard pill for me to swallow. Then I get even more in touch with my feelings, and I realize who I'm really mad at is my aunt Susan. She runs the house. She's the shot caller here. I decide to bring up the unmentionable subject: Mack. I know Susan will not be receptive to this, so this is me saying that my need to express my concern about and hurt over Mack overrides my honoring Susan's mysterious need to never discuss Mack with me, Mom, or anyone else who wants to discuss his problematic ass with her. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan > > **Subject:** mad > > I am really mad at you right now. You know, I'm so thankful to have had a place to live but stuff like you just relaying onward GG's request that I not sit on the couch, that's a good example of a lot of stuff that's been wrong between us that I never brought up because I didn't want to put my living here in jeopardy. That was a chance for *you* to stand up to GG's passive-aggressive action toward me. But you just passed it on, and so for most of the time I've lived here, I've lived under the confusing instruction not to sit on the couch. Everyone else is allowed to sit on the couch except me—that sends me the signal that I'm not a first-class resident. I know you've helped me however you can, and those things have been major, and I am so grateful to you for everything you've done and for your whole self. I guess since I'm going soon I'm just allowing myself to be a little more open about the problems. > > A main thing was Mack. Honestly, Susan, I'm just never going to forget that you continued to allow him to be around me after he treated me so poorly. I don't even know if you can accept that he treated *everyone* poorly, especially you. You two woke me up one of my first nights here, drunk and YELLING at each other such scary things. I can't live with that kind of conflict right next to me. I'll say this, too, I think it's kind of weird that you would watch TV with Mack while both of you are lying in you and Bob's bed. It's totally none of my business except to say that it's evidence that you and Mack have a special relationship and from the way you treated me and the way you treated him it was clear to me that your relationship with him is more important than your relationship with me. That hurts because I like you a lot. > > I'll leave it at that. There's a lot more to say but I will spare you on the chance that this is hurtful—which is not my goal. > > Sorry if this makes you hate me, but I gotta be honest. > > I'll try to stay in my room as much as possible until Mom and I move, so I don't disturb you further. And I won't ask for any special groceries or anything. I'm probably not going to come around much after we move because, as I knew many many years ago, I don't fit into this family and in cases like Perish I'm not even wanted. No response. Stupidly, I continue writing email messages to my family. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Mom, Bob, Susan > > **Subject:** advance notification on Perish's house visits > > I would like to know when Perish is going to be at the house, before the fact, as long as I'm still here. The last time it seemed like everybody knew but me, and him walking through the door and going after me discursively..was a bad surprise. No response, no follow up discussion, no mentions in later conversation. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan > > **Subject:** *[multiple emails, multiple subjects, combined]* > > *[While Susan and Bob were out of town and Mom and I were over there doing chores and checking on my grandmother]* Your house smells like dog. The trash that I took out yesterday smelled like fucking vomit. You have never apologized to me about exposing me to dangerous bigoted Mack—ditto Perish. You've shown that you would never have my back in a bar fight *[a serious dig—Susan's office voted her The Person You Would Most Want to Have Your Back in a Bar Fight and she's very proud of that title, but, actually, I still believe at the time of this writing that Susan might have]* somebody's *back in a bar fight..but not mine]*. I don't respect you anymore. I guess you have too much pride to admit your wrongs and I'm not down with that. > > I won't come over again. We're done. > > *[I was having a manic day this day. This is the day of the failed lunch with Mom and GranGran where heaven forbid I spoke impolitely and said the fucking truth about our family being a place where yes, we do talk about each other behind each other's backs, and I was emailing Susan all these bullshit emails bent over in my chair in a movie theater trying to keep my phone light from bothering my ancestors as they watched the latest movie from Pixar. My ticket was wasted money—I was so effing livid I couldn't pay attention to* shit*.]* > > You left that trash can for GG??!! Full 100%. And smells like shit. You guys don't take sufficient care of her and that's part of why I can't have anything to do with you anymore *[sadly, true—they neglect my grandmother]*. > > You didn't even say "we're going out of town, will you guys get the trash?" You're so fucking SELFISH Susan. And you're weak to not be able to stand up to Perish. Smh. > > You and Bob are so fucking "autonomous" that me and Mom have to guess at your trip dates so we can keep GG company at the right times. > > Something else, Susan, that you should know, is that I wanted to and expected to get to know you better, to do things together. I'm thankful for the place to live, but I can live anywhere. If I'm living with my family I expect we're going to build our relationships. Obviously that didn't happen. I mean: when my mom came to visit the Ranchwood house, very rarely did you even yell a "hi" to my mom or come out of your room at all. That pretty clearly shows that you don't give a shit about respecting or being friendly with my mom. > > You want to be "doing your own thing"? Go for it. You can sit around affirming your racist brother with silence as your consent. Sounds like a pretty sad party to me *[corny line, but I wasn't exactly in top form that day]*. > > And the fact that you let him talk about you all kicking me out of the house because he was going to be in BR more often. When you said nothing in return, you ended our relationship right there *[true]*. I'm never going to forgive you for that *[true—disloyalty is a permanent deal-breaker to me in any relationship]*. I'm never going back to your house and if that means GG gets less company, too bad. You showed your true colors that day and I'm done with ya *[I mean I'll be nice to ya but it won't mean anything]*. > > It was shocking to me the day you compared me to Mack. I write two books a year. Mack probably doesn't even read two books a year. In making that comparison, you showed how clueless you are about what a loser Mack is and how accomplished I am *[haha—ego much??!!]*. How many people do you know who have written ten books *[can't blame the mania for this one—I think this is a tough but valid point to make to someone]*? And yet, you don't even show me the kind of respect housemates show each other. Is it because I'm of the younger generation? You still see me as a kid or something? The stuff you do just doesn't add up, and based on past experience with you, you'll have no desire to even speak to me about what I'm bringing up with you *[extremely solid point to make with Susan, but it's her choice to decide what she talks about with people, and lately that ain't much]*. You might think you're "just in your own world" but really, what it is, is you're too scared about the changes *you* need to make *[probably true but none of my goddamn business]*. > > Smh. Then my mood changes, my perspective changes, my energy changes, and I see things as if I'm a different person. I feel sympathy for Susan, I realize I am a bastard due to mental illness, that I owe my non-homeless status to my relatives, and maybe I don't have some inalienable right that says my relatives have to like me. And yet, they helped me out anyway. I text Susan. > **ME:** I should be more gentle with you. I love you and my primary feeling right now is thankfulness for you and Bob and GranGran. I needed help and you saved my ass. I'll never forget it. That's the bottom line. No need to respond. I hope you get over the cold soon. —Matthew > > **Susan:** *[one day later]* Bipolar much? Lol..sorry..just wanted to say that those emails were just words *[if they were "just words" then you wouldn't be trying to deflate them by saying they're just words—I see right through you, girl]*. They don't hold any power over me *["The lady doth protest too much, methinks"]*. I understand your illness to some degree so I know you are going to have moments of rage about things. > > **ME:** In your last text to me you maliciously made light of a major life-threatening mental illness that I have. That is not the type of speech that I expect to come from an aunt who loves me. I have enough health challenges to deal with that I don't have time for speech from you that aims to hurt, not help me. I'm blocking your number as a way to discourage any more language from you that shows that you do not have my best interests at heart. My note to you was honest and described how certain situations at the house made me feel. Your note to me was malicious, it was a personal attack, and it showed you offloading your responsibility for things that happened and blaming them on my disease..in a way that my disease was not responsible. I expect more from you than what you wrote in that text, but you clearly don't have the wherewithal to even extend the same authenticity to me that I have extended to you. Your number is now blocked. ### 158 I did block my aunt's number (for like two hours) but my mom convinced me to unblock it because basically for the family to work Susan and I sometimes need to coordinate about things. Or..in case of emergency..you know. Two weeks passed. I left Susan alone, she left me alone, and it was wonderfully peaceful. Two weeks later: > **ME:** I heard you want to go to lunch? > > **Susan:** Lunch or dinner this weekend. Whatever works for you, birthday boy! > > **ME:** Could you pick the time/place? I can't handle doing that right now but thank you very much for inviting me, it's very kind of you and I look forward to seeing you. > > **Susan:** No problem! Let me think about it and I'll get back to you. > > **ME:** K, cool. We have a birthday lunch. We don't talk much. Most of the time we spend typing on our respective phones. Neither of us cares. I don't care about connecting with her. She either doesn't care about having deep conversations (which is what I love to do with people I love) or maybe the extent of her ability to connect is to buy me a birthday lunch—and you know what, as long as we're not fighting, that is ok with me. Either my expectations have been lowered from experience, or I've gotten wiser about meeting people where they are, and not expecting them to trudge through the rough territory I happen to live in. So the lunch is ok. We go our separate ways. And because Susan rarely responds to my meaningful/substantive texts, I text her a joke—something I know she'll be able to relate to easily. In the context of our prior discussions of the word *douchebag* and its variants—*douchenozzle* for example—I text my aunt this odd morsel from the internet: > **ME:** I just saw a new (to me) word on Reddit. As a fellow aficionado of words, I thought it might give you a chuckle: the word is: "douchecanoe". Way worse than a simple douchebag, obviously. > > **Susan:** Lol! Love it! She texts me something simple and personal and true a few days later. > **Susan:** We are at a wedding and Bob was talking about little Matthew as our ring bearer.. > > **ME:** =) Aww..I remember that !! That was a great experience \<3 I bet they liked me more back then when I was cute and pliable and they hadn't realized yet how all that childhood smartness was going to grow up to be intractable mental illness. ### 159 Because the crazy bipolar stuff I do is *stuff I'm doing*, I feel like I could have stopped it, like I could have done better. But it's an illusion. During mania and depression, I'm not in control. Depression brings feelings that a rational mind could reason its way out of, but a depressed mind cannot—*My family would be better off without me*, for example. During mania, I sometimes don't remember what I did—just like a blackout drunk. I open my mouth when a sane person would keep it shut, I say things and write things to people I love that I know will hurt their feelings—but I feel an *obligation* in that moment, as strong as Martin Luther's, to speak my truth, even at the cost of a relationship. And because these are *things I do*, I blame myself for them later. I take total responsibility. Then I hate myself, because it seems I will never be who I want to be: an always-loving, kind, calm, responsible person. Until I was twenty-seven, I refused to take meds or see a psychiatrist or even admit to myself that *maybe* I had a part in the continual chaos that was my life. Maybe it wasn't all my crazy girlfriend or my crazy boss—maybe the crazy was me. Now this is a dangerous path to go down, societally—to take responsibility for your part of the crazy—because once you go far enough down that path, past the initial *maybe I have a responsibility* part, you realize (or at least I did) that *I am not the only crazy one*. I'm just the one who finally decided to own up to my part in it. The crazy girlfriend is still crazy. The crazy boss is still crazy. They're crazier than me, in fact, in that they are wolves in sheep's clothing, people who hide their illnesses under a thin veneer of politeness and professionalism and denial that there's anything to be healed within them. It is the right path to examine your own life, if we are to believe Socrates, but when you are the one wolf who takes off its sheep's clothing, you better believe all the sheep in the room will designate you the bad guy. All fear is the fear of becoming. It is the fear of what you might become. And when someone admits their illness, everyone around them who has illness (which is everyone) *sees* what they might become if they admitted their illness. Discounted. Knocked off their pedestal. Made human. It's scary to think that instead of being popular and employable and liked, you might be denied the approval of those who used to like you, employ you, adore you. And the worst part is, you might be denied entry to the relationship, the job, the family, the culture *because of something you don't control*. We're uneducated as a society about mental illness. That ignorance leads to the casting out of people who are not *bad* but simply *ill*. That ignorance of mental illness, when it exists in the mentally ill, causes us to hate ourselves for aspects of who we are that we can wrangle with, but never master. Lithium helps lower the amplitude of the curve of my mood swings. I take it religiously. But lithium doesn't cure bipolar—nothing does. Even on lithium, I have mood swings. Even on lithium, I say impolite things in polite contexts, setting relationships back for months—or destroying them. And because I am getting treatment for my illness, and the ill around me are not, I become their excuse for furthering their lack of self-examination. It's so easy for the wolves in sheep's clothing to describe the incident as: *Matthew went crazy and said some crazy things at lunch!* But when I describe the events to my massage therapist, my nurse, my doctors—people who are slightly healthy—they say, "Sounds like you said the truth that no one else was willing to say." It was me, my mom, and my grandmom at a Mexican restaurant. My mom said, "Well, at least we're not the kind of family who talks about each other behind each other's backs." And I said: "OH. YES. WE. ARE." I told a truth that nobody wanted to hear. I was partially out of control. I'm fuckin' bipolar for god's sake. Don't..invite me..to..a..*polite*..*conversation!* I don't even *believe* in polite conversation anymore. To me all that's just stalling, just delaying the inevitable, the moment when you crack or come unraveled or *start to see*. Life is short. In my opinion it's better to come unraveled *now*. But believing I can *master* my illness only causes more trouble. Doctors say you *manage* it—to me that's not the most accurate word from the patient's perspective. To a doctor, they might be managing your illness, "help[ing](#) solve a problem, first by observation, then by careful intervention" (to quote Daryl Zero). But from the patient's perspective, at least from mine, what I do with bipolar, with OCD, with tardive dyskinesia, with alcoholism and drug addiction, is more like *wrangling*. I'm not a *lion* that can eat *another lion*—I'm just a lion tamer. And the longer I stay in that cage, the greater chances there are that that lion is going to eat *me*. All I have is a puny little whip—and yeah, we put on a good show, me, the whip, and the lion—but in reality that lion doesn't give a *shit* about that whip. He's not afraid of it and he's not afraid of me. "Managing" mental illness, "managing" addiction, is kind of like managing *the devil*. You ain't gonna win. But you can first: admit your weakness, and second: roll with the punches. If you fight the devil, the devil will win. You can't beat her—she's too powerful. But you can learn to live with her, you can learn to survive the cage for as long as possible. And a key part of that is admitting she's there in the first place. It is actually more complex that this example, for the devil is part of you. She is no external demon, shaped as a bat, hanging from the bars, ready to suck your blood at any moment. She's not a lion of entirely different composition than you, differences clearly visible to anyone. No. These illnesses, diseases, disorders, or whatever you want to call them, are *part of our nature*. They are us, we are them—there *is no* us and them. So it is impossible for my grandmother to distinguish—impossible for *me* to distinguish, impossible for my *psychiatrist* to distinguish—what is me and what is illness. To quote Steve Arlo from *Zero Effect*, "There aren't any *good* guys. You realize that, don't you? I mean: there aren't *evil* guys, and *innocent* guys. It's just—it's just.. It's just a bunch of guys." There's no *good* me or *evil* me. I'm not *innocent* of what I said or *guilty* of what I said. That wasn't *the illness* speaking or *the old Matthew* speaking. It's all just..me. Would I have said what I said that day at lunch if I hadn't been bipolar? Well, theorists, scientists, people who would like to figure this out by isolating the variables, I've got bad news for you: we're never gonna know. This isn't sixth-grade science class. It's the real world. Paradigms of mental illness have changed before and you can bet your tent that they will change again. But if you think it's gonna get more simple—they're gonna invent a cure for bipolar, give you an injection and—*poof!*—you're well—I don't think so. Once, we had four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—to explain our emotions, our behavior. Now we have classified *hundreds* of mental illnesses. Bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia..these disorders will never become easier to understand, even as our knowledge of them grows—they will become *harder* to understand, *more* complex. What is known as bipolar disorder now will someday be a *family* of illnesses, tens, hundreds of classifications strong. Saying, *What would Matthew be like without bipolar?* is like saying, *What would Annie be like without red hair?* It's a pointless question. A dog and its tail are so wrapped up in each other that when considering one, you must consider the other—they are integral, they are part of the same thing. It is considered kinder these days to say someone *has* bipolar disorder rather than saying they *are* bipolar. I get this. I am not bipolar, in the sense that there are paradigms in which bipolar disorder is not the totality of what we consider "me." But to say I *have* bipolar is not right either. You can lop off a dog's tail—you cannot lop off my bipolar. And this is where I started: how much responsibility do I take? How deeply do I blame myself? I think I have to take as much responsibility as possible *but at the same time* be gentle with myself. A bipolar person causes everyone around them suffering, but they cause themselves suffering a thousand times more. I think to survive bipolar as long as I can, I have to stop beating myself up for having a devil inside me, and start being as gentle as possible *to me and the devil*—because, insidiously, we are one and the same. ### 160 I don't really think of the events of that fall—my suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalizations—as a breakdown, or a "nervous breakdown" (that tired old term), but in a way it was. Before I tried to kill myself, my whole life, I took at least one shower or bath every day. I didn't feel *awake* until I'd had my morning shower. If I didn't take a shower in the morning, I *felt* that fact in my consciousness all day and it didn't feel right. After my attempt and being in the hospital so often and so long that I went inpatient in the fall and didn't get out till winter..after that, I didn't bathe every day. I bathed every week when I moved to my sister's house. By the time I moved to my grandmother's house, I was bathing once a month. This started at the Refuge, and I told my check-in person one night, when she asked, among many questions, "Did you shower and clean up today?" that I was afraid of the water. Like a cat. I was afraid of the transition between dryness and wetness and in a shower (versus a bath) all those little droplets of water hitting my skin at the same time was a sensory overload. I guess that's part of mania: colors seem brighter, sounds seem louder, everything tactile is turned up to the max. But to an uncomfortable level. Like I won't do it. When I lived with my sister in Portland, I wore sunglasses to the grocery store. It was much more pleasant. I was instantly happier there. Without the shades, it was just too bright to be able to function..because when you're manic, especially when you're psychotically manic, the real problem with those delusions and hallucinations, as minor as they may be, is that you focus your attention on them instead of focusing your attention on what everyone else has agreed is "real life." Psychotic people tend to turn inward, to withdraw from social life, because they are presented with alternate realities that are fascinating, frightening, or just brighter and shinier in such a way that they grab your attention. You can't pay attention to the "right" things—what everyone else thinks is important. And it seems silly to you that they would pay attention to those things. You feel like you have a special perspective on the world that no one else has—and you're right. You do have a special perspective. Sometimes that perspective is irrelevant. Sometimes it is dangerous. Sometimes it is valuable—but getting people to listen to your psychotic or alternate-reality thoughts is difficult. With people you don't know, the moment you say, "mental illness," the conversation is over. They quietly tune out, move away. With people you do know, you might get sympathy if they have their own experience with mental illness or they work in a medical field. But with most people, even family who supposedly love you, once they know there's something wrong with your brain, they discount you, don't take you seriously, stop conversing with you, stop including your opinion in group decisions. And..they don't get your jokes because they don't have the context you do, which is required for getting the joke. I remember having that problem in college. I would say things and I think they genuinely offended or frightened men and women in my dorm—some of my speech was just too unusual for people to get. And some of it was too complex. And some of it was crazy, probably, some of it made no sense. The people in my college dorm nicknamed me "Crazy Matt" and I don't think all of them meant it as a compliment. Truth be told, I thought they were crazy, too—we were in completely different worlds. I've always only ever loved freaks. My high school friends called ourselves that—The Freaks. There were the jocks and the band kids and the smart kids and the black kids and the rap kids and skater kids and the drug kids and the goth kids and there were real hardcore loners who literally sat one to a table. Then there were me and my friends, fluctuating between six and eight of us. Some of us were goth and some of us were skater kids and a couple of us were actually the very smartest kids in the school, even smarter than the smart kids, and we sat at a round table in the corner of the lunchroom and since every other group of kids had a name, we gave ourselves one, too—The Freaks. We were the freaks of Colonel White High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, because we truly fit in no bucket. You might find one of us suspended for wearing an offensive shirt, you might find one of us crying in the stairwell using a Heinlein novel as a Kleenex, you might find one of us taking the PSAT and getting the highest score in the history of the school. So we fit together, because we didn't fit anywhere else. Whatever. We were the fucking *Breakfast Club*. Every school has one. Back then I used to wake up at five, run outside for an hour in the grounds of a seminary near our house, then come back to the house and take a hot bath followed by a cold shower. During the bath I'd read Fitzgerald and Salinger. When I told Tuesday about the cold showers, she said: "No wonder you've been so frisky lately." "Yeah," I say, "I read that nuns used to give kids cold showers to quell their sexual desires but the cold shower actually has the opposite effect. After about twenty minutes, it dilates the capillaries and increases sexual desire for hours and hours..like the whole day." "I know," she'd say. "I read that too." And she'd touch me in places that I usually only touched myself. And every day since then I took hot baths and cold showers until I had my nervous breakdown and attempted suicide and ended up in the Refuge. Sometime I blame it on it just being a major pain in the ass to take a shower at the Refuge. You had these group bathrooms with two showers and two toilets and two sinks and a lot of slippery wet tiles that were wet with more than just water. It was dangerous, it was embarrassing—you want to just take a freaking shower and you're in there with a plastic curtain, hospital blue, that doesn't even cover the whole shower stall, so crazy people like Chad'll be walking in, looking at you and your dick, and then they'll start a conversation with you while they're taking a shit and *you can smell their shit* and they're saying something like, "Matt, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about." After a few visits to the hospital I noticed that there *were* private bathrooms that had toilets, sinks, showers in them—one for men and one for women—but the staff didn't announce these bathrooms to everyone. To the general population, they were just locked doors with no windows, but if you asked any one of the mental health techs, they would unlock the private bathroom and get you towels and soap and you could go in there, with a door that locked from the outside as soon as you closed it. And I would take my showers in there, every few days, or sometimes once a week. And I would always try to masturbate with the liquid soap but I could never cum due to the antidepressant I was on. At first I thought it was my fault—I was defective or nervous or rushed—but then I realized it was the Celexa. I tried to masturbate at night in the fifteen minutes of privacy I had between safety checks: some guy opening your door and shining a flashlight on you long enough that *he can see you breathing*—that's the insurance company requirement for safety checks. You're supposed to see the patient's eyes, but you have to make sure they're breathing, for sure. Anyway I could never cum in these short increments and I found myself thinking: *Why am I trying to hide it? I'm in a fucking mental institution. Sometimes I was there for a month. A man has to get his cock off once in a while.* I asked Dr. Meggs to switch me from Celexa to Lexapro and within days I was cumming again. I came in the shower. I came in my bed. My mood improved greatly as I'm sure you can fucking imagine. But once I got out of the Refuge I stopped taking baths and showers. I had to *make* myself do it. My sister would ask me how long it had been. That was when I stayed with her family in Portland. I can't explain it because I don't understand it, but bathing just seemed wrong—uncomfortable and a waste of time. I've never been a big soap person. I don't wash my hair. I don't use soap every time I shower. I don't use washcloths. I don't own a comb, and haven't since high school. All that soap is bad for your skin. But at my grandmother's house, when I moved down there, bathing once a week and then once a month..was pushing it. When we went out to lunch my grandmother would tell me to comb my hair. This is like a thirty-six year old being told by his eighty-five-year-old grandmother to correct a few stray hairs on the head of a tiny human on the edges of an unfathomable universe. I told her I didn't own a comb. "Well put some water on it and run your fingers through it." "Why?" "Because you look like you just got out of bed!" "Who cares? We're just going to a restaurant." GranGran would huff. Her generation and to a lesser degree her children considered going out to eat on the same level of formality as going to church in 1950. I stared my grandmother down. To her, Chimes is the epitome of fine dining—the best seafood she's ever had. To me, Chimes is just one tiny notch above Applebee's, which is a restaurant so shitty I refuse to eat there. Besides, as I mentioned, my whole philosophy of restaurants and clubs is to dress like a homeless person but spend so much money and leave such good tips that they're forced by their own greed to let you dress however you want. My mom would only want to know: "Did you sleep in that last night?" I always lied and said no, even though at that time I only changed my clothes once a month as well, and I wore the same thing to bed as I did to breakfast as I did to Chimes as I did to drink whiskey as I did to smoke cigarettes on the porch as I did to take out the trash etcetera etcetera etcetera. I think I wanted someone to say, "You can't go out to lunch with us unless you change your clothes," just so I could shake my head and sigh and go back to my room and lock the door and let them go to lunch without me. Fuck you. If you want my company you can accept me as I am. And fuck you, if what I wear is more important to you than what I say or what I think or how I feel or who I am, then *fuck you*. "Are these pants ok?" "As long as you didn't wear them to sleep last night." That was their yardstick of civilization. You would never wear something out of the house that you had slept in the night before—to do so would violate the most fundamental principles imaginable. ### 161 I wanted to be done with them all, but they were patient, some of them were kind, and every one of them was passive-aggressive. My aunt would pass messages to me from my grandmother saying my grandmother said it bothered her when I sat on the couch. O-k. Fail. Fail on grandmother. Fail on aunt. And when I put the wrong pots and pans in the dishwasher, my grandmother would stand in the kitchen with the dishwasher door open, look at me as I sat writing with my laptop at the dining room table..and she would sigh, and make ugly faces, and she would re-wash, by hand, perfectly clean dishes that (unbeknownst to her) I had already hand washed, then run through the dishwasher. I guess when you're eighty-five and all you do all day is read the Bible and watch Fox News and get mad about political scandals that a) aren't even remotely true and b) you can do absolutely nothing about..I guess at that point in your life it becomes really important to let your first grandson know that he is a fuck up when it comes to washing dishes. Even though he's thirty-five and has spent a lot of his life successfully living in apartments and maintaining kitchens and dishes and carpets and clothes. And cars. That's the other thing that made me feel unwelcome: everyone in the house was allowed to drive my grandmother's car except me. No reason ever given. She never even told me this directly. It just became clear to me over time that whenever we went somewhere, I was never allowed to drive. If it was just me and GranGran at the house, and her car was the only one there, I couldn't just borrow the car so I didn't interrupt her stories—she had to get up from her chair and *get ready* to go to the Circle K and *she drove me* three blocks there and back and had another reason to resent me, that I had rudely interrupted her from watching *The Young and the Restless*, which last I checked is the same story every week since the inception of the show. I felt so resented that I stopped asking her. I'd mine my uncle's change jar and walk to the Circle K—even though there were no sidewalk, so cars would be zooming along right beside me and sometimes they'd give a little honk of the horn to surprise the pedestrian! Always a fun game! And that's people of all ages, too—teenagers, middle-aged men—apparently people of all demographics think it's funny to scare the shit out of someone who is risking their life to walk along the side of a road with no sidewalks. One time I slipped in the mud and fell down a hill. I was muddy everywhere. I had to search around for my phone and tell my friend Davina that I had fallen in the mud. But once I got up, and righted myself, and climbed back up the hill, a guy in a pickup truck was there, across the street. He had stopped when he saw me fall and was waiting to see if I was ok. I gave him the thumbs up and we both smiled and he drove on. So yeah, there's good in the world, even in the deep south of the United States, where the stereotypes are mostly true. A lot of people are like my grandmother—white, racist, ignorant, republican, right-wing conservative crazy Christians who vote against the poor, even when the poor is their own grandchildren. Like my aunt and uncle telling me to hide my food stamp card from GranGran because if she saw it she would get mad. I didn't give a shit if she got mad and I would have rather us have it out in the open and her have a realistic picture of the world, that some people can't find work and some people are mentally ill and it isn't like you can *live off* minimum wage anymore. My aunt and uncle prefer to avoid the conflict. I'd rather just deal with the truth—as much as I possibly can. I don't know why I thought these houses of my loving but themselves crazy relatives were good places for me to get well after my suicide attempt. The Refuge was crazy and I couldn't keep going back there, so I went to Leona's house in Portland. That was crazy from the start but the crazy only involved me listening to Leona and her husband fight over ridiculous minor things *for hours* just like our parents did. But gradually they discovered that I would always say *yes* to anything they asked me to do—with no limit, no matter how ridiculous the request was. My other sister Joanne just moved there from New York because her dance studio folded and fired all their employees. She moved into the house with Leona and James and Daniel and now my newest nephew Joel! And from the sound of it, Joanne doesn't do a damn thing they say. When she's at home she's in her room with the door closed. She doesn't take orders, she doesn't report her activities. Joanne is smart—maybe the most of all of us. I could take a few lessons from her. And then Baton Rouge was a disaster. I came down here for a two-week vacation and ended up staying three years. At the beginning my aunt and uncle were welcoming and everyone was having fun and we had cheese and wine night on Friday and Susan and I did things together like go to a football game and tailgate party and watched the LSU games in a bar. But when I stopped drinking, my aunt stopped inviting me to things. That's what's called *family systems*, folks. You're not drinking in a vacuum. You don't have bipolar disorder in a vacuum, either. My aunt took me to meetings, though—she supported me in that way. It's just that we were on different paths now. But let's be clear: there's not *one* crazy person in a family. *Everyone* in the family is crazy. There's just one person in the family that admits it, seeks help, and tries to get better. - - - - And when my grandmother said something negative about me to my mom while they were at lunch one day, Mom said she backed me up. She said: "Mom, your husband was an alcoholic who I don't have to remind you *died* when he was younger than I am now from his alcoholism. *Perish*, when I see my brother on Facebook, in *every* picture he has a drink in his hand. And now that Colton's back living with him what do you think he has in his hand?—a beer, just like his father. *Susan* has wine bottles hidden in her room. She takes open bottles of wine with her *in the car* when she goes on road trips to Biloxi. And Matthew has alcoholism and drug abuse and mental illness..and *suicide*..on *both sides* of the family—" "There's no drug abuse on our side of the family." "Mom, yes there is." "Well there's no suicide." "Mom. Ernie?" "I don't want to talk about that." "You don't want to talk about it. That's fair. I'll respect that. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It did happen, Mom, it did. And on his dad's side, too, he has twin cousins diagnosed with bipolar who have had some kind of substance abuse problems that—guess what?—*no one wants to talk about.* And his cousin Kristi is an alcoholic." "She is?" "Uh-huh." "I thought she was a writer. Doesn't she live in Nashville?" "She is a writer. She lives in Portland. One day her brother Joel called Leona and said Kristi is in her apartment, locked in, hasn't left for days, and she's drinking herself to *death!*" "Really?" "Yes really!! And Joel asked Leona and James to pick her up and take her—" "Take her where?" "To rehab! She was in rehab for a week or a month or something, I don't know, and Leona said when they picked her up she was *extremely* drunk and laughing and just the most amiable person you'd ever met. But they had to detox her safely. You can *die* from alcohol withdrawal." "I would think detox and rehab was more for people who used heroin." "No. Mom. This is a fact that Matthew learned in one of his rehab classes: The only recreational drug that you can die from stopping suddenly is *alcohol*. Not cocaine. Not heroin. *Alcohol*, Mom." "Well frankly I'd be suspect of anything Matthew said after all the drugs he's done." "Think what you want about that, Mom. But I want you to recognize that of all the alcoholics on both sides of the family—" "No one on my side—unless you're counting Perish and Susan—but *no one* on our side of the family is alcoholic. I don't know what you're talking about." "Aunt Kathy. Aunt Stelle. Uncle Bill—" "Stop. Just stop. Those people *are not alcoholics*." "Here's what I want you to realize," my mom says. "You may think Matthew doesn't make sense or has lost it and maybe that's just because he doesn't make sense to *you*. But *my son* is the *only* person on either side of the family who has ever done anything about his alcoholism. He's the *only one* who ever stopped drinking. He's the only one who's ever gone to AA meetings." "Oh is he still going to those meetings?" "Yes. He can hardly sit still because he's in so much pain but he goes to one meeting a week." "I wasn't even aware that he had an alcohol problem." "Do you think that Perish has an alcohol problem." "Perish?! No. Do you?" "I think if there's never a day when you don't have a drink, or a week when you don't have a drink, then you have something to look at." "Well, Sharon—" My mom interrupts her. "I just want you to remember one thing. For all his faults, and his outbursts, and his weird theories, and his intensity—" "I just wish he'd comb his hair." "Well, Mom, that's *his* hair and he's going to do with it what he wants. You may not realize this, but you and Susan and Bob—to the degree that he participates at all—have made *my son* the whipping boy around that house, in so many ways that I'm not even going to go into now. But I want you to always remember that in the history of this whole dysfunctional family, Matthew is *the only one* who ever did anything about his alcoholism." "You mean stop drinking." "Stop drinking, stop doing drugs, pursue a more spiritual life. Everyone else in both sides of his family drank until they *died*." "I can tell you one thing," my grandmother says, "and that's that Aunt Stelle and Uncle Bill were not alcoholics. And I don't think I would call Matthew spiritual." That's an arrow through my mom's heart. Her emotion rises. She could cry but she doesn't let herself. She keeps it simmering just below the surface. And she looks her mother in the eye. "You're walking a thin line with that statement." "He just doesn't seem very spiritual to me, Sharon. He doesn't go to church." "You're talking to the wrong person if you want to talk about church. Don't forget you're talking to a pastor. And I know—*I know*, from twenty years of being a pastor—that *church* is sometimes the least spiritual place you can be. Have you ever had a deep conversation with my son?" "Not that I can recall." "Why do you think that is?" "Sharon, I don't know." "Well you might consider—and this is all I'm going to say to you about this—but you might consider that the reason you've never had a deep conversation with him is that the waters on his side—" And here my mom does shed a tear. "—run deeper than the waters on yours." My mom was exactly right about this. And I do this with a lot of people. I never pressed my grandmother to discuss anything substantive because when I have laid out conversational invitations to do so, she has always dismissed them. I remained at the level of small talk with her, or at the level of agitated, illogically personalized confessional struggles about Benghazi—with her as the confessor and me as the priest. I did this out of politeness to her, nothing else. If she had ever wanted to have a meaningful conversation with me, we would have had one. I was ready. ### 162 I send some crazy email to my cousin Lily about how Mom is going to try to put me in a mental hospital 'cause I can't function normally just because I said something impolite at lunch with her and her mom. My note is full of paranoia. Fear. I think that because I said four undesirable words to my hypersensitive grandmother and the daughter who is trying to protect her, that I'm going to lose my place to live, what little property I own, the right to walk free outside a psychiatric hospital, the right to refuse medicine. I'm going to lose all this plus the love of my mother just because I said four little unpleasant words at some shitty Mexican restaurant that sent me into a tailspin. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lily > > **Subject:** a hard day emotionally > > I had a hard day emotionally on Tuesday and then Wednesday. When I woke up today, things seemed to be better, so I accepted Mom's invitation to go to lunch and a movie with GranGran. We ate at a Las Palmas near the movie theater, I got chicken, everyone said they liked their food. We talked about stuff, all of which I do not remember because I think I might be in a mixed or manic state of bipolar disorder. Evidence: over the last few days have been talking loudly and too fast (as reported by my mom). I did talk a lot at lunch and then Mom was saying we had to go right then to get to the movie on time. We sat down at the table at Las Palmas at 11:00. We got up from the table at 11:34. That was the start of some of my frustration: I don't like to hurry when I eat. Of course it's no real problem, we just took some food in boxes, but my idea of lunch is more like two hours..where there's time for conversation and learning about each other. I guess they didn't schedule in time to have much talk at lunch. I should have followed my gut instinct this morning which was that a restaurant and then a movie would be too much sitting for me because of my tardive dyskinesia, the uncontrollable motion thing. I spend most of the day lying down now, because sitting and standing are positions where I clench the most. So it was just sad, because I said things at lunch that GG and Mom did not want to hear (critiques of the family may have been one of my topics)..so they were uncomfortable, I was uncomfortable. In the movie I hid my head in my shirt because it was waaay too stressful to me to hear the soundtrack of this Pixar movie. I'd like to see it on a smaller scale someday because I love watching movies and this one seemed cool. But I'm just hurting and I don't feel connected to the Ranchwood house people or my mom. I feel like I'm a burden, I definitely do not feel like I fit in. I'm honestly straight-up mad with Susan..they didn't even tell us when they were going to visit Bob's dad..which would have been good information for us to know so me and Mom could do stuff with GG, visit her, etc. I mean, it's no big deal to figure that out, but when they don't talk to us about that, that's not within the definition of how I expect a family to act. Here's something else that I guess is just two different approaches to life, but I lived at the Ranchwood house for approximately two years, and one thing I expected (yes, expected) us to do is get to know each other better..like..have conversations about ourselves or issues or whatever. That didn't happen, and I will get over it but it's frankly upsetting to me that the whole two years GG sat in her room with the door closed watching TV and Bob and Susan laid in their room watching TV and we hardly talked at all. I'm thankful I had a place to stay so I wasn't homeless, but it's basically killed my relationship with Susan..her more than the other two because I expect more from her, for whatever reason. Anyway I'm at odds with all of our family in this town, including my mom, and some family elsewhere. I am rational enough even in this state to know that it's my fault. I'm not conforming to the expectations of others, in terms of how honest they want to be about our family systems or other subjects. I live with my mom now, I'm not sure if you knew that..anyway I think I'm just too much of a pain and really more of a bad force than a good one. I want her life to go well. I don't want to be a negative influence. I'm thinking I might try to get to Vermont, which has a very good mental hospital, because I don't want to end up in the mental hospital in Baton Rouge I spent a week in a couple years ago..they put me on like 10 different medicines which my regular psychiatrist had to undo once I got out, you weren't allowed to write, you were required to sit in the TV room with everyone and watch Family Feud all day..for a week..they gave us our medicines late..there were no classes or workshops, we didn't see a doctor daily..it did me more harm than good. Anyway I'm staying in my room trying to act normal when I see Mom so she doesn't take me to the hospital. I have outpatient doctors I am seeing..I'm not a danger to myself or others..a week in a psych hospital is not what I need right now. I should have taken care of my own needs today, by staying home instead of tagging along with Mom and GG. > > Smh. I feel so stupid. I'm glad we can still send letters and I am terrified that I'll do some bipolar thing someday that will offend you. I hope not, but until then thanks for listening. And then the very next day: > **From:** Matthew > > **To:** Lily > > **Subject:** my mom is trying to put me in a mental hospital > > Well, my mom is trying to put me in a mental hospital because I apparently said some uncouth things at lunch with her and GG yesterday, so I'm trying to basically cease contact with people I love so that I don't accidentally hurt them. I don't think it's safe for anyone to be around me so I'm sorry to push you away but I just don't know what to do so I'm ceasing contact with everyone. I am sorry to have wasted your time. I don't remember what, if anything, my mom said to spark this idea of mine that she might be on the verge of taking me to the hospital. I suppose it's *possible* that she openly questioned whether I needed inpatient time. I suspect it's more likely that I made the whole thing up in my head, and just *imagined* that if I continued "acting crazy" (saying an oppositional, though perfectly reasonable, true statement in a rather scary way at our Mexican lunch) that my behavior would cause Mom to send me to a mental hospital. Since she's never sent me to one before (I've tended to send myself) and since saying something impolite doesn't get you admitted to a mental hospital (danger to self or others does) I think it's fair to say that this scenario was all in my mind. I already showed you the emails I sent to my aunt while I'm sitting in the latest Pixar movie that wasn't designed to be enjoyed by people experiencing bipolar manic episodes—work on that, could you, Pixar? So I sent those messages while my mom and grandmom were watching this incomprehensible, highly existential movie that I also can't imagine kids having any kind of understanding of. This movie is like how *Sesame Street* was a show for kids but it had subtle cultural references that the kids wouldn't get but it made the show funny for adults. Right. Well this Pixar movie—whatever the fucking title was—was just like that except it was like the primary audience was existential philosophers and they had put a few cute elements in here and there so the kids could watch it too. The whole time I'm Tweeting my breakdown, punching away in the dark at an on-screen keyboard. At the end of my self-hating, revealing rant I Tweeted: > Some people have Twitter meltdowns. I don't fuck around. My entire timeline is a Twitter meltdown. It's like with Twitter, with my life in general, one of my goals is to humiliate myself so much that no one else could possibly step in and do a better job. So I had sent those fucked-up emails to my aunt, so mad I could hardly *see*, from the Pixar movie theater and—you know—a *week* later, at her earliest fucking convenience, Susan writes me back. > **Susan:** Hey. I just read the email you sent. Is everything OK? > > **ME:** Not really. I've had a mood episode this week. I'm sorry I contacted you during that time. I don't expect you or anyone in the family to understand me and I don't even want you to forgive me. I just can't be around anyone anymore because it's not safe for them..you never know what I'm going to say or do, so I'm staying away from family meals (I missed a meal with Mom and GG this morning because it was bound to result in disaster—mostly for me). So thanks for all your help in the past but for now I need to keep communication and face time to a minimum, with you all, with AA people, I just can't do it anymore. > > **Susan:** Matthew, I'm not going to say I fully understand but I accept you. I had no doubt that you were having a bad time of it. I support you doing what you need to do to take care of yourself. I love you. *[You know, right now I can see that this is a perfectly reasonable, loving response but at the time that's not how it read to me. That's the damn near impossible thing to deal with about bipolar disorder..as my psychiatrist says..your organ of perception is broken, and that makes problem solving and acting reasonably almost unattainable for the bipolar person. It's like in *Apollo 13*, where they have the false indicator light..their instruments are giving them the wrong information about the state of their spacecraft, so that makes it impossible to fly. Those are some of the hardest problems to solve, when your sensors are giving you inaccurate feedback..you have to do a very difficult thing, which is first realize that* the data you're getting about your situation is wrong*..*then *you can solve the problem. But, yeah, as long as you trust that false indicator light,* nothing else *you try will ever work. Of course I responded to Susan's text like a hardass—frustratingly, even though everything I said is true, my approach is still coarse, even at thirty-seven.]* > > **ME:** Sometimes it's not about me..even though I'm the identified patient..sometimes it is about you and the way you affect the system *[like hey bitch, why don't]* you *take some responsibility—but guess what, Matthew,* Susan doesn't want *to do that! Stop knocking on that door!]*. Might as well just forget about it. I appreciate that you took me in. I'm upset because I had expectations that we would get to know each other better (all of us who lived there). It hurts to think that nobody else wanted that. To me, if we're not building our relationships, we might as well be strangers. But I need to accept and respect that you all didn't want that. It's ok. It's my fault that I'm upset because I created an unrealistic expectation, then got mad when my expectation isn't met. My therapists have been telling me for years that I do this..for whatever reason it's a hard habit for me to break. I love you too—everyone at the house. I don't think we know how to interact very well, and not just the relationships involving me or you. Learning, as an adult, for example, that my mom and Perish didn't even have each other's phone numbers until about four years ago..is just one of the things about our family that I find surprising and disillusioning. The other day at lunch, my mom said, "Well, at least we're not one of those families that talks about each other behind each other's backs," and I said, "Oh yes we are!" GG and Mom flipped out, their faces turned red, and suddenly we were in a conversation about my mental health. I agree that starting last Tuesday and continuing up to now, I am having a mixed-emotion bipolar event. I can and do admit hard truths about myself. When I say a hard truth at lunch, neither of those women were ready to say, "Yeah, I guess sometimes we do talk about each other behind our backs." No. It's too hard to look within, so we blame the one who spoke the truth. It's ok. I don't need you or anyone to like me, and I'd rather have no relationship than a fake relationship. You've recently said you're not into spending time with me or Mom or GG so really this works out ok for at least you and me, because I can't handle any more family get togethers—my tricked-out nervous system is too stressed out by them, and I need to take care of myself instead of trying to please the family. No response. There's no relationship here—I'm talking to myself. > **ME:** Hi. Hope you're well. I hope things are well with you. I know I've been erratic. I'm doing what I can with the parts I can control. I have been sober for over a year, I am working with a sponsor every day and in longer sessions on the weekend. I'm working with three different doctors. I want to be the best Matthew and the best family member I can be. I love you. > > **Susan:** Yay for over a year sober!!!! *[Like she gives a fuck. Her room is littered with wine bottles and vodka bottles and when she takes a road trip, her unzipped travel bag reveals an uncorked red. She puts that bag in the passenger's seat and backs down the driveway. I'm not judging—I'm just saying. And she probably does give a fuck.]* > > **ME:** Thank you. Thanks for your patience. And thank you again for good measure. That felt like progress. I didn't fuck up, anyway. And she stuck her neck out to congratulate me. Then sometime later, I tried to describe to her, in detail, the current state of a medical situation that started while I was living in her house. > **ME:** Today was my neurologist appointment. It went well, I think. My neurologist, immediately upon seeing me, suggested that he prescribe tetrabenazine. We talked about tetrabenazine six months ago but I decided not to take that or either of the other two medicinal options. One option is to start taking the antipsychotic that caused the problem in the first place..that would mask the clenching symptoms but make the root problem worse, which neither my doctor or I were into. We discussed tetrabenazine at length. Its most common side effects are drowsiness, depression, and suicide. I told him before that I have a history of chronic suicidality and one suicide attempt and I took that option off the table last time. But, having lived another six months tardive dyskinesia-style, I had become open to the tetrabenazine option, and that's what we're going to do. The medicine is only available at one pharmacy in the country..partly because it's new-ish, partly because it's dangerous. But as my doctor explained, part of why it is associated with an elevated number of suicides is that it was designed and tested for Huntington's disease, which itself has a high rate of suicide. Since I don't have Huntington's disease, the tetrabenazine isn't as dangerous as it seems. Also, as I pointed out, and my neurologist laughingly agreed, tardive dyskinesia increases your chances of suicide as well, so we may be canceling out tetrabenazine's suicidal effects by using it to treat my TD!! Assuming Mom and I can figure out a way to pay for it (which is probable), I should start taking it in 2-3 weeks, titrating up slowly, and I'll make sure I'm near someone at the beginning of taking it in case I do feel suicidal. I asked exactly how the medicine worked (something I couldn't find on the internet) and my neurologist gave me a detailed answer. I felt satisfied with that and he said no when I asked him if it would affect my cognition. So I should be able to write and think and talk just as I have been. The way he spoke, it wasn't like maybe this will work, it was like this will work. I think the moment I'm able to sit in a chair or stand or do anything without clenching, I'm going to cry. It's been so long since I've been able to be still. Oh yeah, and my neurologist called my psychiatrist and the psychiatrist agreed on this course of treatment. That's about all that's fit to print. Thanks for caring for me and wading through the details =) No response. She didn't wade through the details. Why would she? No one reads long texts, emails, books anymore. They teach you in film school never to have a paragraph in your script that's longer than three lines because film producers can't read large blocks of text—their attention spans have been systematically neutered to the size of a baby carrot. Also, no one gives a fuck about the details of my medical treatment except me, my doctors, and sometimes my mom—why would they? They haven't even done basic reading on bipolar disorder—for me to write anyone in my family a detailed note on the treatment for my TD is like me making a soliloquy to the moon. Or I guess, since it's a soliloquy, to nobody at all. My AA sponsor would look at all this and say: "Early sobriety is hard." My psychiatrist would look at this and say: "Bipolar disorder is hard." But that's all bullshit. You know what? *Life* is hard. ### 163 A long exchange where Susan shows me her haircut and I compliment it profusely. Then a few days later: > **ME:** I don't feel good about being a resource suck on the phone bill when you and I don't even see eyes to eye on stuff. So, I just don't want to be unfair to you since you obviously don't like or respect me, it doesn't feel good to me for you to be paying my bill. Mom said I should just let you pay but I don't feel good about it. Do you want me to mail you this phone back. I'm probably moving to the woods. > > **Susan:** I will let you know. > > **ME:** Take your time. > > Lily is telling me about your rental house and I'm like Lily I don't even officially know about the rental house! You never open up to me, you know, just tell me things that are going on. What changed? > > You just don't treat me like a real person. > > I'll always love you, aunt Susan, but you didn't treat me too well at the Ranchwood house. > > And Mom wants me to spend my birthday there? Why would I want to do that? > > Whatever. If you take away my phone I won't be able to schedule with my doctors. I can't afford my own. So I guess I'm just beholden to you while you hold me at a distance. I think our family is so fucked up. > > **Susan:** I bought that house a year ago. It isn't a rent house. We talked about that I wanted to use it as a place to do recycling of things I find by the side of the road. Stephen asked me to let his friend rent a room and that lasted 2 months. Stephen lives there now. I don't talk to Lily about that either. She must be talking to Stephen or something. > > **ME:** You never talked to me about it. And I don't even care. But I at least used to want to be part of your life and it just stings that you didn't seem to want that. > > Case closed. > > Goodbye. > > **Susan:** I don't want to take the phone Matthew..I never said anything like that. I freely gave it to you. You are clearly having an episode. > > **ME:** Clearly, yes, clearly. Since I'm ill, no one else has to take responsibility for their actions. Very convenient. > > Conversation is over. Ignoring all replies. Take the phone if you want I don't give a fuck. I'm leaving here anyway. Bye bye. > > Look, I'll delete your number. I'm sorry. I really don't actually want to talk to you because it hasn't been fruitful in the past. But I "love" you as much as anyone does and I wish you the best. Do whatever you want with the phone. Text to Joanne and Leona: > **ME:** I need help. Mom has planned a trip with me and her going to Baton Rouge with no guarantees that Perish will not be there, Mack will not be there, alcohol will not be a main event. I told her I'm not going. I do not want to move again bc I'm just getting set up here with excellent doctors and a counsellor but Mom and I are fighting every day. We hardly ever fought in our last apartment. Now every day is a fight. She seems to think that me going to the Ranchwood house will be a blast—to me it seems risky especially because there's likely to be alcohol there. I have one year and four months sober today and I'll be homeless before I break that streak. There's of course more to the story but this text is long enough so I'll stop. > > Actually, forget it. I'm done talking. I love you both. > > I've been pushed too far. No response so I leave an urgent cry-for-help voicemail for Joanne. Joanne texts back: > **Joanne:** Hey, I hear you and I'm thinking of you, want to talk tomorrow? > > **ME:** No thank you! Have a great day though! > > When you've needed me, have I ever pushed you off until tomorrow? Not one time. I'm turning my phone off indefinitely. Mom is arguing with me every day over nothing, pushing me and pushing me. This almost never happened in Baton Rouge. Just forget it. > > **Joanne:** Would you like to talk now? I have 20 min now before work.. > > **ME:** No. I'm done talking with this family. I have new bad mental health news and I can't trust anyone in this family not to use it as a new way to use power against me. I'm taking Mom off my medical release forms and I'm never telling any of you. Fuck!! > > **Joanne:** I won't use anything against you. I hope to talk to you if you want to. > > Ok, I'm turning my phone ringer off for several hours now; if I call you tomorrow it's only because I care about you and want to help. > > **ME:** You can't help me. In addition, you've been totally unavailable lately. Which probably is meeting a need of yours, so I respect it. > > Please just focus on yourself and don't think about me, ok? You seem to have a good thing going there. I am on a different path, one that will likely lead to homelessness again, as Mom is very displeased whenever I share my thoughts, as they are too much truth for her to handle. You might think that's bipolar grandiosity speaking. Think what you want, but the fact is Mom is not interested in treating me as an equal, mentally. She informed me earlier that since I was younger and not as wise as her and her siblings that my insights into our family are not welcome! Ha ha ha! She is the more deceived!!!!! My insight there goes far past her siblings' if not hers, and she's generally taken to ignoring everything I say while expecting me to respond to what she says!!! Obviously not a train that is long for its tracks. Thank you for your love but I don't need any help, mentally, except from my counsellor. Have a great night and think nothing of these things!!! > > **Joanne:** That 'mindspa' device *[that she gave me years ago and I've used once]* uses the same brainwave technology that that new doctor you told me about talked about. (I find it very soothing.) > > **ME:** Thank you. I will try it. But I am not the problem. I told Mom this morning I didn't feel safe going to GranGran's in January without knowing that Perish and Mack would not be there, that alcohol would not be a major part of the event, and I told her that even with those safeguards in place I don't feel psychologically safe around the residents of that house. Mom took offense, flipped out, and has been assaulting me emotionally ever since. Simple as that. Instead of solving the problem, perhaps with me going to someone else's house for that week, she displayed her hurt feelings. Which I can understand. She probably wanted my company, frankly. But I'm just not going to that house. Mom can frame that as my mental health issue all she wants but I'm the one seeing doctors and counsellors, working to improve myself and my ability to interface with others. Mom threw some real pot shots at me today. It was her acting out of anger but somehow it's all seen to be my fault because I'm mentally ill!! My mental illness has nothing to do with what happened here today, except maybe in other people's minds. Even the people who know me don't even know me. > > I didn't do anything wrong today. Mom's saying well when *are* you gonna be able to be at an event or a table where there's alcohol and I told her it's different for different people but me being around aunt Susan while she's drinking is a really bad idea for me right now. I like to have fun with people and if Susan is having fun drinking, I'll want to have fun drinking with her. That doesn't mean I'll drink—but why put myself in such a stressful position? Mom doesn't understand where I'm coming from on that one and that's ok but that's a rule I'm setting for myself..for my own safety and development. It's non-negotiable, whether Mom respects it or not. That's part of what's going on over here today. > > I'm going to stop writing because I have no idea if you're even reading these. > > Best to us all as we proceed. > > **Joanne:** Hey, I got your texts and voicemail—just wanted to say that I respect your privacy, and that you haven't made anything worse for me :) > > **ME:** Did you get the one about me protecting my sobriety and sanity at the cost of my relationship with Mom..I thought that one was key. > > She doesn't understand sobriety. She has said before, when I've vocally re-committed to staying sober *today*, "I hope you get past the point where you have to think about it every day." > > Well literally I don't think about it every day. But part of the key to success there is to stay sober for one day—today—and not to ever say, "I'm over it, I no longer have a weakness to alcohol." > > Because people stay sober for 20, 30 years and then go back out, they take a drink and it's because they thought they were over it. > > My fortunes went south in that house once I stopped drinking. Susan literally said to me, "Well, Matt, I know we don't hang out anymore but I just can't think of anything to do that doesn't involve alcohol." > > And even Mom doesn't seem to understand that I'm not "over it"—if I went into an AA meeting for advice about going to a house where alcohol was going to be part of the fun, they would say 1) don't go unless you have an escape plan: your own transportation and another place to go so you can leave under your own power if you need to, and 2) they would suggest that no matter how much or little sobriety time I have, just not going to an event that makes me uncomfortable. > > If I did the opposite, they'd say I'm consciously putting my sobriety at risk—and they'd be right. > > I'm not about to mess with that part of my life which is going well for once. Yesterday I had one year and four months sober. That's the most I've ever had. > > And each day I commit to being sober for just that day—that's how it works for me. > > I'm sorry I messed up Mom's plans, but I cannot responsibly go to that house. > > She took it personally and went crazy on me for this today. > > Damn. I'm an idiot. I had a plan to stop talking to everyone for everyone's safety and I forgot already. If I don't talk to you in the future it's just because I'm too scared to trust even those in this family who still care about me with any new mental health news/diagnoses..because I'm afraid it'll cause me to be discounted more than I already am. I feel like I am put down and marginalized by Leona, [Dad](#), and Mom and it's become almost a joke that every time we have a talk that's hard for them, they say, Are you having a bipolar episode? They're just using it as an excuse to discount what I'm saying, which most of the time isn't being affected by bipolar or anything else. The extended family (Susan et al.) does it even more pronouncedly. It's a farce I want no part of. I'm sorry I should have ignored your communication for simplicity but it's the middle of the night and I simply forgot my new policy of getting as far away from our family as possible. I wish you good things. I won't abandon you, but I should never have been this open tonight. > > **Joanne:** Ok, that's fine, I think it's great that you're protecting your sobriety, and I can only imagine how difficult that is! > > I respect you, and if you want to talk I love to hear your voice, and if you don't want to talk that's ok too :) > > **ME:** If you want to talk, I will always talk with you. > > **Joanne:** Aww! <3 Is there a good time for you today? > > **ME:** Literally any time. We talk a few hours later. > **ME:** Thank you again for talking/listening. I feel very alone due to my health situation and Mom's emotional shut-out of me. I'll be ok (like my zest for life is intact) but a little company helps and I trust you more than I can safely trust anyone right now. No pressure. Really. No pressure. > > **Joanne:** It's fine :) I'm glad we talked :) > > **ME:** Me too. > > I'm sorry I talked so much. Clearly a problem I have right now. I'll work on it. > > I just want *someone* to know what I'm going through over here. ### 164 Did you think my obsessive psychotic emails has reached their limit? *Fuck you!* There *is no* end to my obsessional psychotic email. Here's act II, III, IV, or V in an infinite series of psychotic email. When I look at this sane, I cringe—I am the fool. Everyone else is just standing around like *what the fuck?* One day I wake up early—could be bipolar, could be the medicine, could be my obsession with writing this memoir. I don't know. I do know that at 3:47 this morning my fearful, unruly brain wrote this email to my dad: > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** payment plan? > > Dad, > > You won't even give me the decency of calling me and saying, "I don't ever want to talk to you again, my son." Do you see how weak and cruel that is? You just sit in silence—why would you do that to your firstborn child? > > Why don't you call me ([my phone number]) and we'll set up a payment plan for the [ridiculous amount of money], or whatever it is? I'd like to pay that off, though it would be a slow process, it would make me feel better. > > But you're not even going to give me that, are you? Before, you filed a restraining order against me; now, I suspect you'll take some legal action against me so that you'll never have to talk to me, only your lawyer. > > Let's forget about love and talk about the money for a second. Let this email be on record showing that I am attempting to contact you to pay you back in installments—the only way someone who is disabled and can't get work could possibly pay you back—and that the longer you go without calling me to work out a payment plan or tell me where/how I can send you payments, the more it will work against any legal plan you might have to forcibly take what little money I have. > > I never should have contacted you about this, because if history proves real, you will use this (as you have used everything I've done) against me in some way. But I am attempting to at least pay off the money I owe you, even though you show no signs that you want to act as my father, no signs that you even care about my life-threatening disabilities, and every sign that you have simply moved on from being my parent—but without the guts to own it and inform me that that is the case. All I hear from you is..silence. No calls in years. I don't view that as very responsible parenting behavior. > > It used to hurt me more, but it hurts less and less because..I guess just because of the passage of time. I'd prefer to hear from you what you want or don't want from our relationship (as if one still existed between us) but you seem content to ignore a child you have abused and say nothing. I suspect your mind doesn't want to face the realities of your abuse, and talking to me would certainly stir up those realities for you, and that you're not emotionally strong enough to do that. But that's just my layman's analysis. I could have stopped there, but this quintessential story straps itself inside my mind, barricades, ensconces. Minutes pass, maybe an hour. And I can't keep it to myself—I have to tell him, you, *everyone* two or three times just so you *understand* that *this is a key event* in the formation of me, in the formation of my relationship with my dad, in the formation of how I view men and women differently. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** do you remember a time.. > > ..in Dallas, when you and Mom were arguing. I was 2 or 3 years old and I came to you and asked if you and Mom might be getting a divorce in the future, since you were arguing now. > > (And don't try to say this never happened and that it's some bipolar delusion of mine, because Mom remembers it exactly the same way I do.) > > You answered, "No, son, your mother and I would never get divorced." > > Mom answered, "Well, sometimes people do get divorced, and it is possible that your dad and I might get divorced, but that isn't what's happening right now." > > I believe you were trying to comfort me—and if you were, I appreciate that intention. But that is one of my earliest memories and what *I* took away from it, even at that age, at that very moment, was: Mom is respecting me and giving me an honest answer; Dad is being disrespectful of my intelligence and giving me a dismissive, bullshit answer. > > I knew more about that situation than *you* did, when I was 3 years old. That is just the first instance of many where you have disrespected me, not acknowledged or listened to what I was saying (which was more intelligent and informed and correct than what you were saying) and from the moment you gave me that (comforting?) bullshit answer claiming that you and Mom would never get divorced, I have known since then that you didn't respect me, and I haven't respected you since then—when I was 2 or 3 years old. > > Do you see how early these seeds were sewn by you? Yes, the old *I was superior to you when I was 3* argument—never very popular with the fans. Also never popular: the *blame the other guy for everything* tactic. No one likes that. Being the insensitive, crazy motherfucker that I am, I decide to keep digging. I'm already neck-deep in dirt—might as well try to find China. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** actually > > Dad, > > Please don't call me *[This is an insane request—I can't get him to call me by]* begging *him to call me. There is already almost zero chance that he will call me regardless of* what *I do. It's wishful thinking on my part that I would get any kind of voluntary contact from my dad]*. The last time we spoke on the phone (when I was in Vermont) your denial of the potty-training abuse you did to me made me so angry that that night I was admitted to the ER and was subsequently hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. The fact is your abuse and neglect tickle my bipolar mania and depression and if I'm smart, I need to eliminate all contact with you because for me, with the illnesses I have, it really is a matter of life and death. > > As I mentioned before, I now have another condition, caused by one of the drugs prescribed for me in the psych hospital, that makes me unable to stand or sit without clenching uncontrollably, so I have to spend most of my time lying down. > > I'm not asking for your sympathy or care..I know you probably want to do that, but it's clear to everyone (except maybe you) that you have your own psychological problems (possibly borderline personality disorder) that make it impossible for you to have emotional relationships with any of us. So, please, I am not asking you for something you may not be able to give me. > > But I have been diagnosed with three mental illnesses, two of which increase one's chances of suicide, and you know I have bipolar I disorder, which is extremely difficult to cope with and reduces one's life expectancy by a decade. > > So, really, it's not smart for me to dick around with you about money, our love or lack of it, your denial of abuse, or anything. I have blocked your email, will see if I can block your number (if I even have it) and I will try not to email you or contact you in any way, any more. > > I just have to do this for my health. The hospital experience is very traumatic and I might not survive another one. > > Please leave me at peace to live what life I can live, and I will do my best to do the same for you. > > Matthew I stop for a while, get scared, think of the worst thing that could happen, decide this is an inevitability, and write again. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** actually > > It's important that you don't get a court to drain the little money in my disability account, because that's the money I use to pay for my doctors and medicine, and without my medicine my chances of death go way up. So please don't pull some kind of stunt like that. I am forwarding this to my doctors so that it is on record that you knew that draining my disability money would increase my chances of death *[Total lie—I never had any intention of forwarding this to anyone.]* I don't want you to get away with something like that without the rest of the family having recourse if you cause my death by stealing my disability money. You had the chance yesterday to contact me about a payment plan and did not do so. Really I can't afford psychologically to deal with you any more. Then I get really scared. I try to threaten him but he certainly sees through this to the simple reality that he has a thirty-seven-year-old mentally ill kid who he prefers not to think about (it's inconvenient, he's moved on in his life to a new family that suits him better because they require less effort—they're also intellectually disabled, but hey, if you don't like to be challenged, that's your business). But let's focus on my disabilities since this is my memoir: psychosis. Scared animal trying to defend itself against an enemy that hasn't actually presented itself anywhere but in my mind: > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** actually > > In fact if you attack me legally, I will try a criminal child abuse suit against you for your potty-training abuse of me. So just don't try anything legal or I will come out swinging. You have wronged me greatly and the least you can do is never contact me again. Your emails are automatically being deleted so don't waste your time replying via email. Please don't call me or contact me in any way and if I die before you, you are not invited to the funeral. I will forward this to the family so they know you are not welcome there, if that's the order it goes in *[Again, never any intention of forwarding this to anyone.]* I want nothing to do with you for the rest of my life. In case you hadn't figured it out yet, this is totally untrue. I would give a fucking *hand* to have my dad in my life. All this cutting off contact with my dad—total bullshit, total smokescreen. My dad *cut off contact with me* far before I ever had a clue. I desperately *wish* I was in the power position and could cut him off..but that's not the case. I'm the grown-up puppy still lapping for my daddy's attention—he's the father dog who moved on to a new bitch and a new set of pups long ago. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** actually > > You must think we're all so stupid—either that or you really don't remember. You claim you never left us and went on trips to Florida..I'm living with Mom again and I've got the letters right here..in your handwriting, postmarked from Florida!!! > > Lol Dad..I mean how can you lie when I have indisputable evidence right in front of me??!! You either think I'm that gullible or you are in some extreme denial. > > Joanne told me stories of you fucking with her when she was younger, playing the count-to-100 game..and she would ask if she had said, say, 14 yet, and you would lie and say she hadn't when she had. > > Your lies (head games) have contributed to the mental illness of all three of your children—you are complicit in that and you up and leave us all and Mom has to pick up the pieces. > > I'm working on another memoir and your abuse of me plays prominently in it. I suggest you don't read it, because it might be too hard for you to handle. One thing you and Mom taught us when we were kids is that the truth always comes out eventually..well..that is true for you, too. And don't try to sue me or do any legal action..everything I'm saying in this memoir is true and I have every right to say it. > > I don't believe in god, but if I did, I'd pray for you. Me, sadly, falling back into the humiliator/humiliated pattern—I know that having his secrets exposed is something he fears greatly, and I played that card shamelessly because somewhere in life I learned or decided that once someone crosses the line (of acceptable human decency) it is then ok to treat that person like they are a subhuman piece of shit. I hate that about myself—I'm just being honest here. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** can we just have peace? > > I live my life in fear wondering if you're going to file more legal actions against me, your own son. > > Or that if I speak with you, you will abuse me by lying about the past that we both know is true. > > Your behavior, and I'm not the only one who thinks this (or uses this exact word), is crazy-making. Talking to you makes a person crazy because you deny what we all know is true, you refuse to connect emotionally..it really has been a contributor to my instability in life, especially knowing (based on your actions) that I am not important to you, not a priority in your life. It is maddening..so if that was your goal..then you fucking succeeded. I'm just falling apart here, my mind becoming more disorganized. Obviously that wasn't his goal—he's doing his best, just like everyone. It's just that my father is a very sick man. And instead of stepping up to the plate to help his mentally ill son, my father just backed into the shadows like a scared little kid. The main difference between us in that regard is *I admit I'm sick*. It took a while (decades)..took a few inpatient hospitalizations before I admitted I was sick, that *I* was the cause of my disastrous life, that I really had bipolar disorder and that it was *my* world that was not normal, not all of yours. I am basically living in the Matrix. I am Truman Burbank. Things that are real to you seem fake to me. My world is constructed with lies I can never detect, and even when they're presented to me, I can't tell if they're lies. My texture hallucination—a sign that I'm manic—appears on walls and paper and *it looks real* but *I know it's not real*—*but I don't* quite *know that*. When I'm manic, I can't figure out whether it's real or not, and the fact that earlier in my life, when not manic, I knew it wasn't real, *doesn't help me* make that decision then. It's undecidable—I can't actually tell what's going on. I angered my mother one time we drove through the pharmacy window. She asked me if we were refilling cyclobenzaprine and I said I didn't know. I was ninety-nine percent sure we were because that's the medicine I had requested to be refilled via the pharmacy app. But the text message confirmation that said I had a medicine to be picked up just said that a medicine starting with *C* was ready at the pharmacy..and I take multiple medicines whose names start with *C*. So I didn't really *know* with *one-hundred percent certainty* that the medicine that was ready was cyclobenzaprine. So I said I didn't know. And this set my mom off—to her it indicated that I had a lot less awareness of the situation than I really had—because I was being technical. To most people, ninety-nine percent certain *is* certain. But to me, someone with psychosis, I have to be very precise about what I know and what I don't know. Frankly, I think it's prudent for everyone to doubt what they know—in my observation a lot of what people think they know, they don't have what I would consider sufficient reason to think they know. This morning I was just battling my own shadow. For all I know, my dad has a Gmail filter to delete all my email, too. I was just arguing with everything I feared, and it didn't have a tangible connection to my dad (in the present moment, in his current incarnation, with what he's actually done about our loan). I was doing something I always hate when other people do with me: have a relationship with me that doesn't actually involve me, but is just them working out their own shit with me as their punching bag. But, this morning, I couldn't stop. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** also > > If you get a court to drain my funds *[Yes, really, I'm continuing on this subject]*—*unbelievable!]*, or if I end up in a psych hospital or dead, my disability will go away, and Mom depends on that too, so please don't do anything like that if you have any caring left in your heart, because it could cause Mom to become homeless if that money is cut off. These are the the things I worry about now that I have a little bit of money. I want to pay you back in installments but I can't trust you to communicate with me safely *[That is certainly true—no psychosis there]*, so for my own mental health and life safety, I can't do that right now. If you have Leona send me your address I'll send you checks once I get a real bank account set up. I want to pay you back—regardless of what you believe about my lack of character and "work ethic", which you have made very clear in the past—and I will pay you back in full, eventually. Please just ask Leona to send me your mailing address or bank routing/account numbers and I will pay you that way. Actually, no, fuck it, there are ways to send money through email now..I'll figure out how to do that, and pay you back that way, that way we don't have to have any exposure to one another. I'll send you some money asap. My obsession takes a few steps backwards, but not all the way out of the room. The email money transfer solution placates me—I *really* want to pay my dad back, and I *really* don't want to delete my Gmail filter..part of what keeps me sane is not hearing anything that comes from within that man's head. An hour passes. I do other things. At 10:29am I feel compelled to send the following email. My hope tells me it will be the last one I ever send. My obsession knows that can't possibly be true. > **To:** Van > > **Subject:** all you want > > All you want from me is money. Well, believe me, that's all you're going to get *[Borrowing a little here from Princess Leia's classic scolding of Han Solo: "If money is all that you love, then that's what you'll receive.”]* From now on, the only communication you're going to get from me is email money transfers. And once the last one of those is sent, you'll never hear from me again. That's what it's like to be paranoid, folks (and an insensitive, hurtful bastard—or maybe a sufferer of bipolar disorder who doesn't have the full degree of control afforded a mentally healthy person). Yes, my paranoia is rooted in reality—most paranoia is. Being psychotic, I am told I have a reduced ability to accurately determine the probability that my dad will get a court to drain my bank account to pay a tiny fraction of what I owe him for my film school tuition. I get irrationally, unnecessarily worried and I write multiple emails, trying to position myself strategically relative to my dad (who is less of an enemy than I fear him to be but more of an enemy than I would like him to be), trying to box my dad in out of a desire to defend myself against attacks from him (I can't tell anymore if they're real or imagined). I think I used to have boundaries but I lost them. Now I wrongly think that everyone is accessible to me, that I can impose on anyone's time or mind, when I never used to think that. I'm having to learn boundaries again and I'm not even sure I want to. Instead, I go crazy. I write my dad nine email messages between 3:47am and 10:29am. The link is one way—my Gmail filter doesn't just archive messages from my dad, it *deletes* them upon receipt. That's for my own personal safety. *That's* how mad my dad makes me. Listening to him deny the horrible shit he's done to me literally puts me in the hospital and like I said, I can't afford to go there again. I used to write chain emails like these to my boss in California. I thought it was because I was drunk—but I was drunk all the time, and it turns out I do the same exact thing when I'm sober, except now I send them to my dad. I tried to use that California boss as a father figure. It's partially obsession, partially graphomania, and partly a need to be heard. Unfortunately, people don't like to read lengthy chains of email, or, really, to read much of anything at all. If someone mass-emailed me like that, I wouldn't like it. I know (sometimes, later) that my paranoia is paranoia, but I am compelled to write about it anyway. You may know that graphomania is defined as *the obsessive impulse to write*, but the etymology is far more telling—*graphomania* comes from the Greek words for *writing* and *insanity*. ### 165 So, I mean half my family ignores me, the other half hates me, the remaining two percent are keeping my ass alive, so forgive me if I'm a little crazy. If I sent cry-for-help text messages to my aunt, she ignores me—like, just never fucking responds. If I send her a stupid joke from the internet, she responds right away. My cousin, her son, doesn't respond to anything serious or deep either. Not just my immediate family, but my extended family too, is not a family. It is—as Joanne says—"a collection of individuals." My mom, my sisters, my friend Ashley, they've had my back when I was homeless or suicidal or just getting out of the hospital. But even after my suicide attempt, I sent an email to my family being honest with them about why I was in a psych hospital for the last three and a half weeks. I don't think anybody responded. But that's ok. I'm used to being alone because very few people know what to say to me. Eventually I ended up living with Leona, my sister, seven years younger than me. I don't know if Mom and Dad just didn't know what to say? Were in denial? But I mean how do you think that feels when your own parents don't come to your rescue..when they don't even hit "reply." How do you think I got this way? - - - - Writing Davina's book with TD—some days I was typing with one finger I was in so much pain, then discovering the prone typing position, finding a doctor while Joanne was here visiting, going to AA, working through various sponsors. Sticking with the meditation meeting. Making a year sober. I write a blog post to mark the occasion: > Just for Today > > I have been sober for one year today. For purists (and I am one) that's much more accurately stated as 365 sober days in a row. You can't get sober for a year, you can't get sober for a lifetime, you can't get sober for a week. You can get sober for a minute, 10 minutes, an hour, an afternoon, maybe even a day. Staying sober for some time is like painting a wall—except you're not allowed to use a brush or a roller..you have to use a Q-tip, and you have to paint one spot each day, and you can only paint one spot each day. It's like writing a book, actually. In school, if you were halfway smart, you could write all your 10-page papers the night before. You can't write a book "the night before"—you have to write a few pages every day for months or years. With sobriety and writing, you can't skip ahead and it doesn't help to get stuck in what you already did—it's a one day at a time sort of thing. > > Recovering addicts pay a massive price to learn that the only way to move forward at all is by taking "baby steps". Baby steps are from *What About Bob?*, a comedic movie about what sanity is and what madness is. If you are mad underneath but on the surface sane, *What About Bob?* will unnerve you. You'll wonder who the hero is and who is the villain. *The Royal Tenenbaums* has a similar effect on those who are from pathologically evil families, and who have not dealt with that (with a therapist). Anyway Bob from *What About Bob?* cannot make it down a hallway without taking "baby steps". He cannot psychologically "make it" from 2pm to 4pm without taking baby steps—he looks at the clock and manages his thinking in terms of one- or five-minute intervals. It sounds silly but "baby steps" resound as one of the most crucial paradigms in our world—all from a very silly screenplay by Tom Schulman (who by the way also wrote a very serious screenplay called *Dead Poets Society*. Of course this idea is older than Tom Schulman—the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu most famously stated it: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." > > When you are addicted, you are not in control. This goes for all sorts of substances and in fact also goes for non-substance-related behaviors like work and obsessive-compulsive behavior. People are addicted to power, sex, their own image. I believe that, of these, substance abuse at least is coexistent with a whacked-out relationship with the present moment. For me, substance abuse has most of the time been a way to either hold on to a moment that I love or a way to make a moment I dislike, go away. I've used alcohol along with music to return to the same emotional moment again and again..long enough to write a book that oozes that emotion when read. If you read about writers, you will quickly see that there is far more than a casual correlation between writers and alcoholism—it's less like a correlation and more like a death knell. So the moment hurts—there's a drug for that. Or the moment is ecstasy—there's a drug for that, too. If you had the ability to manipulate your mind to dull the pain that someone you loved is dead, would you do it? If you had the power to feel more godlike/beautiful/sexy than you could have previously even *imagined*, to have orgasms that are 40 times more powerful than a normal, already mind-blowing orgasm, would you do it? For the extra-intelligent, exploratory person, the answer is more often yes than for people who have a greater ability to just accept the world they are given. I've said yes many times to drugs that I used to control my state in so many moments. For a while they worked for me. Then, as any addict will tell you, the drugs turned on me. I was no longer controlling the moment with drugs—drugs were controlling me. There's that saying: *You don't do drugs. Drugs do you.* Well, that's true. Now's a good time to stop, make yourself a screwdriver, and come back when you're ready. ### 166 Everyone refreshed? Let's continue. > People who have never done serious drugs sometimes say things like: *Why would you ever do that? It just destroys you, it just* kills *your body.* They haven't made a very obvious inference, and the answer to their question is this: Look at what pain and death I am willing to inflict on my body and my family and my life. Don't you think I must be getting something *phenomenal*, something *extraordinary*, in return? We addicts *do* get something in return for this crazy trade: *we get to feel good*, even if it's just for a few seconds. A young woman told me this story once: She said: "I dropped out of college 'cause I was spending all my money on drugs, skipping all my classes, and there was no point. So I went home for a few weeks to get ready for a road trip. I was going out west, because I had never seen Utah and I'd heard it was like *soul-fillingly* beautiful. I was standing in the corn field talking to my dad and he said, 'Laura, I don't understand why you feel you need to go on this trip. There's nothing special in Utah. You're just going to end up on drugs again, homeless, a prostitute, and two or three years from now I'll get a call from you.' And I said, 'I *have* to go to Utah. There are rock structures and canyons and hot springs in Arizona. How come *you* never went to Arizona? Didn't you ever want to see something other than Ohio?' Dad is quiet. I say, 'Why didn't you ever try drugs? Don't you want to see what Native Americans see when they're on peyote? There's a whole spiritual world out there that you can't just stand around in your corn field waiting for your heart and your spirit to be filled with!! You have to seek it out!!' And my father looked at me and he said, 'I can't imagine what it must be like to be you. You are my precious child and I hate to see that your heart hurts and I hate watching you try to fill it.' He went back to his work in the field. And I screamed: 'DON'T YOU WANT YOUR HEART TO FEEL THAT PEACE, THAT UNIVERSAL PEACE THAT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT?!' My dad looks up at me and says, 'Laura, I already have that peace.'" That was the end of her story. I'll connect the dots a little: *Smarter People Are More Likely To Be Mentally Ill* and to be alcoholics and drug addicts: > > In modern life, the opportunity to imbibe—or to otherwise ingest mind-altering substances—presents an "evolutionarily novel" situation explored more readily by the smarter, bolder ones among us. In fact, the correlation is so strong scientists say the inverse is true: People of lower intelligence are the least likely to drink or use drugs. Now, scientists have identified a biomolecular connection between curiosity as a trait and intelligence in general, as evidenced by a 2009 study in Neuron from researchers at the University of Toronto and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital. Specifically, the neuronal calcium sensor-1 protein was associated in a mouse model with spatial memory and curiosity. Interestingly, that same protein has been linked in humans to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. > > I don't know much about AA. I've been to AA or NA meetings over four distinct periods. Even telling you that, I am breaking one of the integral rules of all 12-step groups, which is that members remain anonymous. I've been schooled by long-time members of AA about breaking this rule and I do believe it is one of the most important features that makes the organization work. However, I believe breaking that rule is sometimes necessary to do the most useful thing overall. For the purpose of this post, telling you a little about my AA experience, even though it is outside the context of AA is, I believe, a good compromise. Once, early in a period of sobriety, I told what someone had shared in one meeting, to some other people in the same AA circles who were not in that meeting, and they sternly informed me that *What happens in a meeting, stays in that meeting.* They were right—I stood corrected. Each AA meeting is anonymous even from other AA meetings in the same town. It's an *ad hoc* meeting and when it's over, baby, keep it to yourself. It's an important rule to protect the safety of those who share: Let's say a husband and wife are both AA members in the same town. The wife might share something in a meeting where her husband is not in attendance *that she does not want him to hear*. If I share what she shared with other alcoholics outside of that meeting, it might compromise her ability to share safely in meetings. It's an extremely important rule—which people break constantly so that they can pass along wisdom from one group to another. AA members break their own rules all the time: there is a guideline prohibiting "crosstalk", which is interrupting someone else while they're talking, or sharing directly *at* someone, giving them advice instead of sharing your own experience, strength, and hope. It's sad to hear some "old-timers" share at newer members week after week, giving them advice, never sharing a thing about themselves or their own journey. If AA ever became that for me, I might as well be drinking. > > I said I don't know much about AA, and that's true. I've read about 25 pages of the Alcoholics Anonymous book, begrudgingly. I've done hardly anything my sponsor has asked me to do and I am surprised he is still willing to be my sponsor. I only go to one meeting a week, which is frowned upon by my AA friends. (This is mostly due to the fact that I am in chronic pain, have a serious movement disorder that makes it impossible to sit still or stop uncontrollable clenching of my muscles. I'm forbidden to drive by my psychiatrist, I don't have a car anyway, and the one meeting I go to is a meditation meeting, so I am able to lie down during the meditation part of the meeting and sit extremely awkwardly and painfully for the open-sharing part of the meeting.) (I'm not against meetings. When I got sober in Tucson I went to three or four meetings *a day* for the first few months.) I do listen carefully in meetings and I sometimes pick up wisdom from other addicts. When I was talking with my AA friend Glory about how little I know about AA, she said, "That's ok, because this isn't a program of knowledge or understanding. It's not even a program about feelings. It's a program of action. It's a program of doing." > > The American philosopher William James thought along similar lines: > > Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. > > So it doesn't matter how I feel. I don't have to feel right or wise or successful with respect to AA, I don't even have to feel like being sober, I just have to *do* being sober. That is a very weird way of thinking for me—I am a thinker and a feeler and sometimes I start with feeling and thought about a writing project and then move to the action of writing. But the AA way of staying sober doesn't work that way—it works by taking action first and letting the thoughts and feelings come later. So *that's* something I know about AA-style sobriety. I—perhaps accidentally—got this right during this period of sobriety: I started going to AA meetings before I stopped drinking and before I met AA's one requirement for membership (a desire to stop drinking). When I went to AA this time, I did not have the desire to stop drinking. I had the desire to *keep* drinking! But I went anyway—I took action before I had the right feeling—and a month later I finally stopped. > > Now I'm going to tell you the handful of things I know about getting clean and sober the AA/NA way. None of these are original to me—I learned them all from wiser creatures I met along the way =) Live in the moment. Live for today. Don't beat yourself up over yesterday and don't get overwhelmed by tomorrow. Do something you can actually do something about, which is this moment and this moment only. This is the most important thing I know about living sober and living life in general. I certainly consider this a type of meditation, and as such, regardless of how long any of us does it, we will always be beginners. When you start to fret that you're not doing things the right way, when you want to do more but don't know what to do, just chill. You don't actually have to work AA "the right way" or *do more* in order to succeed or survive "the program". All you have to do is just *don't make things worse* by picking up a drink or a drug today. Life doesn't actually require your help for things to go well—the world is designed to go wonderfully for you—the universe wants every good thing for you. Before you try to help it go better, first, do no harm. As a drinker, as an addict, I was doing way more work than necessary. The more days in a row I don't make things worse by drinking or drugging—even if that's all I do—the more my life gets better. In the same vein, I called my sponsor. I said, "I didn't go to a meeting today! I'm freaking out!" My sponsor says, "Are you drunk?" I said, "No." He said, "Then you're doing something right!" The point is that AA is an amazing tool, but even AA is not the point. The point is to live a happy life. I didn't get sober to go to AA meetings; I got sober so I could be happier and more loving and more creative and productive! AA is part of that for me, but being in AA is not the overarching goal of my life. When you think about using, ask yourself this question: "Did I ever wake up and say, gee, I wish I had used yesterday?" This is from Tom, my first sponsor, a fucking spiritual master and in order to gain this wisdom he had to lose his wife, his kids, his job, his dignity and almost his life..which is usually the type of thing you have to go through to get even the slightest handle on the deepest truths of this world. When I had two days clean and Tom had two years, I asked him, "How do you know you're not wasting your time—that you won't relapse someday? How do you know each day invested in sobriety is worth it? How do you know you're going to get two more years?" He looked at me and he said, "Well, Matthew, I *don't* know—I just know I'm going to stay clean today." In my mind, before he said that, I thought getting clean was like graduating from school—you do it once and then you're done, you're clean, you're educated, graduated..you move on to the next phase. Some magical transformation happens after which I will no longer be an addict. After 18 years of using and stopping and using and stopping, I can say that that doesn't seem to be the case for me. There's no fast-forward button. You're painting a wall. You can't use a brush; you can't use a roller. You have a Q-tip, and you get to paint exactly one spot each day. If you stick to what you can actually do *each day*, then each day is exceedingly easy, fantastically fun, and over time you will paint that wall..or live your life..the way a spiritual master would: with ease (expending the littlest effort possible), with elegance (making graceful transitions from this moment to the next), and with lightness (letting go of everything that doesn't matter). ### 167 I talk with Joanne on the phone. She tells me about her improv. I tell her about my writing. I tell her about my problems with Mom. I guess I go on too long because Joanne reflects back to me that it's ok to go on extended speeches with her but to try to keep it short around people like Mom because it might make them think I'm doing worse mentally. I write her this text immediately after our conversation: > I'm so glad we can discuss deep things about art. After our conversation I told Mom (jokingly) that I was giving her full credit for raising such a wonderful, wonderful woman as you. I appreciate so much that we can talk about deep and far out and abstract things. I am used to most people simply dismissing me as crazy when they don't understand me, and sometimes (just now was an example) when I mention radical ideas to Mom she gets frustrated and angry, and it messes up the whole vibe of our conversation. And I feel like she doesn't accept me. I know she loves me—she takes care of me in so many ways. But she does not like radical ideas about what to me is the evil of money (and all trade), and she absolutely hates any scientific data suggesting (the following is real data) that cannabis, ecstasy, and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. I told her the other day that right before the FDA classified all the bad drugs not to take, Congress passed a law excluding alcohol and tobacco from the list of drugs to be classified..and the law specifically states that the reason for excluding them is because of their relationship to the IRS..ie we are making too much tax money off these extremely dangerous drugs to make them illegal. One in five deaths in the US is caused by tobacco. How is that not a Class I substance? Because in this particular case, the law, or lack of law, is designed to generate tax dollars at an extremely high cost of human life. Anyway, whatever, maybe it's because her dad died of drinking alcohol, but she does not like to hear that alcohol, which is legal and has little stigma, is more dangerous than ecstasy, which is illegal and has great stigma. Maybe you don't want to hear about this either. Mostly, lately, I just try to shut my effing mouth and put my thoughts into my books. Everything I say to Mom invites a criticism. Sometimes she just walks out of the room when I'm talking (although she says I walk out abruptly in the middle of us watching tv together, so maybe it runs in the family). I kinda cut my ties with my AA group because we're moving, I got so incredulous when the daily meditation book my sponsor and I both used to read from used the phrase "spiritual success". I was like: these people have no idea what spirituality is if they think it's something that is well characterized by success and failure. That's the last meditation I've read from that book, I stopped talking to my sponsor, and the very next day I felt so much better. My writing was happy, I felt empty and free. I love the AA meeting I go to here but I just found out one of my favorite people is also leaving. I'm doing pretty well right now..I'm not mad about this stuff I'm just not in the mood to waste my time. My sponsor is wise in a way but she's also full of platitudes—"pride is pity in reverse". Ok, I get that, but that doesn't mean that having pride in your work means you're about to pop open a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Like I'm unable to use the word "pride" around my sponsor or she'll go off in some teaching mode. Idk. She helped me stay sober for over a year. Maybe it's time to move on, for me, and I'll find AA communities in Nashville that will be right for me as my sobriety continues. I feel optimistic, I just wanted to say a few things. If you don't want me to share on certain topics, or in certain forums, or at all, just let me know and I'll be quiet. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable or certainly not angry just because I mention a certain thought. I said to Mom that I thought money and equal rights were contradictory. It was right after she said we should get the money out of politics. What I said went too far for her, she got frustrated, then angry and short with me. It just makes me not want to speak—I'll just keep it in the books. ### 168 As I'm sober longer, more and more feelings come out. I am no longer numb. My bipolar is less and less controlled. Even on an antidepressant, I cry at the drop of a hat. My emotions of anger and love and even pure bliss overtake me and I'm impossible to talk to. I try not to talk with anyone, because none of us are on the same page. People who love me think it's weird when I express joy with tears. I am talking about the beauty and wonder and shock of the world and no one, but no one, is getting it. When you're drunk you go on wild rampages on Twitter and email and in person and say and do all these crazy things and after a while once you start to do some real damage, you say, I better stop drinking. So you stop drinking. But when you're bipolar you find out that stopping drinking doesn't do shit to change your behavior! Those wild things you said and crazy rampages you went on?—You would have done those stone cold sober. It's maddening. Your friends can stop doing drugs and have normal lives and jobs and babies and husbands and wives. But when I, for example, stop drinking, stop drugging, it gets worse. The things I say when I'm drunk are *fairytales* compared to the things I say when I'm sober. You can't drink—'cause that causes its own problems. But you can't stay sober, either, because drinking, in my case, *was helping to calm me down*. Drunk, I'm terrible—I'm a menace, I'm a criminal. But sober—and bipolar—I'm one of the most dangerous elements around. Certainly in an emotional sense, a social sense. Maybe in a physical sense, too. Most people drink to get crazy. I'm crazy as a baseline. My normal brain will violate every rule, cross every boundary, care about nothing, destroy relationships *without even knowing it*. When I'm doing manic shit, I don't know it! *I have no idea!* Only when I see the horrified look on your face do I start to think that what I'm doing is crazy..and that look in your face is my only reference to normal—there's not one inside me. To me, suicidally depressed, regular mood, and guerrilla manic *all feel the same*. I don't know if I'm making love to you or scaring the crap out of you. I don't know if I just made the best presentation my boss had ever seen or gleefully said the most obscene phrase his upper-crust ass has ever heard *in his life*. I don't know if I'm getting promoted or fired! I have almost no handle on this shit except for other people's reactions—and I don't even see those half the time. I am *open* emotionally, and it makes people just as uncomfortable as if I was standing naked before them. I post: > "It's so beautiful to feel" > > I cry. > > I cry because I have bipolar. I cry because I feel. I cry because when I witness harsh, deep, true beauty, it touches me. > > That kind of beauty can only touch you if you're open, defenseless, willing to be hurt. > > I told my mom about *In Bruges* this morning, that I watched it a second time last night, and I cried when I told her about it. It is a subtly, realistically touching movie—but "touching" is not the first word most people would think of to describe it. And I didn't cry when I told my mom about it because it's touching—I cried because it's one of the very best pieces of writing I've ever had the privilege to witness as a human being. > > I thought for a moment that great writing touches me because writing is what I love to do most myself. > > But that's not it. > > When I went to see the Basquiat exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2005, I brought my sunglasses with me because I knew that seeing that man's art in person would make me cry. Basquiat blows me away. And seeing those paintings up close, seeing how big some of them are..for me it was overwhelming. Emotionally. Spiritually. For me that's one part of what it means to be human, and that is *to stand in awe*. I think it is a very appropriate paradigmatic stance, a very appropriate stature for us to embody, precisely because we are tiny, tiny beings who live among the stars, among universes inside universes, inside slowly spinning nebulas, inside a Great Mystery, and so *awe* is maybe the rightest emotion we can feel. > > Awe in another human being. > > Awe at the clouds. > > Awe at the Grand Canyon. > > Awe at an ocean storm off the coast of South America. > > Awe at the youngest girl to sail around the world alone. > > Awe at Yusuf Islam singing *[The Wind]*. > > Awe at reading *The Catcher in the Rye*, *Glengarry Glen Ross*, or watching *Pulp Fiction*. > > Awe at the bloody, screaming, miracle birth of a new person. > > Standing with my best friend in the quietest place I've ever been: miles and miles inside Allegheny National Forest at the top of a mountain plateau, in snow we had not prepared for, among leafless trees, with no sounds of any other animals, no wind, just complete, blanketed silence that I have never heard before or since. Part of the awe and humility of that situation is that we were not equipped to handle the cold that could have killed us. Starting a fire was impossible. No one would hear us even if we screamed—that near-complete isolation is terrifying, but you accept it, and it is beauty. > > Facing your death is terrifying, but you accept it, and it is beauty. > > Solo camping is terrifying. But then, when you've done it a few times and you're at the top of a mountain in Tucson with the rattlesnakes and the elk and the little bunny rabbits and the pumas and the saguaro cacti, you have to face a simple, laughing truth: which is that we can all die anyway, at any time, all the time—we just usually don't think about it. > > I woke up with a famous quote from Faulkner jangling around my head: > > "Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." > > I was thinking, in my first thoughts of the day, that there is an uncrossable line between every pair of us. I think this is by definition, for if you could know and feel and be made of my experiences or memories, there would be no difference between us, and one of us would be unnecessary. The Dub Pistols suggest that there are Six Million Ways To Live. Right. I am my point of view, my process for doing things on this lucky little ball of green and blue. I can never cross into the Basquiat way of living, of seeing, of creating, of painting. > > No. Basquiat will always be the only one of him. You will always be the only one of you who ever lived, with your wisdoms and talents and children and friends. So like Faulkner says, competition and comparison with others is the lesser striving—the truest competition is only with yourself—because of that uncrossable line. It doesn't make any sense for me to say, "Gosh, I really wish I was Shawn Johnson winning the gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics balance beam event." > > What makes sense is for me to stand in awe, as I stand in awe of the literal stars, at this pinnacle human performance that took one person a lifetime to build, which will always stand as one of the most perfect things that anyone has ever done with their body, their mind, their emotions, and yes—their spirit. Shawn John makes me cry, too. > > One of my great teachers, Rebecca Lamb, simply said to me, over and over, "It's so beautiful to feel." How right you are, old friend. Don't doubt that your words will never leave me, or that they describe even the younger me who existed long before we ever met. > > I may cry more at human greatness because I have bipolar disorder. I would bet that is a factor. But I think it would be unwise to discount my perspective on this basis. Some people are especially intuitive. Some people are especially smart. We don't discount dogs because they have a wonderful sense of smell—we put them to use! We put our smart people to use with some small rate of efficiency—most are marginalized or discounted. A few of us are either intuitive ourselves or recognize intuition in others. I have learned that when my mother has an intuitive feeling about a situation or person—even if it makes absolutely no sense to my own perceptions and thinkings and machinations—I better give a hard look at my mom's intuition, because *that* motherfucker is *finely* tuned. > > My tears are like a divining rod for beauty, and they detect their target better than any stud finder or Wall Street trading strategy. I love to write, yes, but by the wisdom of Rebecca's proverb, if I had the choice of writing for the rest of my life, or wandering around MoCA weeping before Basquiats, I might just choose the latter. ### 169 Legal classifications matter. Back then ecstasy was considered a dangerous party drug and there were all these scary ads and exposés on TV about people dying in dance clubs. And yes, MDMA is still classified on the FDA's list of dangerous drugs. But now we know, from many scientific studies, that ecstasy, along with pot and LSD, are incontrovertibly less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes. So what difference does it make? My girlfriend is still dead, right? Well, the doctors who looked at her said, "This doesn't look like a drug overdose. The usual signs of massive organ failure that we would associate with a drug overdose are just not here. We see massive bone fragmentation, decomposition, porousness, due to bulimia. And the same thing probably would have happened to her if she had taken a Sudafed." But instead of all this time me thinking, oh, we did a drug that scientists say is safer than alcohol and cigarettes, I've been thinking: *Stupid, stupid, stupid, I gave my girlfriend some freaky, dangerous, illegal drug than neither of us should have been taking in the first place.* And a lot of people reading this are still gonna think that: my mom for example gets very uncomfortable when I talk about any illegal drug. A lot of people put stock in the US government's classification of evil drugs. But it's completely unscientific—and by the way it's completely rigged. Right before the DEA classified and illegalized all those drugs, Congress passed a law saying that alcohol and tobacco would be excluded from the classification *because they were being taxed*..*because we were making so much money off them*..so people like my mom (no offense) who put stock in the DEA's drug classifications are trusting a source that is not even as disinterested and dispassionate as a scientific study is supposed to be. There are a lot of people—let's take my grandmother—who think there is a strong equivalence between moral rightness and human law..or think there should be. But anyone who thinks deeper, any smart person in any time of history, knows that the common knowledge is not always right, morally or scientifically—and many have been executed by their governments by speaking some kind of "truth," some kind of dissension, whether it be moral or scientific. Some of the rules are not there to keep you safe—they're there to control you and to stunt your development. Anyway a person like me, who's been beating myself up for years with guilt over handing a twenty-year-old *who I loved*—who I was *in love with*—a dose of ecstasy that seemed to play prominently in her death..when I, who have been carrying this heavy piece of history like a Pilgrim's burden, am lightened somewhat by this news, it sets a tiny wrong right. It doesn't un-coma my girlfriend. It doesn't un-die her. It doesn't take back her beautiful organs and un-donate them to fortunate strangers. But it makes me feel like less of a criminal—my guilt has partly been about the fact that "the drug that killed her" was illegal—when science believes now I would have done her more of a disservice, chemically, by offering her a cigarette and doing shots of Absolut all night (which was definitely not the experience we were going for). So legal classifications *do* matter. The fact that cigarettes aren't included on the DEA's list of bad, bad drugs has certainly killed more people than ecstasy ever will—especially given that tobacco is responsible for one out of every five deaths in the US. That omission—the omission of tobacco—from the FDA's list of *drugs not to try*, which was voted on and passed by Congress, has probably been one of the deadliest acts in history. Ditto the omission of alcohol. People like my mom have a reluctant understanding, and people like my grandmother have zero understanding, that, yes, sometimes the rules are there to keep you safe—but *sometimes*, and this is one of those cases, the rules are there to keep you addicted to something the government has a stable tax arrangement with, which they know is killing you at alarming rates. The hard truth is that the people who get very very rich off that fact that one-fifth of the US citizens who die each year die from tobacco..those profiteers have made a decision, whether they allow themselves to realize this consciously or not, to take the money at your expense. The expense of your life, your premature death, your suffering at the hands of a zillion forms of cancer. My grandmother's husband died from drinking alcohol—but I bet you my two front teeth that that woman would defend the government to her death that alcohol is safer than LSD. Even very smart people confuse legality with scientific or moral rightness—don't you be one of the ones who makes that mistake. Additionally, the US suffers from what engineering corporations call *not made here* syndrome—meaning that if we didn't make it ourselves, it couldn't possibly be of any value. Let's say you were in charge of US drug policy, how would you go about deciding what the laws would be? If the US was the best in the world in terms of its drug record—lowest percentage of deaths from drug overdose, lowest percentage of addicts—then you might do your own research into how you could extend the frontier of drug policy excellence—which you occupied..you were the frontrunner in this area. But that is not the case. We have a pitiful record in terms of those statistics and so *going it alone*—that most foolish part of American exceptionalism—going it alone isn't the smartest strategy. A smart person faced with such a problem would humbly realize that other countries, through policies much different than our own, have amazingly low incidences of overdose and addiction. Then that smart person would simply copy or adapt policies from the world leader in this area into our own system, theoretically producing some of the same results as the world leader in this area. I don't know what's wrong with us: the US is either too proud to adopt systems similar to other countries' drug and health care systems that work better than ours, or our rich, detached, isolated, prideful lawmakers *just don't give a fuck* that regular people are dying because they choose to re-invent the wheel with every policy—or, as lately, they sit in the garage inventing nothing while collecting a paycheck. This paycheck, while large by the standards of the average American wage earner, is tiny compared to the money they're being paid by corporations to sit there quietly while corporations like Exxon and BP destroy the planet and corporations like Walmart don't even pay their employees enough to buy food without relying on government programs. This is not the picture of people who are trying to get something done. It is the picture of complacency—a government made up of millionaires who take their orders from billionaires, about half of whom inherited their money from their parents. The Koch brothers, the Waltons—they inherited their money—they don't know shit about the virtual myth of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." They don't know shit. They never started a business from scratch. They never worked in a company they didn't own. Their parents were rich—that's the only reason they're rich. Their riches didn't take skill, intelligence, hard work—all those values that are put in place to keep poor people working for the rich, nursing the hope that someday they'll be rich too. Check your email: *The American Dream* has always been a lie to keep poor people working for rich people in perpetuity with no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—at least not for you. ### 170 One day, after the meditation portion of the AA meeting I go to, is over, I quietly get up and leave the room. I have already stopped talking to my sponsor. I have stopped telling Mom every detail of my day—it's just an opportunity for her to get upset, object, and instruct me on how better to live my life. Her advice is good, I'm just not in the mood to be taught, constantly, by others. I post my thoughts on my blog, which I'm 99% sure no one in my family reads anyway: > Your lack of acceptance is your irrelevance > > I go to an AA meeting every week at a Buddhist temple. At least I used to. > > It's a meditation meeting—my favorite kind of AA meeting. I've been to similar meetings in other towns. The format is roughly half an hour of meditation followed by half an hour of people sharing their experiences with alcohol and other drugs, or their experiences with meditation. > > The last time I went to this meeting, the home group member who happened to be chairing the meeting that night announced that the monks who graciously let us use their temple had asked that we not lie down during meditation, to honor their traditions. > > Well, it happens that right now I only go to one meeting a week, and the reason I go to that meditation meeting is that I had been able to lie down during meditation, with my head on my meditation cushion and my body pointed into the center of our circle of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. The reason I used to lie down during that meditation is that I have tardive dyskinesia, a permanent damaging of the dopamine receptors in my brain by antipsychotic medication that was prescribed to me years ago by a psychiatrist in a psych hospital. The brain needs enough dopamine in the area in the brain where dopamine is usable, in order to coordinate muscle movements. Because of the damage to my brain, I don't have enough dopamine in the usable area. For the last two years, muscles in my mouth, lips, tongue, neck, arms, hands, shoulders, torso, stomach, eyelids! (etc.) have been clenching, moving, thrashing, sometimes punching uncontrollably. It's a significant challenge because it makes you look really crazy and a lot of people don't want to interact with a person who looks really crazy. In fact tardive dyskinesia increases your chance of suicide because being out of control of your body, socially impaired, unable to do most tasks, unable to work a job, and in constant pain does (for me) sometimes create a daunting feeling that makes me feel like it will be impossible to live the rest of my life like this. > > Luckily there is good news. For most people with TD, the symptoms go away when they're sleeping. I am very fortunate that when I lie down, my clenching reduces to a level low enough that I can breathe through it, consciously making it go away. When I sit or stand, the clenching returns instantly, but when I lie on my back or my front, my clenching lessens to a level where I can type with both hands, talk on the phone, use a touch screen device somewhat accurately, drink liquids (only with a straw, though—without the straw I spill!!), and eat (though sometimes with a different utensil than I'd use otherwise). Lying down has helped keep me sane while my mom and I work with doctors to try to find ways to lessen the symptoms of this permanent brain damage that was done by one of my psych meds *[Note that I am unwilling to mention the psych med by name that all of my doctors tell me caused my TD—in this world, even though I am the injured party, I know there is a chance that if I mention the medicine that fucked up my dopamine receptors, the manufacturer of that medicine might be able to sue me and win (what, exactly?)—but think about that for a second: it is prudent for me not to offend the manufacturer of a medicine that hurt* me*.]* > > So I lie down 23 hours a day, about. When I'm sleeping I lie on my back, and most of my waking hours I spend lying on my front, my neck propped up by pillows. I stand and walk for 5 minutes here or there. I try to sit up for part of lunch. But I can't sit for an hour—sitting for half an hour produces severe muscle spasms and pain. > > My meditation meeting—the only AA meeting I was going to—was a lifesaver. I could lie down for the first 30 minutes, in the dark, when everybody should be paying attention to their own meditation and not worrying about anyone else's meditation. I never fell asleep during meditation, I didn't snore. And by the way, there's another guy in that meeting who lies down or sort of leans on his pillow during meditation—he recently had a heart attack and my view is that anything we can do to accommodate him, to keep him with us longer, we should do. > > The last time I went to this meeting, I heard the announcement that we were being asked by the monks not to lie down during meditation in order to honor their traditions, I said to myself: Ok, I'll see if I can make it the whole hour sitting up. I would consider it potentially a lot ruder to lie down during the discussion period than the meditation period—when someone is telling me their pain, their joy, their wisdom, I want to look into that person's eyes. So I sat for that half an hour meditation. It started out uncomfortable, then painful, and then I heard myself, in my mind, use the word "torture" to describe what I was feeling. And when I realized that's how bad it was, I made the decision to leave when the meditation was over. That was the hardest meditation sit I've ever had, and I can assure you I was not calmly focusing on my breathing—the type of meditation this group recommends. > > As soon as the ending bell rang, while the lights were still dim, I gathered my things and left the beautiful meditation space these monks let us use for free. Normally a 12-step group pays a small amount of rent to the owner of the space where they meet. These monks refuse to accept money from us—they're literally *giving* us the use of their space for one hour a week—we just give our rent money to other AA groups. After the meditation, I went outside and—since I can't drive safely with TD—my mom drove me home. > > Now, I don't know if the monks who run that temple actually made the no-lying-down request (they're not present in the temple while we run our group—are they spying on us through the windows?) or if that was just the excuse made by someone or someones in our AA group wanting to impose that restriction because *they* felt lying down disrespected their rules of meditation, or what—I have no idea. But I do know this: I'll not pick a fight with a monk. > > =) > > Here's how I know that my spiritual practice is working: I didn't feel mad about this event. I don't feel mad now. I haven't felt mad for one iota of a second between then and now. That's a big change for me—I used to be an expert at anger, and I am intentionally unlearning that skill, every day. There's more: I did not then, nor now, nor in-between, feel any need to discuss, with anyone in that AA group or with the monks of that temple, how this restriction has affected me. I feel no need to judge them. I'm not even curious why they think lying down precludes one from meditating, in the large sense. So *that's* my meditation. Pema Chödrön wrote a book called *Don't Bite the Hook* and you can pretty much get the point of the entire book just by the title: The world is full of people driving crazy and talking crazy and acting crazy and, generally, all sorts of situations that are trying to drag you from your path. To drag you from *your path*. This thing about not lying down during meditation could have been a hook I bit. In fact, even a year ago I think I would have bitten it. But it's just like trolls on the net or my racist uncle: those are hooks that invite me into *conversations that I don't want to have*. So today I don't have those conversations. I respect those monks—I love them even. And I love that AA group—there was a sweet spot for me about a couple months ago where I really felt at home there. I'm not going to question any of them about any of their actions. I'm not going to tell them the effect this new rule has had on me: either I go only for the second half of the meeting, or I stop going..but I'll figure that out. > > Know what I will question, curiously, quizzically, peacefully, and theoretically in this blog? > > I will question if the monks of that temple believe that people in wheelchairs, people on stretchers, people who cannot sit still (or sit at all) because of Parkinson's, TD, Lithium tremors, or whatever reason, are not able to properly meditate or are not worthy to meditate in their space. I would imagine there are people lying in hospital beds who find comfort in meditation. If my psychiatrist needs to do a standing, three-breath meditation before she steps into a psych-ward emergency, I don't think I could find it in myself to tell her she's doing meditation wrong. And if I was in a war zone, I might find myself standing or lying, holding a weapon..and I might meditate before I killed..or before I decided not to. > > I will question what would have happened if that AA group had decided on some form of meditation other than seated, breath-focused meditation? I've heard from the founders of the group that in their beginning they tried walking, lying, sitting, chanting, and all kinds of meditations before deciding to go for the old standby. > > I will question what those monks are doing observing and meddling in our meeting. The AA meeting we hold in their space is not their meeting. If they came in and told us not to talk about addiction we'd probably have to find another space to meet in. They're giving us a space, and in accepting that we didn't consent to the requirement that we meditate using their definition of the word. > > I will question Christian churches whose members (according to stories told me by my mom, who has been a pastor for 20 years)..why members of churches say that children are not welcome in their church if they wear street shoes or sneakers or if they silently use their mobile devices and game devices during church. The church is dying. "Somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 churches close their doors every year." If you love going to church, if that is a crucial part of your spiritual journey, why would you do things that make children feel unwelcome? Ever consider that you might be making their parents feel unwelcome, and that those are the people whose tithes pay your pastor and keep the lights on? > > I will question this Pope—even though compared to every other pope I know about (which, trust me, isn't a lot of popes!!), this Pope has done more acceptance and change than I even thought a Pope could do, given the past performance of other popes. But, hello, Catholic Church, *women can't be priests?????!!!!!!!! What period of geologic history do you think you're existing in?* I'll try to refrain from any further insult of your tradition, but let it be known that every time I consider that massive level of rejection of slightly more than half of the human beings that you believe your God created..I laugh. I laugh out loud because even with the *immense* amount of good you do, your refusal to accept the knowledge and wisdom and perspective that women could offer as priests in your church..makes you *absolutely, completely, 100% irrelevant to me*. > > The list goes on. We humans have been so historically unaccepting of each other, it blows the thinking person's mind. We kill each other because we're different. I weep for this planet, I do; I *lament* the possibility that we might continue on our current course. We could be having such a party on this Earth, the biggest in the solar system (as far as we know =), with everyone adopting *Live and let live* and not being so damn *fearful* of what we don't understand. The concepts are simple—people have known them for longer than we can comprehend, likely past the beginning of written history. When someone is different, we can either learn about them—in which case our compassion will almost universally increase—or we can just stand back, scared as shit, launching drone strikes on people we've never even tried to get to know. People often call my ultra-pacifist views naive. Dude, thinking we can all love each other and create a world that works together *like magic* is not naive. > > Thinking that there's a right and a wrong way to meditate is naive—Buddha would laugh his fat belly right into space if he heard monks telling someone who can't sit up that they must sit up to meditate. Those monks don't even know their own tradition. > > Christians don't either. They don't even know their own tradition. I hate to be the pantheist in the room telling Christians this, but if you read the Bible you would know that Jesus wasn't a friend to the rich..and he *was* a friend to children above all, and sinners and women and all the people you don't accept. The bottom line to Jesus' teachings is love—that's indisputable. So, all my fellow humans who *hate* gays and blacks and Muslims and Mexicans and capitalists and socialists and the poor and disabled and those you yourself maimed by voting for war..well, I'll try to put this gently, but: Jesus would put his arms around you and embrace you like he embraced all sinners and he would tell you to change your ways. If you *hate*, you are incorrect in calling yourself a Christian. > > I don't hate Buddhist monks, I don't hate Catholics, I don't hate the Pope, I don't hate Christians. I love the good that you do. But your lack of acceptance is your irrelevance. The fewer people you accept, the less your relevance will be, and, eventually—if you keep that direction—you will disappear. > > Wanna know why? Because the party will have moved elsewhere. And we will be rocking the house and singing and loving and accepting Everything and Everyone and that's called Love and the more you Love something the more Wonderful it Becomes. Hate never watered any plant I saw—maybe a dead one. To extremely loosely and slightly poetically paraphrase Jesus (and perhaps to provide a radical love-oriented interpretation of this scripture), I think the rain loves the trees and it doesn't care which trees it falls on. Imagine if the rain decided not to fall on certain types of trees *because it did not accept them*—I think that would be a) an unnatural, senseless, extraordinarily difficult and unnecessary detour, and b) the silliest thing I've ever heard of. ### 171 Glory comes to the house, I happen to have just walked into my room and close the door—which I never do, so it was meant to be. Glory comes down on her high horse telling us that I misunderstood the no-lying-down rule and I was being arrogant and I'm sure she had some pithyism for what arrogance is the opposite of. Glory assumed my mom, being closer to Glory's age than my own, would see reason and be on Glory's side. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! My mom is smarter than all these motherfuckers *combined*. She tells Glory that actually, yeah, you all did create a meeting which excluded my son. My mom parries with Glory while I practice the restraint of staying in my room because I knew if I left it, I would yell Glory off our porch and back into the seventh level of hell. I got no love for this sort of thing. And Glory, if I was being arrogant you would know it because you would feel the skin burning off your face and making the consistency of crispy bacon—*mmm, just how I like it*. But I'm practicing staying chill about things so I don't even worry about it. I do some other work and my mom knocks on my door when Glory is gone. I thank her profusely for handling that. An NA guy in Tucson banged on my door for like 30 minutes because I skipped a meeting..boundaries, people! Fuck. Instead of arguing with Glory myself, or arguing with anyone, or going to the next meditation meeting and stating my case, or venting with Mom, I post again in my blog—a creative, constructive act—where people who want to read what I have to say, can, and people who don't want to read what I have to say, don't have to. See? The reason I did that? I'm done fighting the world. My mom says she was about my age when she, too, decided to give up the fight. See, I don't care if that AA group ever understands why I left. I have *no desire* to be in conflict with them, even to fight for something that was helping me. I am perfectly content to just say *goodbye*. And if you ever disrespect me, I can cut you off *like that*. I can walk away from you forever—never say another word to you—and feel fine about it. Because you need me more than I need you, not the other way around. Here's my post: > Why smart people don't like AA > > As I said before, I didn't have any intention of discussing this with anyone from AA, even though sharing my thoughts might be useful to that group or me—it's basically a conversation I don't want to have. I'm not an AA activist or leader or meeting founder; I don't want to reform AA, I was just going there to get help getting sober. I haven't gone back to the meditation meeting or gone to any AA meeting since the no-lying-down rule was announced. But my astute sponsor and I have discussed this briefly in two or three text messages. I'm leaving out the beginning of our interchange as it is non-substantive, but this, my next-to-last reply, exemplifies the exchange and expands a little on my earlier article. > > I don't think you are hearing what I'm saying. Several members of the group told me that at the beginning, they/you tried different types of meditation—sitting, standing, walking, lying, chanting, etc—before settling on seated, breath-focused meditation. What if we had chosen lying or walking meditation and the monks didn't approve? J. leans or lies down and the guy has recently had a heart attack. Do we accommodate him? I think we should. What if someone came to the meeting on a stretcher? I have a disability that makes sitting for an hour torturously painful. By accepting the monks' dictum, by remaining in that space under this rule, we as an AA group are saying: we don't accept just everyone in this group. Now, in addition to the *only requirement for membership* (a desire to stop drinking) we have another requirement: the ability to sit up for an hour. We are allowing the monks to make us less accepting. The AA meeting isn't the monks' meeting—it's AA's meeting. And, frankly, for us to go along with their rule and to remain in that space compromises the independence of the group. We're no longer independent: our host is setting rules for our meeting. This eats away at our integrity simply because it introduces another requirement for membership when we clearly state at every meeting that there is only one. So, I don't feel welcome there, I can't actually sit through a meeting, and I don't feel like (metaphorically) bending over backward and, say, showing up at 7:30 to participate in just the discussion, being able to sit for half an hour, just not a full one. I need that meeting. It was helping to keep me sober. Now the meeting doesn't accept me as a member because these particular monks have declared that there are wrong ways to meditate, or they have imposed their meditation traditions on us..which by the way, I think Buddha would find absurd—obviously, by reading enough Buddhist tradition, anyone would know that there is no right or wrong way to meditate. I will not return to that meeting, because its integrity is no longer intact. I'm not angry nor do I have any negative feelings about this—I simply cannot fulfill the [new, additional](#) requirement for membership in that AA group. I wish everyone in the meeting, and the monks who host you, sobriety and serenity. With firmness, and love, Matthew T. > > Normally I wouldn't publish someone else's texts to me—it undermines one of my basic desires, which is for psychological intimacy with others, especially gaining enough of someone's trust that they tell me their most intimate stories—but the response I got from my sponsor is so illustrative of why smart people don't like AA that I am breaking my own rule in this case for the general education of anyone reading this. My sponsor's reply: > > You are welcome to think as you please but IMHO, you are using this issue to withdraw and make your leaving us easier to handle. The monks are very kindly and generously allowing us to use their SACRED space. If they had seen us lying down on the first time we tried it, they would have said something then. Meanwhile, A. or C. was going to talk to [T.—one of the monks](#) and explain your disability AND btw, they really only object to FEET POINTING AT THE BUDDHA. So all we would have needed to do is have you sit on the other side of the circle!! Any facility that allows us to have meetings has a perfect right to make a few rules and it has nothing to do with the third tradition of AA. You chose to become offended & apparently have forgotten that AA, that mtg in particular and the spiritual aura of the temple helped you stay sober for over a year. My hope for you is that after the trauma of moving is done, you will feel more gratitude and less self-righteous indignation. It is the only way you will grow spiritually and stay happily sober. I'm very sorry that the group was robbed of the opportunity to tell you goodbye. And that you didn't take the opportunity to grow in understanding. As your sponsor I have a responsibility to be honest with you and that's what I'm trying to do now. And I still love you! > > And my final reply: > > You're just wrong about how I feel. You're making that up in your own mind and you are not more informed about how I feel than I am. I'm not offended, as you claim, and I think if you read my message and then you read your message, you will see that the one with the heated tone is yours, not mine. Nothing I said was self-righteous or indignant, G.—read it again—it just wasn't. I'm going to have to say goodbye to you now because you are being irrational *[and using all caps]* and I can't proceed with you that way. I haven't forgotten the help you or that group has given me. I will always be thankful but this is the last I will interact with you. —Matthew T. > > So call me Spock. I mean you could make a pretty good argument that the title of this article is self-righteous and indignant—even though there's a much better argument that it's not. > > AA lays out a set of guidelines at the beginning of each meeting and then its members proceed to almost universally ignore them. For a critical thinker, that creates a discordance or poses a question: Why do we say "no crosstalk" and then proceed to crosstalk through the entire meeting. (Crosstalk, in AA, is when you either interrupt someone while they're sharing or you use your share to talk directly to someone, responding to what they said or giving them advice instead of sharing your own experience, strength, and hope, which is the most useful kind of share you can do in an AA meeting. We don't come there for advice. We come there to hear others' stories and share our own. An AA meeting is not a discussion.) > > We crosstalk all the time in AA meetings. I've done it. Sometimes you just can't help yourself. And what do you expect from a bunch of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts?—We're not necessarily the most polite or rule-abiding people. But it's a problem for me, a cousin of mine, and some other smart people I've met in AA, to say at the beginning of each meeting, "no crosstalk," and then to sit through a meeting full of crosstalk. You get one or the other, you can't have both: either eliminate the rule against crosstalk or have the moderator stop crosstalk when it happens (which some moderators do). > > Let me tell you about a time when the moderator of a group allowed egregious crosstalk to happen, initiated by a long-time member of AA toward a newcomer (me). I'll illustrate this with the text of a note I wrote to the regional AA office in Baton Rouge. By writing this note, I broke AA's tradition of anonymity (*whatever happens in a meeting stays in a meeting* and some other tenets which I am also breaking by publicly identifying myself as a [former?](#) AA member on this blog). I realize the hypocrisy of this, as I criticize others for breaking AA rules, and I have weighed the pros and cons and I believe I am making the choice that will result in the greater good. Here's the note: > > I attended the Wednesday night men's meeting last night for the first time. I shared. Directly after my share, an old-timer shared. He looked directly at me and used his share time not to talk about himself and his journey but to give me advice on how to fix myself. > > In my share I mentioned that I have some uncontrollable muscle movements that my psychiatrist thinks are a side effect of the antipsychotic medication I take. > > This AA member suggested, in his share, that my muscle movements were caused by alcohol alone and were not a side effect of my antipsychotic medication. > > He then suggested that along with sobriety, I should stop my psychiatric medications..and that this would be an appropriate solution for me. > > An AA member like this is doing more harm than good. He is not abiding by the group's primary purpose, to help the newcomer. Instead he is turning away the newcomer by crosstalking me in my first visit to the men's meeting and using his share time to give me direct advice instead of sharing his experience, strength, and hope. In every meeting we stress that crosstalk is ill-advised. And yet, this senior member of AA crosstalks me in his share. > > Additionally, he is giving me potentially fatal advice. A bipolar patient, for example, who stops taking his lithium, has an increased chance of suicide. Bipolar disorder is an organic brain disorder..sobriety doesn't fix it. It is highly inappropriate for an AA member to give this advice, unless that AA member is a psychiatrist. > > What this AA member did erases any credibility he might have ever had with me. The fact that his crosstalk was allowed to go on, unchecked by the meeting chair, erases the credibility of that group. I will not have anything to do with that AA member, ever, and I will not return to that meeting. > > Please hear this report as a helpful reflection on something that went wrong, and use it to help make our fellowship better. > > Sincerely, > Matthew T. > > Do you start to see why smart people don't like AA? Of course you will not be literal, and will allow me my tongue-in-cheek title. I certainly don't imply that anyone who likes AA isn't "smart"—a term I couldn't define even if I wanted to. But when a non-psychiatrist, elder, respected member of an AA meeting crosstalks his share *at* me, telling me nothing about his own journey to sobriety (which might have been useful information to me), denies that I have a disability (I have several—one is tardive dyskinesia), tells me that stopping drinking will fix my supposedly non-disability movement disorder (which it seems he has mistaken for delirium tremens, a condition I have never experienced even after my heaviest periods of drinking and which by the way looks nothing like tardive dyskinesia), and then this clueless person advises me to stop taking my psych meds, opting for sobriety alone as the solution to all my problems..that has to cause a smart person to wonder what the fuck they are doing in AA! > > Do you hear self-righteous indignation there? What I hear is common sense. Of course one does not want to throw the baby out with the bath water, but let me inform you that I have been to just over 1,000 AA and NA meetings, and that guy—that old-timer telling me to stop my lithium—he is not an outlier. There are a lot of wonderful and a few wise people in these groups, and in my experience being in community with them can help you get clean and sober if you want to. But there is simply, for me, too high a level of inconsistency and manipulation and bending of the rules that I always come to the conclusion that I cannot allow such a high level of nonsensical junk to enter my mind. About 3/4 of my sponsors have gone out of their way to make their religion and/or politics an issue between us—when I never brought it up and they never should have brought it up. I remember a sponsor who didn't do this. That sponsor kept it simple, which almost no one in Alcoholics Anonymous seems able to do. Whenever you hear anyone in AA say, "It's not about the drinking"—beware. Of course it's about the drinking: that's why people go to AA, because we're alcoholics and when we drink we can't stop and we destroy our lives and hurt everyone around us and we need help stopping or else we'll die. Look, I can philosophize the whiskers off a cat but that has nothing to do with sobriety. Have I enjoyed the more heady and philosophical people I've met in AA? Absolutely. But guess what?—Those are the ones who keep it simple in practice. As one such addict says, I didn't have a theory of addiction, so I don't need a theory of sobriety. I had a *practice* of addiction; now I have a practice of sobriety > > People who disagree with what I just said will counter by saying that really it's a spiritual problem that we alcoholics are trying in vain to solve with alcohol. Yeah? I happen to agree that that is a fantastic paradigm. But, oddly, I've never heard a single recovering alcoholic suggest that alcohol might be the cause of their spiritual problems. Yes, loneliness and hyper-individuality and selfishness and depression and mental illness might all be termed "spiritual problems" that some of us try to solve by drinking ridiculous amounts of alcohol. And some of us eventually learn that alcohol just isn't the right tool for solving those problems. But is the root *the spiritual problem* or is the root *addictive substances*? I don't think that there is a simple answer—or any answer—to that question. Just as surely as people with many years of sobriety insist that "It's not about the drinking" but rather a spiritual problem at root, I can tell you that if I start out with relatively few spiritual problems and, because of proximity, I begin using an addictive substance like alcohol or cocaine, I will rapidly develop some extremely-hard-to-solve spiritual problems. > > To go to 1,000+ 12-step meetings and hear approximately eight times that number of shares where people say a little tidbit about their drinking life, their sober life, or how they got from one to the other (and sometimes back) is something that has changed me forever. So far, this 14 months of clean and sober time that I have right now is the longest I've had since I started drinking. I don't want to drink. And the careful reader of this post will recall something I said early on, in my text to my former sponsor: "I need that meeting. It was helping to keep me sober." I am not against AA. I need AA. I needed the sponsor I just said goodbye to. I needed the support I was getting from AA friends from that meeting. But if you think I'm going to monkey around about whether it's just *lying down during meditation* or *pointing one's feet at the statue of Buddha*, then you don't know me. If it was about where reclining meditators' feet were pointing, then that should have been the verbiage used in the initial announcement. That is not the verbiage that was used. What was said was The monks don't want us lying down during meditation because it goes against their traditions That excludes me from the meeting. It's cool. I'm not drinking over it. I'm not mad. I'm a little sad that my sponsor and I had such a beautiful beginning and such an ugly end—but you know what, that is just one of the [a](#)symmetries of our world, and I accept it. > > Maybe a good title for this post would be "Why smart people don't like anything". Kidding, kind of. Smart isn't really the right word. I'm not saying I'm some high-class motherfucker like the chaps on the top deck of Titanic. For example, one time I was drunk driving through Hollywood and I stopped behind a Carl's Jr., let myself inside the fence that surrounded their dumpsters, dropped my pants and took a dump right there on the asphalt—I had to shit that bad. I could tell you a hundred stories like that and worse but I'm hoping that particular admission will make you hate me less when I say that why smart people don't like AA is really an issue of class. > > Like: when you're my sponsor, and you say that Jesus got you clean, not AA, that means you have a coarse understanding of the game we're playing as sponsor/sponsee. By *class* I mean delicacy, awareness, finesse. For example, none of my friends would ever just go up to a woman and touch her breasts without asking. But there are people who do that. They have no class. And they are not my friends. *Take the best and leave the rest* is an adage that applies to AA especially well. But you can only ignore so much. And when smart people, or people with class, delicacy, awareness, finesse..when they go to AA or NA, it's a shock because for all the good that is in their literature and in the people there who have miraculously stopped their insane drug behavior *for years* and continue to approach the goal of the 12 steps, which is to be a compassionate person..there is also this unacceptable level of inconsistency, irrelevancy, hypocrisy, pompousness, oblivion to others' speech and needs, and, in the case of the self-appointed psychiatrists, real life-threatening danger for the innocent. Ok, this blogger is a bit long-winded, so what I suggest here is we take a break consisting of you going and getting a phatty-phat blunt or a crack stem or a meth pipe or just some good old-fashioned cocaine. I want you to chop that shit up, cut of 1/3 of a plastic straw, and suck than shit up your nose. I do recommend that you do all this while smoking a Kamel Red, drinking a fifth of Jack, and..what's left..just go buck wild because this blog is gonna run on for a while. ### 172 Everyone feeling refreshed? Excellent. Let's resume the polite dialectical smackdown of your host and author, Mr Matthew Q. Temple, MFBA, PQRSTU, LOL. > Part of the dynamic in play here is that you have to respect people while you're helping them. Just because you're the doctor and I'm the patient does not mean that you may not be unknowingly offending my delicacy, awareness, finesse, or smarts. AA people who have wisdom around sobriety often are completely unaware that they are playing the part of the bull in the china shop around classy people. If I'm your math tutor, and I teach you math but insult your race, then I have precluded my ability to be a good math tutor to you. Being sick doesn't make you dumb. It doesn't make you less than those who can heal or teach you. Think of Will in Good Will Hunting. People with less finesse than he had, offended him such that they could not help him (because they were unable to earn his respect—they were a joke to him). Will was sick, yes, but what he needed was—not a therapist as smart as him, but—a therapist who respected him, had more life experience than him, and who had awareness and finesse *in spades*. That's a tall order—the fact is people like that are in short supply. If you're broad minded, complex, intelligent, then you're going to have a hard time finding a therapist. Because, like in Good Will Hunting, in therapy, in the teacher/student relationship, in the sponsor/sponsee relationship, in the parent/child relationship, in the boss/worker relationship, and often in love relationships, there is an element of *who's on top (of the conversation)*. These relationships are characterized by complex power-exchange dynamics and while at our best we allow others to make mistakes, we forgive them, we learn, and we move on..often *who's on top* (who is in control, who has the most power) is set early on in the relationship and it is very hard for the participant with less power to gain the upper hand. Sometimes (especially with love relationships) the power balance changes frequently and rapidly throughout the duration of the relationship. But sometimes the power difference grows so great that the person in power either sticks around because she finds pleasure in abusing her weakly positioned partner, or she leaves because there is no longer interest or challenge in the relationship for her. When I'm the more powerful one in a relationship, let's say a sponsor/sponsee relationship where I am the sponsee, the moment my sponsor indicates to me, through their words or actions, that they think they are the more powerful one in the relationship, I decide that this person is not a good sponsor for me. They are showing me that they think they are on top, and showing me that they don't know that I am on top, and that precludes a lot of the kinds of conversations I want to have. They basically don't know what's up. The smarter you are, the more emotional depth you have, the broader swath of the cultural world you have experienced, the harder it is for people to help you. Of course I listen to lots of people, and I believe this is worthwhile because everyone has had experiences I haven't, so everyone has much to teach me! But when an AA sponsor stops listening to me, stops respecting me, starts talking to me as though they are the parent and I am the child (a relationship where the parent almost always has the power), *and I am actually on top*, then the relationship is over. That's because, as I said in the beginning of this paragraph, "you have to respect people while you're helping them." If you disrespect the people you're helping and they're on bottom, they will stay and allow you to help them. If you disrespect someone you're helping and they're on top, they will walk away..out of your hospital, off of your therapist's couch, out through the double doors of the Buddhist temple that hosts your AA meeting, and you will never see them again.. > > I have heard many people (other than me) say that sobriety and AA principles are harder for smart people to accomplish and accept. I remember talking in a courtyard after a meeting in Tucson and I was explaining some of my thoughts about steps I was taking that helped me stay sober and grow spiritually. These were plans and actions that were helping me live a more joyous life. And this young, NA-brainwashed know-it-all said—as he held up his NA "big book" and knocked a knuckle against its hard cover—"But the steps are all right here, man. That's the beauty of it. You don't have to think up your own plan. It's already been figured out." > > And you know what, he's right. You don't have to think for yourself, you don't have to think at all. The 12 steps are brilliant. The whole AA program is brilliant. But guess what? So am I. > > I'll work a template that works, but I'm not going to stop evaluating, I'm not going to stop thinking, I'm not going to stop inventing. Some AA people say that nothing they thought before they got into AA was right—it was all "stinkin' thinking" Well, my friends, that just doesn't happen to be the case for me. Most of my thoughts were better than what's in the AA book, better than anything any AAer has ever said to me—I thought philosophical, logical, artistic thoughts that are on a level higher than anyone I've ever met. Sound like righteous indignation? Well try being someone who doesn't just color inside the lines—imagine that, for a second. Imagine if you could sit with your friend and prove certain theories in respected math books *wrong*. How can a person like that feel at home in AA, or any religion that's overly dependent on a fixed text? > > The lockstep response of an AAer to a newcomer saying something like what I just said is to try to disarm and scold the person for thinking they are (the AAer's actual words) "terminally unique". Right, I get the point: we have to get over thinking that we aren't connected to the rest of humanity by common strengths and weaknesses. Terminal uniqueness is used as a way for a recovering alcoholic to believe that because of their individuality, the program won't work for them. Terminal uniqueness is at base a fear that you are doomed in a way that others aren't. > > But what I'm talking about is that some people *are* more unique than others. I'm not suggesting to myself that my exceptional uniqueness is a good reason for me to drink! I'm just saying that in AA meetings, I don't encounter people who have deep skill in multiple areas, are as smart as me, who have produced the amount of writing/thinking output that I have, or who have worked technically difficult jobs. It would be unreasonable to expect to meet people like me in any context that I know of, except my family or possibly Twitter. I'm not dissing simple/manual jobs, either. I learned a whole philosophy from washing dishes. But my mind has gone to places that normal people's haven't. I've built my own web server in C. Made a regular expression engine in less than a thousand lines of code—you probably don't even know what a regular expression is. And that's ok. All I'm saying is it doesn't take deep and broad smarts to be an insurance adjuster or a project manager or a medical biller. I'm not putting down any of those things!—we're all necessary and valuable—I'm just saying that for most of you, when we talk, I can figure you out in three seconds, and if we talked for fifty years, you'd never figure me out at all—you'd never really *know* me. Enough arrogance for you? Keep sippin' that Jack, motherfucker. > Most people can follow a program. AA is a program; it's a 12-step program. When people encounter it, it sometimes helps them because they follow the steps. But I can *write* programs, programs that are 100,000 lines long and do profoundly complex things. That's where my mind is. This isn't bragging—this is me asking you *to understand me*. This article isn't titled "Why AA sucks and is doomed and whoever invented it or follows it should be shot". It's titled "Why smart people don't like AA". I know sobriety and serenity are hard for everyone. I'm simply talking about some of the reasons AA is distasteful, hard to swallow, for smart people. It doesn't work as well for smart people—it isn't as good a fit for us as it is for more regular, mentally healthy people of normal intelligence. > > For that young man who was thumping his NA book at me, scolding me for having my own thoughts, I am extremely glad he has NA and that it's helping him. But the illogic is glaring: NA wisely reminds addicts at every meeting that "alcohol is a drug" *[as much as heroin or coke]*. Yet cigarettes are somehow exempt from NA's program. There's a sensible side to this: cigarettes won't alter your consciousness to the level that you'll crash your car or murder your neighbors while you're hallucinating or make you say terrible things to your kids. But they will kill you. Maybe not quickly, but 1/5 of all deaths in the US are due to cigarette smoking. How is that a compassionate act?—to live a shorter life for the people who love you, for yourself. Also, smoking doesn't just kill *you*—secondhand smoke kills 41,000 people in the United States annually—how is *that* a compassionate act? Also still, nicotine is unquestionably addictive. So you've got a highly addictive mixture that doesn't just kill the user, it also kills people nearby—most "hard" drugs don't even have that property: *you're* using and I'm standing next to you and *your* drug is killing us both! Here's my quick letter to NA: *Dear NA, Cigarettes are a drug. Love, Matthew Temple, former user of just about every drug imaginable.* I'm not judging NA—I used to smoke. I am simply, logically saying that NA's cigarette exemption is bullshit. One definition of bullshit is "stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense". By using the word "bullshit" I am not being self-righteous or indignant, I am concluding the brief logical argument preceding that shows that cigarettes are a drug and saying that NA's cigarette exemption is "nonsense". > > NA people, including NA sponsors, generally hold the belief that when quitting heroin (or any "hard" drug), it is acceptable or even helpful to lean on a supposedly lesser substance or practice, especially cigarettes. Quitting heroin is hard—I deserve cigarettes as a comfort blanket while I am successfully abstaining from the greater evils I am sympathetic to this logic. In my early twenties I posted to my blog something like As a former drug addict, it is important to understand the necessity of being an alcoholic I gave up weed, ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms, opium, cigarettes and "just drank alcohol". For me this was an extremely bad trade. Probably the whole paradigm of trading one addiction for another was a bad idea for me, because I am an addict. Straight up, though, if smoking cigarettes helps you psychologically to quit heroin, and then you quit cigarettes, more power to you. Quitting drugs is dicey at the least and damn near impossible at the worst, so I don't knock the lesser-drug-as-a-temporary-crutch method if you can't just stop using all addictive/harmful drugs at once. But for NA people, including moderators and sponsors, to fail to openly, overtly, plainly classify cigarettes as a drug, is bullshit. It's a program of complete honesty (that's what you say about NA in every meeting)—so don't lie to yourself about tobacco and nicotine. > > AA people carry their books with them, have tiny print versions, large-print versions, PDFs on their phones. It's brilliant. It works for some people. I admit I have the PDF on my phone as well. But I don't fit into that little book. I recognize that it contains a lot of wisdom. I read it. I gain wisdom. But AA is so outdated. I mean, the readings use male pronouns for God—that's unforgivable in 2016. Even to only use the word "god" to refer to [the unnamable](#), is just *archaic* to the point of being unacceptable to the thinking person. > > Worse, AA suffers from the same lack-of-drug-definition problem as NA. It's *Alcoholics* Anonymous, so (no shit) a lot of people in AA smoke pot or do other addictive/harmful drugs. > > You remember that girl from your childhood who grew up conservative Christian until high school, then she was the wildest, sexiest, baddest and hottest kid in the 10th grade—biting your neck in the hallway thinking she was a vampire and kissing girls and wearing fishnet tights and short skirts and sexy underwear and generally being the most desirable piece of ass and brains in your class..then you run into her six years later and she's a conservative Christian again, now with two kids, married obviously, dressed like an Amish person? You're awkwardly talking to her husband thinking you've probably done things to his wife that he'll never get to do now that she's returned to her childhood value system. > > Well, I just want you to know that I am not that girl. > > I used drugs when I wanted to. Some results were great. Some results were horrible. I am clearly an addict, so sadly I can't "enjoy responsibly". But if you can, I am sincerely happy for you, because I know the enjoyment that drugs have brought me. For me the negatives outweighed the positives (for addictive/harmful drugs), and for today I'm clean and sober—and that's all I know, that *today* I'm going to stay clean and sober. I don't worry about tomorrow and I plan for it as little as possible. > > When I talk about AA people who smoke weed, I am not judging them or even saying they shouldn't use. I hope you hear that in this article. Some AAers interpret it as a program of abstinence from alcohol only, some interpret it as a program of abstinence from all drugs except cigarettes, like NA. There's hot debate about using narcotic painkillers after surgery, during childbirth, or while passing a kidney stone. Does using prescribed pain medication as directed reset your sobriety date? Who knows. Using one drug, then withdrawing from it, can trigger an addict to seek more or other drugs—no doubt it's a risky business. I'm sure there are a small number of AA people who are still using crystal meth and calling themselves sober because they don't drink alcohol. And if that works for you, go you. To me what's important is to be somewhat accurate, somewhat consistent. > > Pot, the most common drug I'm aware of "sober" AAers using, is addictive for some people (just like alcohol is addictive for some people—not everyone is an alcoholic). Pot can cause psychosis in healthy people and increase psychosis in already psychotic people. Long-term use can increase the chance of developing schizophrenia. You can find studies that contradict those results. On the one hand, it is my distinct observation that everyday pot smokers, over some years, become quite dull mentally, quite slow, and quite uninteresting. And they lose their ambition (maybe this is healthy, who knows!). On the other hand, this 125-year-old woman thinks smoking pot every day is the reason she lived that long. Just because she thinks it doesn't make it so, but it's an interesting case to consider. > > AAers can smoke pot all they want, and the only angle from which I care is that when they share in a meeting, they're sharing from and about a different kind of sobriety than I am. If I got to pick another non-alcohol drug that was ok to do, I could quit alcohol or any other drug *instantly*. In fact that's how I quit smoking: I decided I was getting more out of drinking than smoking, and that I would stop smoking and drink twice as much alcohol. =) True story. I'm not saying that was the most brilliant plan I ever came up with—but I quit smoking *easily* and haven't smoked since. It's just a little bit of insanity to sit in a room of sober alcoholics and not know what other addictive/harmful drugs some of them may be using. I'm not the judge, I'm not the ruler, I'm just saying: when people are potentially using various types of drugs (but dutifully excluding alcohol) then what kind of meeting is going to result? What types of sobriety is a person discussing when they share their experience, strength, and hope? > > It doesn't matter, though—it's an unsolvable problem. Everyone has different brain structures and chemicals running through their brains. I have bipolar disorder, OCD, and tardive dyskinesia—those are all brain disorders having to do with brain structures and neurotransmitters and who knows what. Even if we both abstain from all drugs, my brain structure differs significantly from a person with no mental illness—I suspect that what we experience as *sobriety* differs profoundly. Also, I take a handful of non-recreational, non-addictive, prescribed psychiatric medications that alter my brain at the most fundamental levels—I can assure you that without them, whether I drank alcohol or not, I would not be serene..*at all*. In one sense, if I stop drinking but I need Vicodin as a crutch, then I'm only playing Whac-A-Mole: knock one addiction down and another pops up!—That's not progress! But I think we can all learn something about not taking ourselves (or our programs) too seriously (or too literally), from a fact about Bill W., AA's founder: and that is that the king of sobriety himself was a huge fan of LSD—he even thought it might help cure alcoholism, a theory that has since been proven scientifically. Everybody has to do what works for them. I'm not going to go into my whole personal drug philosophy, but suffice it to say, I can't drink. And I need help staying sober. > > I need AA, but I can't accept AA—and my last AA group doesn't accept me. Honestly, if your statue of Buddha is so sacred, you are a fool. The religion isn't in the statue—it's in you. To say that me pointing my feet at a statue of the founder of your religion, goes against your traditions..that is low-class, indelicate, unaware, coarse, religious-extremist-type shit just as bad as right-wing evangelical Christians, jihadists, fuckin' terrorist ideologues everywhere. And if you think it's an acceptable solution to ask reclining meditators to sit on a certain side of the circle so our feet don't face Buddha—you're wrong. That makes some people more welcome than others, by taking away a right from some AA members that other AA members retain—the right to sit on any empty cushion in the circle. > > Who knew Buddhists could be so pedantic! Who knew recovering alcoholics could be so spineless! And since I have a word for everyone else, I'll give you one for me: iconoclast. Fuck your statues of Buddha, Jesus, Mary, and everyone else. If you think Buddha would give a shit where my feet are, in relation to a statue of his body, you clearly don't even have a full pair of marbles to clack together inside your echoey little head. Maybe I am self-righteous and indignant, but if it took me melting down every religious statue ever cast to stay sober and never drunk drive again, I'll bet Buddha, Jesus, and every other top-shelf spiritual teacher in the history of the world would think first about the pedestrians I'll never kill driving my car in a blackout drunk and without hesitation they would SHOUT "Melt those motherfuckers down!" Look, I never said this was going to be straight narrative all the way through. See, you get your straight narrative in Part I. Then, in Part II, the text becomes more fractured as my character enters the insane asylum—it's more about the psychological inner world of the character: what's his diagnosis, where did all this inner disorder come from? So you get stories from childhood..the relationship with the dad. And then at some point supposedly I'm cured—HAHA—or at least medicated enough and therapied enough to get out of the hospital. So—*voila, Part III!!!*—is how someone with those experiences reacts with a normal world. (You should be imagining this whole paragraph narrated by Heath Ledger's Joker voice.) Try it. "Normal world." You, me, and the Joker have a secret that there is no such thing as a "normal world"—*[Joker laugh]*—it's *all* crazy people—*[hee hee hee]*. And what happens (still Joker voice) when you put a Matthew together with a Perish. Or his whole family. Or societal institutions with senseless rules. Chaos. Can there even *be* anything *but* chaos for a Matthew in this so-called "normal world" of yours? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *[endless Joker laugh]*. Bottomless hole, dropping to the center of the Earth. ### 173 I hate those AA platitudes: "stinkin' thinkin.' " "Being alone in my head is a horrible place to be." "Pride is the opposite of pity." No, fuck, you, you must have never been inside my head because my head is a glorious place to be. Some people in AA assert that *all* of their thinking was useless before they got into AA, that *all* their decisions were wrong. That's just not the case for me. I kept going to work and I programmed a shit-ton of C and C At least two of my novels I wrote tipsy or *drunk*. They wouldn't be what they are if I had written them sober—in fact there's no way to separate those novels from my drinking. Without my drinking, those two novels wouldn't exist. So I recoil at the statement that someone's *entire life* was *one-hundred-percent* fucked before they got to AA. Today I choose not to drink or do other drugs. It works better for me this way—it serves my overall goals better. But drinking wasn't one-hundred percent bad or AA wouldn't exist at all—we were all getting something good out of that drug, at least for a while. Otherwise it would be easy to quit. I've gotten help and community and encouragement and friendship from twelve-step programs, but I have to depart, conceptually, from their whole thing when people start saying things like *everything I thought was wrong before I stopped drinking*. I can't relate to that. It's not my experience, it's not me. Yeah, smoking crystal meth fucked me up big time, but I moved on, I stopped using, I got another job. I could still direct short films and write screenplays and make love to women and write hundreds and hundreds of pages of useful insight while I was working on my sixth or tenth or twelfth martini at the Arclight bar in Hollywood. I made new friends, got my hair cut, invented new types of one-dimensional cellular automata, got high marks in class, traded techniques with major directors. I certainly don't think hard drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, are the thing for me now, but I would be a liar if I said that when I was using drugs my *entire* brain and all its thoughts were nonfunction, bullshit, scat. So when AA and AA people say inaccurate things like that, their credibility goes out the window with me. I mean, to say that you can't develop spiritually while on drugs? The planet seems to have been designed to provide us with certain plants that lead us to the most spiritual experience *possible*. I'm sorry, but if you haven't eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms, you don't know shit about this life. If AA people would be more reasonable with their statements and say, *I find I am more consistent in my spiritual and other work practices now that I am sober*, I'd be like, Cheers, mate. But when AA people say that alcohol stunts all spiritual growth? I guess they've never heard of John Denver? Billy Joel? Ernest Hemingway? Janis Joplin? Amy Winehouse? I think it's fair to say that active drunks and drug addicts have come up with much of the greatest art ever produced. And let me tell you a little secret: it's not just artists. It's engineers, mathematicians, teachers, even spiritual teachers—it's fucking everybody. So to say that alcohol and spirituality are completely at odds is just a lie that makes people like me not want to go to meetings. I don't want to kill somebody drunk driving in a blackout—that's why I stopped drinking. If AA would keep shit *practical* then I would keep going, but when all it is, is amateur philosopher hour, I'm out. I'm not angry about being out. I'm not going to drink over being out. I'm just out. I can do *just for today* on my own—at least for a while. Salinger writes, "You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes." I think this curse applies to me. ### 174 Oh and by the way if you're one of those people who are like, *Well, what good is it to make great music like Amy Winehouse but die when you're twenty-seven?* Fool, the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long! When I told my grandmother about Jean-Michel Basquiat, I mentioned that he died of a heroin overdose at twenty-seven and she shook her head judgmentally and said, "It's too bad that someone with so much talent has so little common sense." I guess that's one way to look at it. But the way I look at it (and I didn't say this to my grandmother) Jean-Michel Basquiat affected the world, the entire future of the human species, from the time for which he lived, forward, *to infinity*. In our collective culture, JMB will never be forgotten. He added a thousand paintings to the archive of human history, paintings so powerful that when I go to a museum show of Basquiat, I bring sunglasses—'cause that shit is high-voltage emotional power lines that draws the fucking *soul* of me almost right out of my body—and I cry. In my entire life the best thing my grandmother ever did for me is give birth to my mom and keep a fridge full of Fla-Vor-Ice in the freezer when we were kids. I love my grandmother, but she is not the candle that burned twice as bright. No judgement to her for her path—I'd like to live a long time, too. But no judgment on Winehouse, Basquiat, Cobain—please. Their way of living is far more beautiful and generous and I believe, for those of you who believe in God, their way of living is far more pleasing to God than living to be ninety, crotchety, angry, bigoted, close minded, your only activities are reading the Bible and watching Fox News because you like the feeling of being superior to someone, even if all your facts are wrong. I don't want to judge my grandmother, but I don't truly think she has any upper ground on our great dead artists who never lived to be thirty but made an indelible make on..let's not say *the world*, let's just say *me*..I love my grandmother but she does not evoke emotion from me, she does not make me feel ecstasy, or more human, or even *fear* (which is actually the name for beauty). My grandmother doesn't make me feel that. Kurt Cobain does. And when I say fear I don't mean the fear that keeps you locked in a room watching terror theatre and billionaires play chess with what was supposed to be a democracy. When I say fear I mean when you see someone so beautiful, so true in their actions, so pure of heart that they put everyone else to *shame*..and they can't even help it. Maybe you were a child, at the park, and you saw a young woman on a bench and your four-year-old self just knew that she was an *angel*. And you told your mom, and she didn't get it (because adults never do) but you will always know, for the rest of your suffering life, that at four you could see angels, and you might make it to your grave before you can teach yourself to see them again. Or maybe it's the power of a healer—the healing personality types—and when you're full of ache and bile from hateful work you do just to survive..when all you're doing is keeping your body alive so that someday someone with more of that holy power than you will *inspire* you—will breathe life into you—and maybe it happens when the healer hugs not you, but someone you love so much that you could never reach. Maybe it's you seeing your daughter first find something she loves to do, at thirty-six years old, after living in half the states in the country and *being so lost* and how can you *stand* to see your daughter so lost and so hurt and nothing you can do. And, lo and behold, one day the sun never sets, and your pain which is just a reflection of her pain..evaporates..the light just never stayed long enough for her pain to just *go away*..that is what was needed, nothing more than the miracle of a fifty-hour day, and what was caught in lock step and dying in the Garden of Eden suddenly moves into a sandstorm and flourishes like Audrey II from *Little Shop of Horrors* and she grows..and grows..and grows..and what had seemed like a useless person, that only the wisest could see all along, now everyone can see, all those skills that the capitalist economy that was supposed to find the best solutions never found a use for, now eclipse anything ever produced in a factory. Maybe it's that. Or maybe it's a blind musician you've been going to see and to listen to and to dance with and to invent songs with since you were a child, and he was vibrant and young until thirty years later, in a state a stranger to you both, you see an old man who believes in a old God that you long ago left behind..but this man, who cannot see, plays keyboards and plays them like those power lines I was talking about in conjunction with Basquiat a minute ago. I knew an artist, Scott, he shared my love for JMB. He saw me carrying one of his books and he said something like, "That man was plugged in *to the source*." And that's how this blind musician is. He doesn't play Yamahas and Kurzweils and Korgs—he plays high voltage, and if there wasn't a foot of rubber separating him from the Earth, just playing he'd die. This man makes eighty-year-olds drop their canes, get up, and fucking dance. And I realized, looking at the older him from the older me, that the reason this man is blind *is that the light is coming through him!* So much of his God, so much of my Universe and my Everything and my dad's Great Mystery and whatever Basquiat was plugged in to, is coming through this spirit I am watching, listening to, channeling power..even in his faded state from that young man I used to play with as a kid, this simple human is channeling so much god power that it blinded him. That's what happened to him. It's no chance that this man is a blind musician. Of course not. We know that from our world's blind musicians, who number in the hundreds even if you only count the famous ones. The one I'm speaking of isn't famous—only in church circles. His name is Ken Medema, and his songs (as someone once taught me about literature) don't contain information—they contain *power*. He sings about us all being "bound together and woven with love." He sings about homelessness by spiraling his voice upward in something not a wail, not a simple scream from human to human, but some primal scream to God Himself (as I imagine Ken imagines his God), and he makes a sound that sounds like *I have felt* living outside myself without a job or money or any way to get plugged back into what we lie to ourselves is a society but is nothing close—we are merely an economy that throws away people who don't have salable skills, or whose minds are sick. This blind man singing about homelessness screams: "I *WANT* HO*OOO*OME!!" and it is like an animal demand—not anything a human would ever be honest enough to say—but the way a bear or a lion or—yes!—maybe an elephant would make this sound with her trunk, raising it into the air, straight up, this elephant calling on its god—and if an elephant has a god, you *know* it's powerful. That is the god I pray to, the god of the elephants. I pray to the god whose voice sounds like the sound that would occur if all the animals and all the people on this tiny planet sang, all at the same time, the same, towering note, something that the Princess would sing from *The NeverEnding Story*, when all of creation had been reduced to a single, glowing, grain of sand—a single ember—and it was destroyed because the animal closest to god—us—us gods had forgotten the most important things: hope, compassion, love. And before that last spark of the universe goes out, it takes all of us, in unison, asking the god of elephants and whales and the god of volcanoes and hurricanes, to save us from our own terrifying lack of belief. - - - - When my dad and my stepmom saw *Lost in Translation*, I asked them what they thought and my stepmom said, "Oh, my, *god*, I wished they would have *fucked* already." My dad said the same thing. Where was the sex? What did their relationship consist of if they didn't have sex? I looked at these two people, who I previously understood, who I previously had a relationship with, and I said (to myself): *You shallow motherfuckers. You didn't* get *the film. You have no idea what the movie was about. The whole point of the movie is they* didn't *have sex. If they had had sex it would have ruined the whole film. The* point *(if you want to know) of the goddamn* movie *is when they're lying in bed together, they have a deep conversation, he touches her foot*—*idly, as they both fall asleep*—*and they* don't *have sex.* I looked at my dad, at my stepmom Eva, and I thought: *Who* are *you people? How shallow can you get??* But with me and Gretchen the story was just the opposite. I wish that from the first night we met, Gretchen and I *had* been having sex. Then at least *I* would have gotten something out of the relationship. ### 175 Lying on the bed in some Comfort Suites in Nashville: > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Kristi > > **Subject:** Writing from Nashville > > This might be a short email. But how can I not write you from a Nashville hotel during my first time ever in this city? My mom and I are here to look for an apartment and for her to meet her new church members. Today was a hard day physically because I spend most every day lying on my stomach typing and today was about nine hours of driving, which Mom did all of (I'm barred from driving by my psychiatrist), and a lot more walking and standing than I'm used to. I know it sounds ridiculous but the tardive dyskinesia makes me clench and shake and like a few minutes ago I just fell off the bed I was lying on. I try to laugh about it, but this morning I involuntarily punched the tip of a plastic straw (hard plastic) and it broke the skin..I hit it that hard. I'm trying new medicine but as far as I can tell, the medicine that caused this, caused permanent damage to my brain, and it can be addressed but never fixed. But then I've read that sometimes it just goes away when your stress goes away. So I don't know why I'm telling you about this. Who cares? I'm human, I'm going to die eventually. Am I too prideful that I think I deserve to be healthy? I feel some conflict around my mental illnesses that I don't normally feel. I had an intense experience recently where I went without my Klonopin for one day because of doctor and insurance company fuck ups, and I had such an intense dream I felt like it was a vision from god or my subconscious or maybe just a crazy Klonopin withdrawal dream..but it was beyond a dream..it was as consciousness-testing as a hallucinogenic trip. I felt like my mind was being pushed farther than I generally want it to be pushed. But I took notes and I'm going to make a novella out of it in a few years when I'm done with my current projects. This is the third or fourth time I've had that kind of vision, not related to drug withdrawal before, but I mean at the end of this vision, I saw a book cover with a title on it, like my subconscious (or whatever) was telling me: write a book based on this vision and by the way HERE'S THE TITLE!! I mean, who cares where that vision came from, it's become part of my process occasionally (last time was about five years ago) to see some vision that I believe is telling me what to write. I know that might sound crazy but please know that I am sane enough to take any of these metaphors of visions (from god, from my subconscious, induced by psychiatric drug withdrawal, whatever)..I take any of those metaphors with a grain of salt. It's not important to me to figure out which one is more true, but I am listening to the message. I wrote about ten pages of notes while I was still withdrawing from the anti-anxiety medicine and I'm taking what I can from the experience. I mean if I'm going to get pushed to the limit psychologically, I'm going to take the story from the vision with me. Which is probably just what my subconscious wanted me to do. Life is on hard mode right now. I'm just hoping I live a good while longer so I can do what I want to do with my writing and possibly, I'd like to fall in love again, if I meet a person I can genuinely do that with/feel that way about. I'm a big fan of Tennessee accents, so I figure my chances are going up coincidentally with this move. > > I hope you're well. > > Love, > > Matthew ### 176 Mom got a job. We had to leave Baton Rouge because there was no work there. We're in Nashville now..alive..doing what I love to do most. I eat, and I shit, and I go to sleep. I make smalltalk with everyone, grocery checkers, restaurant servers, neighbors in the apartment complex. I go to therapy and about every other session I laugh, every other session I cry. Since you last met me in Vermont, I haven't wanted to kill myself (except this one little time), and I've written many more books. I have been back to the mental hospital, but not for long. My occasional visits have been week-long check-ups for mania and depression. Through trial and error, my psychiatrists and I have found medicine that works for me. It doesn't cut out my mood swings, but it lessens the amplitude of their curve. I have learned not to resist my medication, but to live with it, to trust it, and to love it. I made a friend. It's my neighbor Ida. We got to know each other gradually, me saying hi from a distance, then stopping by at her porch for short conversations. I discovered right away she's a touch person like me—we hug and grab arms every time we say hello and every time we say goodbye. "I need touch, Matthew." "So do I." My parents don't touch, and to me its a vacuum of a certain kind of love, that human touch. I need it and I have to get it somewhere. So now I get my hugs from Ida, and it's good. I tell Ida, "I'm getting this feeling I used to get in Vermont. This feeling of doom, like everything's about to end." I've had that feeling all my life. Ida says, "You're different in your mind, aren't you." I say, "Yes." Then I stand there with tears welling. And I say: "My therapist back in Ohio saw me looking terribly depressed and desperate and desolate and dead when I walked into her office one time for an appointment. She asked me what was wrong and we talked through it and at the end of the session as I was leaving she said: 'Matthew. You know that look I saw on your face when you came through that door today? I don't *ever* want to see that face again.' By which she meant I needed to take care of myself, to keep myself above a certain level of sadness, and that that work needed to be done by me, regardless of whether I was seeing a therapist." Ida says, "I know." And then I understand that she really does know. She tells me she had a daughter with bipolar. "She used to run up and down the street naked before she killed herself." "Oh, Ida." We grab arms. But we don't always go deep—just 80% of the time. And in general Ida sits on her porch and smokes. If she has her back turned out, then I walk on by. If she's facing out toward the parking lot, then I stop and talk. By now, the tardive dyskinesia caused by an antipsychotic medication prescribed at the Refuge causes me spasming so bad, I spend twenty-three hours a day lying down—I lie on my back at night to sleep and on my floor during the day to type. And as I tell Ida my troubles she tells me hers. She's lost two daughters. One was bipolar. That one committed suicide. Ida have our optimism in common. We have our compassion. And we're also connected through this illness, bipolar disorder, which caused my friend's daughter to run down the street naked when manic, catching the attention of police, ending up in mental hospitals, and taking her own life. One out of every five people with bipolar disorder dies by suicide..which tells me that there are Idas everywhere, mothers and brothers and grandfathers and sisters of people with bipolar disorder who have died by suicide. I sit with Ida and cry for her loss—a child, a whole person, a whole life, she can never get back. And Ida comforts me on days when my mind is my enemy, and it tells me that my family would be better off without me, and that the rational course is for me to die..today. Me and that woman grab each other's arms and we keep each other alive and on this plane and breathing and relating to others and doing the business of life and generally living, moment by moment sometimes, sometimes as much as day by day. And that's how we make it through. There is no grand strength. There is no master plan. We just walk on our own paths, side by side. And eventually we lose each other, and eventually we fall and things break that can never be recovered. And some day we sit down, or lie down, for the last time, and in some kind of personal silence we take our last breath. Then nothing more can be healed, and nothing more can be set right, and we are the history of our grandchildren—all we are is stories told by our kids as our kids remember them—inaccurate, funny maybe, sad. Just some kids playing in the sprinkler and their parents trying to pass on what was so great or what was so monstrous about nana and papaw..but no one really cares. Even the bipolar mania stories no one wants to hear. Until one day, one of the grandkids grows up and gets the diagnosis themselves..then everything that little grandchild can learn about her bipolar grandfather is gold because any information she learns about *him* is information about *herself*—and it's information that could save her life. ### 177 Just texted aunt Susan about one of our favorite movies, *Trading Places*. We love—our whole family loves—the scene in the train car. But Susan refuses to talk to me about real stuff—she just ignores me, avoids me—and so I think of her as not a real person. I hate that, but that's the way it is. I mean there's no *real* relationship there, no intimacy, and I don't know why. Mom says it's not about me—that's how Susan is with everyone these days. So I guess I shouldn't worry that it's because she still thinks of me as a kid, or that I have bipolar—it really might have nothing to do with me. But I hate it. I expect that I'll have more intimacy with people in my family than it really turns out I have. But that's probably a totally unrealistic expectation. Susan gets a part in a play. It's a comedy—perfect for her—in the family she's considered the funny one. My mom is the smart one. Paula is the pretty one. Susan is the funny one. So I text her my hopes, my wishes, that all is going well. > **Me:** I hope you had a great play last night!! *[theatre emoji](#)* Weeks pass. No response. I don't block her number this time, but, yeah, something within me closes down with Susan. Maybe it's ego—and if it is that's ok—but when I write you a message I typically expect a response—in this case a simple fucking *thank you* would do just fine. ### 178 Four years I kept a promise to myself not to read Dad's rare email or to write him or call him (he never calls me) or to think about him too much. Counter to my intuition, this worked—my life is instantly more peaceful when he's evicted. But one day my mom was asking something about Dad—his present location—and I thought I could answer her question based on the preview I had seen of one of Dad's messages. So I opened up his email—and years worth of emotion—and for a few days I was in a Dad funk. His latest message was as always self-centered and impersonal. I made the mistake of opening myself up more by writing him back: > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Van > **Bcc:** Leona, Joanne > > **Subject:** re: family news > > Dad, > > We don't have an active relationship and haven't for many years now. You disbelieve truths about your treatment of me as a child and blame it on my bipolar disorder—you have shown you're unwilling to come to terms with your part in our relationship, or to accept difficult truths about yourself. You didn't support me in finding a decent college to go to..as soon as I returned from OU, you wanted me out of the house as soon as possible. While Joanne and Leona had a home to return to during college breaks, you quickly moved on to living with your girlfriends and your new wife—there's no way I could have gone to college because I had no place to stay during breaks. > > You have shown me since an early age that you didn't respect my intelligence. You showed me this by giving me childish answers to intelligent questions I asked of you. You didn't recognize that even at about three years old, I understood things better than you did—you never took me seriously. > > Over the years, I've heard stories from Joanne and Leona about interactions you had with them when they were children. As I hear more and more of the story from my sisters and mom, I have a clearer and clearer idea of what you do and how you operate. You deny your mystery trips to Florida when we were kids, but I have seen the letters you wrote to Mom, in your handwriting, and I've seen the envelopes they came in, postmarked from Florida. Even when indisputable evidence is in your face, you incredibly deny the truth!! I have heard incredible stories from my sisters and mom about times when you fucked with their heads by lying to them..including some of these stories where you played with the truth with one of us when we were children. > > That kind of playing with the truth has likely had long-term effects on your children. A psychiatrist of mine believes that your manipulation of the truth with me is the reason I am psychotic—that I am somewhat unable to determine what is the truth and what is not. So maybe you thought you were just playing innocent games by using deception and lies with your children, but that behavior has very likely contributed to all our psychological instability. > > You had a chance, when you remarried, to proactively blend the families so that we were all in loving, equal, accepting relationships. Typically, most men just move on to their next family, cutting ties with the last, and that is almost exactly what you have done. This was a huge missed opportunity that was your responsibility to make happen. > > Even up to four years ago, the last time you and I spoke on the phone, you denied events that occurred between you and I during the potty-training period of my childhood. Make no mistake: you can run and hide from what you did (for example: gruffly yell at me while forcing me to hand wash my shitty underwear in the toilet water, and gruffly yell at me not to do it again), but that was a humiliation that has deeply informed my relationship patterns throughout the course of my life. Only in my thirties have I been able to collapse some of my relationship pattern tendencies that you taught me so early by demonstrating the humiliator/humiliated pattern. > > You have deeply hurt me—and I don't mean you hurt my feelings. I mean you have played a crucial part in creating a human being who has needed therapy and inpatient psychiatric care and may need that for the rest of my life. I have no expectation that this note will be the catalyst that will get you to start taking responsibility for how you've behaved toward us kids and Mom—if history is any lesson you'll ignore me and make up reasons why I'm wrong and you have nothing to take responsibility for. Until tonight, I haven't read any of your messages for about four years. The reason for that is that when you write, all you write about is your job. You don't write to me about our relationship. At this point, I don't blame you—we don't have much of a relationship anymore. Two emails a year isn't a relationship. Not asking me about me or my feelings isn't a relationship. You've had my phone number for four years since my suicide attempt and have never once called me to see how I was—what kind of message are you trying to send to me with that inaction? And by the way, what kind of person are you that you would let others in our family help with my healthcare expenses while you contribute zero? Since you last saw me, a prescribed medicine has given me a physical disability that makes me unable to work. I am horizontal twenty-three hours a day. I'm applying for disability. My life has undergone a drastic change—imagine for a moment that I might need my dad at a time like this, a unique male adult to talk to. Imagine how lonely I feel without the presence of my same-sex parent!! Don't underestimate the effect of that..you should know something about this from studying psychology, no? *[His BS is in psychology.]* > > In my late twenties and early thirties I tried for about five years to build a relationship with you and you were the very definition of a deadbeat—you just aren't present emotionally and that doesn't work for me. Everyone in our immediate family can vouch for the fact that during those years I called and emailed you and gave you every chance to respond and be in relationship with me and you dropped the ball. Since the weeks following my suicide attempt, I haven't called you or responded to any of your emails. I just archive them without reading because I know that they will be about your job, be emotionless, or they will be an attempt to hurt or blame me. This rather lengthy note to you is to politely and simply ask you to stop emailing me—you're wasting your time. Our relationship has been over for a long time. I wish you the best—just not with me. I hated myself for opening up to him again—opening up to him has historically just been an opportunity for him to attack me emotionally, to let me know by what he said that I was a low priority for him. In fact, I'm not even on his list. But after a few days passed, the hole surrounding my Dad feelings closed up again, and I re-committed to letting him go. In every way that matters to me, he's already dead. And once I resumed my pattern of non-contact, my peace around Dad returned. And at some point I realized that the model Joanne and I had discussed over the phone in my early days in Brattleboro—with Dad as the ultimate disapprover and Mom as the ultimate approver—was a true model, but it wasn't the only one to consider. As I've aged, I've met and learned of many divorced parents who maintain civil relationships with each other, either because they genuinely like each other and are capable of being friends or because doing so helps their children. My parents, on the other hand, maintain zero contact—I think that hurts my life picture, and maybe that of my sisters. As is typical of me, I expressed my feelings about this through writing, hopefully doing so with less and less anger through time: > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon, Van > **Cc:** Leona, Joanne > > **Subject:** parenting > > I think you all could have done better in the divorce, by at least maintaining alignment in your role as parents. Some people get divorced and maintain contact or civility so that they can be there for their kids. I think you should have done that. The way you have done it, it creates a very not-there feeling of home and family in not just me but in my siblings, I am coming to understand. Just a piece of feedback: it would help your children if you still acted in a couple as our parents, as you are, and always will be, the couple that created us. It doesn't mean you have to be buddy buddy, but some civil relationship that underlies your continued parenting of your adult children, is something I expect from my parents. > > Also, I am disappointed in you, Dad, for being so out of contact. Louise *[Dad's sister]* recently wrote me because she hadn't heard from Kristi *[Louise's daughter]* in a week and they were worried about her. I realized, in this, that if I went missing for a week, Dad, you wouldn't realize I was missing. And I found that disappointing. For all of Kristi's difficulty, Louise still is in enough contact with her, apparently, to notice when she goes missing. Dad, we haven't been in contact at all this calendar year. Do you know where I am? My way of seeing parenting is that a parent should be interested enough in their children that they need to know what's up with their kids. I'm disappointed that this is not the case with us. > > MT Mom responded to the three kids with an amazingly logical, appropriately apologetic, just plain loving note. I instantly felt ten times better. Dad never responded—but you already knew that, didn't you? I mean why, oh why, oh *why* would you expect anything different, little Alice? But guess what, oh father, neglectful Queen of Hearts, your absence doesn't hurt this Alice anymore—my feelings for you are almost dead, now just embers in a snowstorm. I searched for you over half a lifetime..but the trail's gone cold. I am no longer searching for you, but if you ever decide to look for me, the door is always open. ### 179 Ida opens up to me and tells me her daughter's name was Grace. "The one..?" "The bipolar one, that's right." "Mmm..Grace," I say. "That's a beautiful name, Ida." "She used to think she was a god. Matthew! She'd write these crazy texts and show 'em to me and I could hardly believe what she had written. Tiny little words—you could hardly read them. And what she had written, it was like holy/unholy at the same time. Did you ever think you were God?" "No, I never did. But I feel more spiritual when I'm manic and I write scared texts and give them to people, like I gave my friend Shringara one time this thing I called *The Prophecy of Sticks*. She must have thought I was crazy, on some level—though on some level it made sense to her, too." "She was open." "Big time." "Yup." "All my friends were. But we were on a lot of drugs, too." "That's what bipolar people do, 'cause you're trying to regulate." "Yeah it's hard to resist the urge to take the edge off mania with alcohol. Unfortunately it works really well." Sometimes I go and sit with Ida and we just grab each other's arms and squeeze as tight as we can and an old black woman and a young white man hold each other and cry. Then I get up, shaky from dyskinesia, tell Ida I love her, and I go back to my apartment to write. ### 180 Brattleboro was a great and hard year for me. Since I lived there, there have been two suicide attempts at the Refuge. I certainly thought about killing myself while I was there. I've certainly hammered into your head by now that one in five people with bipolar disorder end their own lives. Those are not good odds. I take lithium and other drugs that, statistically, should lengthen my life compared to people who live with bipolar unmedicated. I do it for myself. I do it for my family and friends. Life is short. Most people never even live it. Bipolar has a flip side to all the horror—as one of my sister's university professors said, "You've never lived till you've been bipolar." There is no question, bipolar disorder offers the best and the worst of life. It seems, from the point of view of a person with bipolar disorder, that everyone else is dead—the normal rhythms of life strike a bipolar person as never enough: never enough joy, never enough pain. We don't understand what life would be like if it weren't a carousel come off the hinges, horses flying into the sky, us still riding them—even if we ride them to our deaths. Mania contains an element of fearlessness which is too much—it causes us to make deadly choices. But there is a lesson in that lethal level of fearlessness—life isn't meant to be lived in fear. Fear, not hate, is the opposite of love. And from the deadly fearlessness of mania, normal people can learn to fear a little less, love a little more. - - - - I tell my doctor my analogy for bipolar: a bipolar brain is like a Formula 1 race car. It goes really fast but needs all kinds of technicians to tune it constantly or it might blow up. He laughs. "We're upping your Klonopin from three to four milligrams." "Ok but I want to be careful with this," I say. "I'm a recovering alcoholic, I go to AA meetings, I don't want to become addicted to something new." My doctor says, "Let me explain the difference between addiction and dependence. Addiction," he says, "is where you see drug-seeking behavior—when you want more of a substance. Dependence is where when you take the drug away away, you see withdrawal symptoms. So you can be dependent..without being addicted." Sounds dicey to me but I say, "Ok." We occasionally run out of medicine because we forget we have extra or the doctor prescribes it wrong or the insurance company won't pay for it. And it's a big deal to me—for everyone else it's a problem but for me it's *fucking with my consciousness*. Coming from someone who's taken serious drugs, trust me, psych meds are serious drugs. They get their fingers deep within your mind. For me, coming off of an anti-anxiety or antipsychotic drug is as hard as coming off of heroin or coke. Different, but equally difficult. ### 181 My sister Leona calls me "misunderstood" but won't read my writing because her husband told her it's too dark (for an educated, mature adult to read?). She told me he recommended she not read the one book of mine he's read. I listen to her horror stories with the TSA but she won't listen to my horror stories about AA. I'm expected to keep up on her blog but she doesn't read mine. When she gave me literature about her son's, my nephew's, sensory processing disorder, I read each brochure from cover to cover so I could better understand his experience and be sensitive to that during our interactions. Then I reported back to her and repeated salient points, asking her to verify that I had learned the information correctly. We went over scenarios of how I might behave if Daniel did certain things unexpectedly. Over time, I took Leona and James's pointers on how to speak to Daniel to their liking. I did what they said to the best of my ability even when I totally disagreed with their parenting tactics. But when I sent Leona links to a couple of the best summary brochures on bipolar disorder that I knew of, she never even responded to the email. Maybe she read the brochures, maybe she didn't—maybe she thinks there's nothing there for her to learn since she studied nursing—the point is I have no idea because *she never wrote me back*. And my book—the one that got published—Leona's husband read it and said *he* liked it but advised Leona not to read it because it's "too dark." You know, to a point I understand protecting yourself psychologically from things that might harm you..but what if those dark things are your brother's *every waking reality*. You're protecting your mental health by not reading what I write—maybe *that's why* I'm *so fucking misunderstood!* It's cool. I understand. I respect you protecting your mental state. But if you don't listen to what I say, then don't blame *me* for being misunderstood..in that case I'm misunderstood because of *your* limitation and squeamishness about—for lack of a better term—*real shit!* Consider for a minute that your life might be easier than mine. Do you contemplate suicide every day? Almost every day? Always when depressed, sometimes when manic? Well I *do*. And you can avoid thinking about that all you want, and I hope it's never the case for you—but it is the case for me. What's dark to you is just daily life for me. - - - - And one more thing regarding being misunderstood. Have you ever heard of parents being misunderstood? The parent of a child, who either feeds the child and changes the child's diaper all day; or the parent of a child who works a job *that is not their first choice* of jobs, all day, to make money to buy food and diapers for said child. Have you ever heard of a person like that being misunderstood? (Typically, your answer here is going to be *no*.) You know why that is? Because *everybody understands* what parents do. We *know* how you made that baby—*it's not a secret!* It may not be *easy* to raise a child, but it's fairly well understood what the process involves. It's an essential process. I imagine that having kids is the most satisfying thing a human can do. I'm not saying it's not beautiful. I'm not saying it's not essential. But one thing parents generally are not is *misunderstood*. People question you getting a tattoo more than they question you getting pregnant, even though *creating a human* is way more impactful on the world than getting a tattoo. People just naturally understand that people are gonna have kids. They congratulate you on it when it requires absolutely no mental creativity or innovation or insight. A sperm, an egg, time, pain, patience, stability, love—it requires these things. Maybe some knowledge from a book. Help from doctors. But there's nothing *original* about making a baby. Look how many people do it—it must be one of the most common activities in the world! And yet, *how excited* do grandmothers get when they become a grandmother? They focus on the grandbaby. They express happiness toward the parents. And (I know I'm losing a lot of you here) all this love and congratulation and happiness comes to parents and children for something that basically just happens naturally. People like to fuck. Babies happen. You want me to *praise you* for that? Who *is* misunderstood? (And of course there's an overlap with parents.) People who do things creative and original with their minds and bodies. Gymnasts. Cellists. Fashion designers. Composers. Painters. Poets. Actors. Those are the people whose parents say, "You want to do *what* with your life?" "But you have the brain to be a *surgeon* and you're going to *waste* it on improv?" (But it's not a *waste*, Mom—it's what I *love*.) *Those* are the people who are misunderstood. They have to *go against the trend* to do what makes them feel like themselves. Doubtless parenting is grueling, but it is decisively *going with the flow*. My objective here is not to diss parents, parenting, or children—we obviously need all of those! But it is to ask parents like my sister Leona who called me and my other sister *misanthropic* for not having partners and kids, who critiques me for feeling misunderstood yet—I feel—makes little effort to understand me..to make that effort. I actually don't care if you understand me, but I would prefer if you didn't go so far as to insult me for occasionally *feeling* misunderstood. I *am* misunderstood! I've lived this way long enough that I don't need you (all) to understand me, but I would appreciate not being *dinged!* for suggesting from time to time, gently, that perhaps you have no idea what I'm talking about! I will spare you the complete list of my credentials for misanthropy, but suffice it to say that I have done *many* things that *most of you* will never understand. I'll never explain them to a wide audience—there's no wide audience that's interested. Say life is a party. I may be standing in the shadows of the party while you're glowing at its center. The pregnant daughter will always get more attention than the *choreographer* daughter—because *everyone* understands babies and no one understands choreography! But that's ok. Please: you have your fun, I'll have mine. All I'm asking is *can you please not insult me* for how I'm living my life? ### 182 Everything is blamed on my bipolar. If Leona and I are having a legitimate argument on a legitimate topic, we can spin ourselves out in infinite circles, each thinking the other doesn't understand the other's point. It really won't end and I, at least, feel more and more judged and less and less valued by the other party. So sometimes I decide to solve these problematic communications with my sister or mom by asserting the simplistic-but-true bipolar paradigm. Oh, the simplistic-but-true bipolar paradigm is: I have bipolar so everything I said is wrong and everything you said is right, congratulations. I send this one text and everything is fine: > I think I've just been having a bipolar episode and am just now figuring it out. I'm sorry for everything. You all are saintly for putting up with me. See? This way everything gets blamed on me and nobody else has to take any responsibility. Works like a charm. A few minutes later my sister sends me this message: > I love you tons. Take extra good care of yourself today! What did I tell you? Re-frame the situation with me as the problematic member of the family and everyone else my helpers and victims, and—*suddenly!*—everyone's happy. See, people like to be *on top*—they like to be needed, wise, perfect, while others are needy, foolish, and flawed. This is what I text my Mom: > I'm sorry for everything. As I'm feeling better, I don't even know if I know what's been happening the last day and I think maybe it was all just a bipolar episode on my part. I think I should be institutionalized but I feel a duty to write my books so for now I'm asking if I can still live with you and I did learn a couple things I can do to interact with you in less offensive ways. But the changes in my mental state do seem to indicate that I'm not someone that people want to deal with (that I'm "crazy"). I was texting Leona earlier and I suggested we stop because things I was saying were upsetting her. She was upsetting me too but the difference is I just absorb it and let the other person do whatever they're doing..most of the time. Mom wrote back, "We got this," and brought home Taco Bell and we had a little *Project Runway* party in the living room. All our problems are solved. But why? What changed? Was the whole event caused by my bipolar? Did Mom and Leona really say some unreasonable and inconsistent things to me? Is all this being morphed for me by the mirror maze that is my mind? What's true? Well, it all is. It's true that I'm bipolar and I have mood episodes and symptoms like fast and forced talking that make me difficult to deal with. Did my fast talking irritate Mom yesterday and start our fight? Maybe. Is my family tired of dealing with the threat of suicide hanging over their heads? Probably. But just because I'm sick doesn't make me dumb. I'll take responsibility for as much as possible, but even though no one wants to hear me say it, I am not the only one complicit in these communicatory kinks we run into sometimes. Does my having a mental disorder invalidate everything I say? Hardly. Are my relatives freed from their inconsistencies, their responsibilities, just because I'm ill? You better believe they're not. But when I try to proceed with them as though we are jointly responsible for issues that occur within the family, no one wants to do that. When I volunteer myself as the source of all evil, people jump right on *that* fucking paradigm. Here's the thing, though: I don't *know* what happened with that fight. Everything seems better now, in my mind. Is this because Mom and I made up and I took responsibility so that Leona didn't have to have a real conversation with me about the fact that, essentially, I read up on her life but she doesn't read up on mine? Did the external change in circumstances make my mind feel better? Or did my mind exit some kind of bipolar mini-loop, and because of that internal change, now everything external seems better to me? Did the fight cause my mind to go crazy, or did my crazy mind cause the fight? I'll never know. And come on, it's the real world—chances are, the answer ain't no simple either/or like I presented above. When I reveal the weight-bearer game to Leona, she flips. > **Leona:** So you've been lying to me this whole time? > > **ME:** I've been lying to *everybody* my whole *life!* > > **Leona:** And what's the point of that? You have to *lie* to get people to like you? > > **ME:** Leona, if I told the truth I see, not only would no one like me, I'd be dead by noon on the end of the first day. ### 183 I just want to walk into the mountains and never come back. Some children, when they're young, they imagine getting married, they imagine their career—like they want to be a firefighter or a jockey or an undertaker. I never imagined any of those things. I imagined how I wanted to die..I just wanted to walk into the wilderness and refuse to eat and sleep on the ground and wait until the cold or the snow or some wild animal or hunger killed me. I definitely don't want to be buried. I don't want to be cremated, either. I want to be eaten by a wolf, and feel that kindred mammal slice into my neck with her fangs and the blood of her sync with the blood of me, so that for a moment our heartbeats would be the same, and then I would be dead, a piece of meat dragged over a distance of miles for baby wolves to dine on. In fact, I think if I could have traded today, what really happened with me today (which was a day of such success it's probably the most fortuitous and full and amazing day I've had in years), I think I'd choose to die with the wolf. That's what it's like to be bipolar. Your emotions don't correspond to what is going on around you. It's like the weather—people personalize it and think that the rain is somehow executing a personal grudge against them *("It's trying to stop me from getting to work!")*—when really the weather means nothing. So a normal person's emotions correlate to the events they're part of. But you never ask a bipolar person why they're crying. I mean, you can ask, but the thing is..there's no answer. I'm sad for no reason today. Everything good happened. A whole day of good things, progress, people helping me and loving me and being patient with me and being my friends and my mom and my doctor—and I'd rather die. That's how I feel tonight, for no reason. I'd trade this beautiful day to end my consciousness forever—and I feel sick for that, I hate myself for it, I feel that my carcass doesn't deserve to live because I am foolish enough to play with death, which is incredibly insulting to the amazingness that is life. I don't know if there's a god or if aliens designed us or if traditional evolution somehow resulted in such an exquisite tragedy as me. However I got here, I hate myself for not loving life to the proper amount..and I think the proper amount is pretty high. If the rest of the world had to live up to the standards I hold myself to, there wouldn't be a lot of people left. And there won't be a lot of people left anyway, because we're killing the Earth. I wouldn't worry about the Illuminati or the Rothschilds doing some kind of population-reduction thing. I wouldn't worry about nuclear war. I think we have much worse problems with methane gas releasing from the melting polar ice caps. Or, really, the ultimate danger to humanity is a virus. It's just going to be a virus. It'll start one day, and three days later there won't be any more people. All your underground cities and places you thought you were going to scurry off Congress to, some scientists and a bunch of CIA agents. You'll all be dead with a simple virus, and the world will be quiet again, and the elephants and the whales will rule the world, and the libraries and the internet will stand still. No one will ever request another web page. And all those books we wrote will never be read. And it will be beautiful. ### 184 The cops come to the house based on an email I send. That's what I said. The cops come to the house based on an email I send. The email even said, "I'm not suicidal." But still the cops come to the house because my doctor's secretary has been instructed to cover her ass. This cops-coming-to-the-house thing is a big deal, because it's part of why Mom decides to kick me out of the house, but anyway..I'll get to that email in a minute, but for now.. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** Xenazine > > I'm taking four of those a day. I think I'm supposed to be taking three? Will you help me figure it out tomorrow? *[Actually, there's no uncertainty: I'm supposed to be taking three a day, Mom messed up, and we're putting more dopamine into my brain than prescribed.]* > > Thanks, > > MT I confide in Joanne. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Joanne > > **Subject:** also > > Mom insists that she dole out the psych meds when, weekly, we fill my pill boxes—one box for vitamins/supplements, one box for psych meds or more accurately, prescribed medications. I do the vitamins, Mom does the psych meds—it makes her "feel better". I agree it's better to have two sets of eyes on all of this. But the implication that she as a mentally healthy person will make fewer mistakes doling out pills is false. She has twice recently made *serious* mistakes, either giving me too much of a medicine that increases dopamine in the brain, or not noticing that we had more of a medicine and causing me to quit suddenly a medicine that you are not supposed to quit suddenly and which, being without, caused me *major* conscious disturbances on par with taking a small dose of hallucinogen. Then I was just double-checking the supply and found that this whole time I was unfortunately off my medicine, we actually had it all along. I'm not *dinging* Mom. Everyone makes mistakes. But here are two cases of her missing something that I noticed (eventually) by observing what she had not, and yet she's discounting my ability to do something that in this case she was mistaken at and I discovered her mistakes. So am I the invalid she thinks I am? I'm going to have to say no. And if she wants to continue, I am going to graciously trust her to continue to dole out the psych meds..we do it every Sunday morning so it'll be coming up soon here. Mistakes happen. No big deal. I still trust her. But when/if I make a mistake like that, she blames bipolar and uses as an excuse for her to think I am that much more helpless and dependent on her and an excuse for problems in her life. Yesterday she actually said that taking me to therapy was a significant reason she didn't have time to take better care of her own life. Wrong. She works about three hours a day at her office and plays games on her iPad the rest of the day, most days. I didn't believe that she blamed my therapy trip for why she didn't have time to take care of her own life. She has gotten into this model of caretaker for the sick when really I only need help with a few things. Leona got into the same model with me and I was riding my bike to the grocery store and all my doctors' appointments..at the end she wasn't even paying for my medicine so mostly what she was doing was unnecessarily worrying about a self-sufficient person!!! This is the type of thing that has caused me to lock Mom out of my medical records and make me keep my new diagnostic information to myself..though obviously I'm reaching out to help by even mentioning that there is such information. Very obvious, very stupid move on my part. I hate myself for giving everyone so many chances. I'm sorry I talked so much in Twitter messages and here..not for your sake, but for my own. This might be the part where I metaphorically move to the mountain. Once, Mom and I misunderstood the doctor's instructions and went *down* on my Klonopin dose instead of going *up*, as the doctor had clearly prescribed. He had me taking fewer pills, but they were a higher-dose pill—and both my mom and I missed it. Within a day my clenching was worse and my pain was way worse. We went back to the doctor and he corrected our mistake. The second time was also a mistake, but it may have been worse. Klonopin is a medicine you're not supposed to stop taking suddenly—you have to taper it down gradually. One time Mom, who fills the prescription medicine pill box while I fill the vitamin one, said we had run out of Klonopin and for two long days over a weekend I suddenly stopped taking Klonopin. The first day we watched James Bond movies in the living room. I think we watched four. I was lying there unable to focus, not in pain this time but shaking and feeling like I had taken a small dose of recreational hallucinogen. One day felt like six. I could never get comfortable in my mind. It's similar to the feeling of stopping an antipsychotic suddenly as well—look online and everyone will tell you it feels like you took a half-dose of mushrooms or LSD: you never visually trip but you get that general weird feeling, fucking with time, like you're hyper-aware, more aware of sounds and colors—and unable to filter irrelevant sounds. I remember camping deep in the woods with a friend the first time I took mushrooms. The road was so far away we didn't hear it all week—until we took mushrooms. Then suddenly it sounded like the cars were right on top of us, like that road was fifty feet away! It's the same thing in mania, or when stopping Klonopin or an antipsychotic: suddenly sounds your brain is filtering out completely, you become aware of. It makes it really hard to function. In mania, you're drawn to lights, thinking they have special significance—which does not help you function or survive in the world. I have to wear sunglasses in malls and grocery stores, outside, anywhere brightly lit. You realize, going through such experiences, that your brain is doing you the favor, very often, of ignoring some things for you so that you can pay attention to some others. Anyway, my whole point to this is that time we thought we were out of Klonopin and I had two days of hellish weird tripping where I'd ask Mom if she thought I was doing ok and she'd say, "You seem like you're doing just fine to me—one of your best days in a long time."—of course, to her I was doing fine, because I was being passive and quiet, while to me I was in sub-tripping hell—but that time, on the third day, I looked through the psych med bag and there was a full bottle of Klonopin in there!! I said, "Mom, I have some news." "Good or bad?" "Well..both." And I told her that while I was fishing through the psych medicine bag for no particular reason except taking inventory to see what we needed to refill, I discovered that this whole two-day sudden stop of Klonopin was completely unnecessary *because there was another full bottle of the stuff in here the whole time!!* She apologized for not seeing and I said, "That's ok. No problem. It was half-luck that I found it myself." I took one pill—one 1 mg Klonopin—and thirty minutes later I felt fine. We restocked the prescription med pill box and I was back on all my meds, feeling fine. It was after that Klonopin mix-up that my irritable mania started. I'm not saying the gap in Klonopin *caused* the irritability that ultimately is being given as the reason Mom wants me out of our apartment—in fact, I don't think that was the cause of that irritability—but what do I know? Mom, a few times, has made medicine mistakes which I eventually caught, or caught when I went to take my medicine and the pill box didn't jive with the iPhone app where I have every dose, every medicine, every time slot meticulously programmed and which I check with the medicine that goes into my hand and into my mouth and into my stomach..we don't do this willy-nilly around here, but my point is that for all we know, Mom's Klonopin mistake could have been the cause of the irritability that got me kicked out. I'm not saying it *did*. I'm just saying: we're a team, here, and we're imperfect, and unplanned fluctuations in hardcore psych meds are apt to affect a person's brain. The medicine would be done more accurately if I just did it all myself, as I did for many years. Because I'm the one who *takes* my medicine, I am infinitely familiarized with it day after day after day—what each pill looks like, both its names, and when I take it throughout the day—I know my medicine better than anyone. I could fill both my vitamin and prescription pill boxes without looking at any reference cards, phone apps, or labels on the bottles. But somewhere in there Mom decided that it would be better if she did the prescription meds and I did the vitamins. I like the company, I like feeling like *we're doing this together*. But somewhere, I think, there's this idea that *I'm ill* and because I'm ill I'm less capable, when that's only partly true. There are *just some things* that I'm not as good at as the mentally healthy person—there are *many things* that I do better than the average person, mentally ill or not. ### 185 Texts with Mom—Christmas Eve—nighttime. > **ME:** Mom, this conversation about group homes, the general lack of certainty, and related factors..it's eating me up inside so I'm giving you advance [warning] that I might need to check myself into a mental hospital soon, or leave Nashville on my own, or something..I don't think I can continue this discussion with you and Lea about me like I'm some kind of animal to be put into which zoo. > > Getting evicted from my Vermont apartment was a factor in me becoming suicidal. I'm not suicidal now but I am at risk for becoming suicidal with all this uncertainty about where I'll be able to live. I have to be safe with myself and that may mean going to the hospital. > > **Mom:** You are not shelter insecure now, and the idea is to make sure you won't be. > > **ME:** That's not how it seems. It seems like we had an agreement that we'd live here for a couple years and then decide to do something different at that point. Now you're saying I'm interfering with your ability to work. Maybe that's true. But we didn't make it two years. We made it seven weeks before we're talking about me having to move out of *our* apartment, btw—I pay half the rent. It just feels like I got inconvenient for you and you're unloading me. > > Just..if I got to the hospital tonight or soon, please don't throw away my stuff. Please let me come back and get them before I leave Nashville. > > It's going to be tough living life without either parent, but I can do it. I'll have to, it sounds like you're saying. > > **Mom:** Do you feel like you need to go to a hospital? > > **ME:** I'll make that decision. > > **Mom:** The things that you are saying and proposing don't seem to be the best for you. > > **ME:** What you would you know about what's best for me? Is being told I have to leave my current home the best for me? No. > > I gotta stop this discussion so I'm not accused of being manic later. End of conversation. > > If I go to the hospital, will you promise to let me come back in for 20 minutes to get my laptop and a backpack? I know you said earlier if I leave don't come back, but I don't want to lose my laptop. > > My whole work continuity is messed up here..I can't edit my book because it feels like a snake is eating my stomach from the inside due to the living location uncertainty. So there's no point of me being here since you and I are no longer friendly, and I can't work. > > **Mom:** We are friendly. I didn't know you couldn't work. I go to bed at this point. > **Mom:** Are you OK?? Please let me know. Christmas Day—early, early morning. > **ME:** I'm ok in an immediate sense. The last few nights my emotions have been going crazy around bedtime. It could be partially a medication effect..two Klonopin and a Latuda all in the space of two hours. And I'm just stressed with the situation. I can't relax enough to edit. At least yesterday I couldn't, worrying that basically my life is going to end in some horrible hotel for the disabled and I won't have you or any family members or even Lea or my current doctors to know that it happened. Portland is a bad idea. Leona and James can barely take care of themselves, Joanne is in some kind of a blackout, relationship-wise, my favorite alcoholic cousin lives there. I don't want to drink again. Maybe Nashville is better. It's all just too much for me to think about and I have too little data to figure it out. Yes, we were friendly last night during the tornado warning and that was fun. > > I would love to have a relaxed low-key Christmas and not be constantly worried if you wanting me out of the the house means you're writing me off. I guess I'm 37, I probably shouldn't care, but I feel like my adventure to Baton Rouge left everyone I knew there hating me more than they did before I got three. I know they don't hate me, but we sure don't see eye to eye. That's hard for me. > > I want you and I to be able to enjoy each other as we age. > > Also I want there to be peace for the next few days or however long it is until we find my next place to put me. I know I'm a problem..can't work..sometimes suicidal..it's got to be hell even knowing me. > > I'm sorry about that. > > I hate myself for it. > > We had a good year in Baton Rouge together. I'll always remember that, even though you had the stress of being unable to find a job..which was just a crazy crazy situation. I wish it had been easier and we were still there in some ways but I'm glad you found this church, I hope it goes amazingly for you—you so deserve it, Mom. I want your life to be wonderful. > > I guess I had some anger last night around being forced to move again so soon. I don't feel it now. I hope it doesn't come again tonight. I wish I had Joanne's ability to completely do her own thing and ignore everyone else but that's not how I do it. I feel other people's feelings too strongly. Maybe you could give me a timeframe..like will I be here for another 20 days so I can finish my fourth draft of this book? It's actually very difficult work for me in the sense that I have to have a certain amount of mental emptiness to be able to work on it—when I'm in turmoil about my basic needs it is more difficult for me to have a thoughtful, measured editing session. > > And my writing work may not matter to many people, but it does matter to me. To me it's an important matter. Not that I have to be serious about it all the time, but in the sense that it's sacred work to me. I don't expect anybody else to understand that but it is, it is to me. > > I don't want to worry you but yes, I am in a danger zone. I am not suicidal, I do not want to drink, but not knowing where and if I'm going to be able to live physically is extremely stressful to me in a way that makes me start to consider suicide and also say "fuck it" to why I'm not drinking. If my life is close to being in danger or being over through homelessness or running out of medicine and being in pain and unable to move, then why not drink? I'm now in a situation where I can't become homeless..I must follow whatever procedure society requires me to follow in order to get my medications. Rationally, I don't think going off them is an option..I perceive that if I did, I would be more crippled than I am now and in more pain, like I was in 2014 at the Ranchwood house..I was looking through old pictures as I organized everything into albums the other day and there are pictures there of me with an ice pack on my left neck and shoulder area..I remember I was in so much pain I finally couldn't sleep because of it and asked to go to the ER, which eventually led to finding Dr. Montgomery and getting insurance, etc. > > I'm on a much better path now, medically. Even though it may be worsening the underlying TD, being back on an antipsychotic has been *amazing*. I'm in so much less pain! I'm still in pain all the time, but it has subsided to an aching in my arms and back and not a constant sharp pain. Also I'm having hardly any joint pain..I was having pain in my elbows constantly from over-flexing them..that is much much lessened. > > Staying in Nashville..idk. Maybe I should just say if you and Lea are calling the shots that Nashville or Portland are both ok. I don't really feel close to say James especially but also Lily..they both have smarts but are so dull some of the time. I sent an email including them both with some very unusual aphorisms by a guy with the last name of Cioran, I think, and their responses were *so* pedestrian it made me want to gouge my eyes out and hang out with Oedipus rather than hear another dull, imagination-less word either of them had to say. I get that kind of writerly discussion on Twitter, though—and even there it's rare and from a select few. That's good enough; I shouldn't be looking for it in my family. > > The thing with the aphorism email..it was like I said, here's a list of Lamborghinis that I thought were neat and Lily's response was the equivalent of: Well, I don't really like Lamborghinis, maybe I'm not enough of a car person, but here's this Subaru that I really like, what do you think of that? And it was a *nice* Subaru she shared..a Thurman aphorism which is truly excellent. But what frustrated me..and it's possibly a generational thing..is how divergent her response was. I thought: how do you get along at ExxonMobil unable to stick to the topic at hand? I think both divergently and convergently, which is unusual. But this wasn't a bubble-gum conversation, a streetwise conversation where anything goes. It was a formal discussion about Cioran aphorisms and she just shat all over it (my interpretation of her actions, the story I'm telling based on her actions). In The Secret History, Donna Tartt talks about this difference in terms of the classical mind and the modern mind.. > > Joanne pointed out to me a decade ago that in that paradigm, I have a classical mind. I remain on topic long enough to complete an argument, thought, project. I value divergent thinking and I spend a fair amount of my time doing it. In some cases, divergence writes your first draft and convergence edits it. But I just cannot stand impertinent divergence and it is present more in some of the younger generations..which is too bad because it means that they are less able to create what you and I might call a final product. They're diverging all over the place such that if you ask them to write an essay on a certain topic they might be able to write an essay, but it certainly won't be on that topic. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this, it just clashes with how I do things. > > This moving thing throws my life into turmoil. It's very stressful. None of us knows if I can even get accepted to one of these places here, in Portland, anywhere. And it feels kind of like I'm being dropped off and never picked back up again. I've already been written off by one of my parents. If that were to happen between you and me, let's just say it would change my world view drastically. Because then Dad wouldn't be an outlier. It would be clear that it's more the case that most people don't want to be around *me*. In that case then suddenly maybe Dad was right to abandon me as an adult because I'm bipolar *and* schizophrenic (even though I don't feel that way, those are the words we use to call what I am). > > I wish Joanne was speaking with me beyond five-minute phone conversations (literally—"It's Joanne, do you mind if we have a five-minute conversation?"—"Uh, sure, Joanne, that'd be fine.") because then I might know whether *she's* staying in Portland. It's not anybody's job to "support" me or be a "family support" and please I'm sure you know this but let us let the conversation reflect that support goes both ways. I supported Leona as much as she supported me when I lived up there. I did an incredible amount of work with James moving them to their new house. I watched Daniel *all day* while Leona was in her room drinking—a little drinking, not a lot, but still. She had me on a clock and I followed it because I needed a place to stay. But if Daniel shat and I wasn't there to catch it, Leona chewed my head off (in yelling) (actual example). She expected me to control when he took a shit. And I know I was a kind and trusted presence to him even at that age because he wanted me, not either of his parents, to take him to the bathroom when he needed to pee when he was potty training—or to take the tray part of his training potty to the bathroom to be flushed, rather. > > I don't know what's it's like now, but when I lived with the Rhimes, they were (Leona was) too overdone to have a friend over for dinner. That's how tapped out she was energy-wise. > > So, we might be able to be family friends, but I don't see them being "supports" for me any more than they are now. > > I do think it would be awesome to be close to a growing Daniel, and perhaps a growing Joel. I think we could all support *each other* through conversation. > > I wish I could discuss all this lightly, but because I don't have a job, this isn't a fun decision for me—it's a life and death one—at least that's how I perceive it. I am leaning more and more toward—if we do this at all—a place that has a 24-hour support person. If the living situation doesn't have that, then I might as well be living on my own or with housemates. > > I'm sorry about last night. I just got freaked out and it it bugs me that this "solution" seems to solve *your* problems, not mine, even though I'm the one who has to do most of the changing. You'll be in a better situation, able to travel without worrying about me..even though the other day, two Nashville police officers, a crisis team worker, and an RN all spoke with me and decided that I was ok in the sense that I wasn't suicidal and didn't need to be hospitalized. And all because of a colorful email I sent..the irony is not that others in our family are so rock-solid sane that they would never send a colorful email..it's that—you, Joanne, Leona excluded—they *can't* even write a coherent email at all. They're less in danger of being considered ill because their brains can't express things on the level that mine can!! If you don't write anything, then no one will ever think anything you write is crazy. That doesn't mean the non-writer is doing anything like living a successful life, it just means they've decided, essentially, to sit out the hand at the game of life. > > So they won't be considered a crazy poker player—that's only because they're not playing!!!! > > Lack of failure through chronic non-participation, chronic inaction, is not success. > > My writer friends, my male and female, older, sage, published, philosophical friends on Twitter think I'm crazy for taking as much medicine as I do and they think it's absurd the way I'm treated by my families..specifically, that the myth is supported that I am less than or handicapped. Now I don't listen to everything those friends say and I'm perfectly fine with the medicine I'm on right now. But their other point makes me think. I am, alongside you and Joanne, one of the most capable people in the family. Yes, absolutely I am "mentally ill" but I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who has had a career with the overall difficulty and depth that you, Joanne, or I have had. Susan couldn't even format her own résumé. She asked me to, I made it look wonderful, that got her an interview, she got herself the job she has now. But still I was treated like I was totally incapable of anything but taking out the trash (and even that I was often reminded I was doing incorrectly). Susan did say thank you for me formatting her résumé (into a consummate professional form and I didn't just format it, I re-wrote it to be correct, language-wise and better technical-description-wise..it took five hours) but instead of a thank you I would like to be treated with respect. By you too. You told me the other day because I was too young and didn't have the wisdom you and your siblings possessed that you didn't want to hear any more of my ideas about your family dynamics. Ok, if you don't want me to talk about something because it bothers you, I won't talk about it. But please, let's not pretend that any sibling of yours is *wiser* than me?! *You* are the only one in that crowd who is wiser than me. > > Give me that, at least. Perish is wiser than me. Please, make a case for that, that would hold up in front of Joanne and Leona, for instance. The statement you made to me was bogus. > > I knew for weeks before you told me that you wanted us to come up with a plan for me not living here, that that was on the horizon. I applied for a low-income building in Brattleboro and have their return letter in my room to prove it. I did that three weeks before you said we need a plan for you to leave. So, I am not stupid. I don't believe you want to kick me out, but in some ways that would be better for me because there would be *less* uncertainty. The current plan has me waiting one week, one month, six months, who knows? That is extremely stressful for me, the one who will be doing the moving. I recognize that as safer, physically, for me, though, and would like for this to be more of a long-term plan, as you stated. But let's get on it. Let's look at that website Lea sent together or separately and apply for whatever we need to apply for. Or look at Portland facilities and get on their waiting lists. I want to get back to a stable situation like I had before this all came up so that I can get into a routine and know what to expect throughout the day and modulate my energy so I can work. The best thing for me?..is to stay right here. I want that to be known as part of this narrative. I like this room. I like living with you (except to the degree to which I am causing you problems), I like my bed and these quilts and my writing space on the floor. I have gotten a ton of work done since we've been here..partially because I was manic. And I am so so sorry for the toll that had on you—it's mortifying to me. But this is not my choice. It's your choice. And I'm happy to go along with it. But this is not what I want. I will do it, I will adapt, I will survive (probably), and I will likely thrive. But I'm doing this because you asked me to, not because I would have ever come up with this in my wildest dreams. > > And also, being robbed of Dr. H's cutting-edge techniques may have a major negative impact on my life. I'm not asking you to feel guilty and I hope you don't—that's just a probable side-effect of this move for me. But I want to acknowledge that as a loss for me and my treatment and my future mental health. It's a loss for me and therefore for all of us. > > I'm petty stumped by this decision. Nashville or Portland with assistance from from you, Lea, possibly Leona in getting into a supervised apartment building for disabled people..versus just going on my own, ASAP, to Brattleboro or more likely Tucson, where I could probably get an apartment for less than $500/month, ride my bike or walk to doctor's appointments, assuming they're close enough, re-connect with my NA community there. It's a tough one, and there's the implicit decision of how much I rely on yours and Lea's advice and how much I just split from that program and go on my own, find new therapists and doctors when I move to Tucson. I hate to say what I'm about to say next, because I don't want to be so reserved, but I am getting older and in things involving physical challenges, I am less of an adventurer now. It's hard for me to sit. It's hard for me to stand. So the idea of moving to Tucson on my own, while I think the town would be great for me in ways that Portland won't (lots of NA meetings within a bike-able area, for instance), I don't know that moving to a city "on my own" is the best idea—if I did it, it would certainly be the physically hardest move I ever made. > > I'm going to stop writing now—I don't even know if you'll read these all. You really offended me with that remark about not being on the level enough to make my piercing observations about your siblings. I wish you had just asked me not to make my observations because you simply don't want to hear them. But, I mean, Mom, you started me programming, and you'll always have that awesome place in my programming career, but I've gone so deep into that world that even Bob, who is also called a programmer, would have no idea what I'm talking about if I showed him the work I did for Optimistic (for example). So, the truth is, you don't even know anything about the realm of thought that I've participated in within programming—you don't even know me in that way—you never will. I would not claim to know you theologically—you have so much knowledge and time spent thinking in that area that you will run circles around me in that domain for the rest of our lives. My point is simply that you don't even know my thought world intimately enough to understand what I do in at least two and probably more like five domains. This is not with the purpose of inflating my ego, but to question how you can make a remark about the relative wisdom of me and someone else when the fact is none of you have ever even done what it is that I have done successfully. We love each other, we care about each other, but you don't even know my mind well enough to make statements about it. So I just find it very hard to swallow that you would use my lack of wisdom or lack of knowledge or my youth or inexperience as a reason why you don't care to hear my opinions on your siblings. As far as I know, I'm the only person on this side of the family who has worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies..which, believe me, is a joke in my mind..but it's just an example of how much larger my world is than yours or any of our family members in that way. And it goes both ways: I don't know how to do what Susan does. But I bet I could learn it in fewer lifetimes than it would take her to do what I've done programming. So don't tell me that I lack the wisdom or the experience—I think you know that's not true. There is only one person with more *wisdom* in this family than me—and that's you. Learning from you is part of the reason I stick around. Needing your help is another. I'm sorry we have to part ways but I am glad that it will be better for you..and by extension, whatever is better for you will make me happier, because getting in your way causes me nothing but stress. > > I agree with you, (to paraphrase) whatever we can do to get back into a loving, mother-son relationship, let's do it. Our relationship (our former relationship) was the most valuable one I had. So I'll do anything you say to restore it, even if it means living in the woods behind the apartment starting in one hour. Why don't you and Lea or just you decide what needs to happen to fix our relationship and I'll do whatever that is. I suppose one of the difficult requirements of being my friend is wading through approximately 4,000 words of text messages each and every day. But I don't fuck around. Text is my life. Get on that communication horse, kid—we're going for a pony ride. I say to my mom through her open door, "Good morning, Mom." Even though we make eye contact, she doesn't say anything back. The most positive spin I can put on this is that she is so into her writing that she is not aware of the nearby, outside world. This trait has been passed down to her three children, or learned by us. They key is you can't take it personal. It doesn't mean that I don't matter. It just means she's in her own world that is not permeable by her firstborn's greeting words. ### 186 It's hard when you've spent your whole life able to move freely—and in addition to that think well in many ways—a machine like most of us. And then, by taking a psych med prescribed by a doctor, I am one of the ones affected by one of that long list of side effects we all laugh about on TV. Oh and the side effect is that I clench and jerk like a monster. Used to be I could just up and go wherever I wanted, traverse the country like a free man. Now I'm a turtle with one leg and a broken shell. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon, Lea (my therapist) > > **Subject:** let's simplify this whole situation > > I sent Mom many messages yesterday and early this morning and the thinking I did therein helped me clarify my thoughts on the whole Matthew needs to find a new place to live situation. Here's my simplified outlook: My life can happen anywhere. I am versatile and can do my work and meet people and enjoy any location. My primary goal here is to relieve my Mom's stress about being unable to be my primary caretaker and her inability to go on business trips because at least the two of you agree that it isn't wise to leave me alone to restore (if possible) the type of relationship Mom and I once had where we are able to have fun together and enjoy each other's company (even if it's over the phone due to living in different cities) I am confounded by the options in this situation. My closest (older, wiser, published, thinker-type advisors online) would certainly say—or have said—that it's my life and I should do what I want. I'm going to go against that advice for now and do whatever you two recommend, because of (2), my primary goal, which is to restore or recreate a healthy relationship with my mom. I don't think I need as much supervision as you two think I do—that is part of your goal and your view, not mine. My goal is for me and Mom's relationship to be happy. Whatever needs to happen for that to be possible (if it is possible—Mom?) I will do, even if it means I have to start camping in the woods behind our apartment today. > Matthew No one responds. Turtle limps on. ### 187 Here's my orchestra warming up, getting ready to write the email that will actually have cops show up at my door. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon, Susan > **Cc:** Bob > **Bcc:** The World > > **Subject:** relevant articles on classifying "episodes" and "psychosis" > > Aunt Susan, Mother Sharon, > > One of the issues that circles around some of our discussions recently is how you presume to classify my behavior as "an episode" or "psychotic". > > It might seem simple to you to make that determination. > > But it's really not as simple as you think. > > Let's leave aside the basic DSM criteria-based diagnostic tools for *one second*—as you'll see all of those concepts are wrapped up in the more general philosophical view of classification I am talking about. > > Here's a post I wrote about nine years ago that explains, in technical detail, why me doing something you think is odd (or you can't predict) does not mean that you have enough knowledge to classify my behavior (as psychotic or anything else): > > [thread deleted] > > (Be sure to read the whole page, including others' dissenting and supporting comments, and my years-later reply at the end of the thread addressing those comments.) > > See, a test maker isn't really ever classifying test takers into categories of intelligence (or psychosis or whatever) by grading a test (or evaluating a person's behavior). The only thing a test maker is testing is whether the test taker knows (and chooses to repeat) what the test maker is thinking. That's quite different. > > And if you take the time to read my article, you will see that the situation test makers find themselves in is entirely more tenuous than is generally thought—especially with highly unpredictable test takers! > > And until you have thought through this philosophy of diagnosis and classification as deeply as I have (as indicated by the article linked above and a couple other articles I might link to below), I ask that while you make your classifications of me, that you keep in mind that it is quite possible that I have thought through this type of situation far more rigorously than you. > > If you are interested in having detailed, logical conversations with me about "episodes" and "psychosis", rather than just throwing words around willy-nilly, I suggest familiarizing yourself with my thoughts in that article. Then we will be in a scientific, meaningful conversation instead of a mud fight. And if you are unwilling or unable or do not have time to read my very well organized, written, and published thoughts on this subject, then I ask you to consider that at least part of the reason you do not understand what I am saying to you lately is that I simply know more about the subject at hand and you are unable (or much more likely) able but unwilling to delve as deeply as I have into the subject of diagnosis and classification and therefore what I am saying is senseless to you not due to my psychosis but rather your lack of education. > > So take a ride with me: read the linked articles, see deeper into what it means to classify a complex system and what some of the limits of doing that are. > > Or: remain uneducated about my thoughts on this subject and just throw around potshots when really you don't even know the meaning of the terms you are using, or the limits of classification in general. > > To each their own, > > Matthew > > Additional reading: > > Disorder and the Doctrine of Ethical Treatment > > Set Inference > > **P.S.** Just because I'm sick doesn't make me stupid. I need your help, yes, and I am thankful you are willing to love and help me. But when you treat me as though I am mentally inferior to you, my willingness to stick around evaporates like gasoline on a sidewalk. Here's the email that I sent that had my doctor call the cops to my door. I'm obviously not trying to impress you by including this. It is grandiose (you might call it egotistical), it is angry, crazy, grasping at straws. But it's a good look at the output of mania, and I'm sharing it for that reason. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon, Susan > **Cc:** Lily, Joanne, Leona, Lea, Dr. H, Kristi, Victoria (nurse from old doctor's office, Lee (old doctor), James, Van, Joel (cousin) > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > Aunt Susan and Mother Sharon, > > Why don't you think about this for a while: > > Foresight of a container > > It's a little something I made up, it's exceedingly simple, but I only know one other person who I've ever met who can readily understand it.  And she's a close relative of mine, probably much smarter than me. > > I just feel and hear in your words this superiority coming from both of you—possibly well-intentioned, but unwelcome.  I don't mind when people are not as smart as me, but when people are not as smart as me and they think they are, or especially when they insult me, I do have a problem with that. > > Here's one for you: > > Cor3 > > It's a classifier—it can tell if I'm psychotic or having an episode better than either of you two can.  I invented it.  It is, in this narrow sense, smarter than any of us.  In fact, if you can find someone, anyone, in your lifetime, who can explain how it works (here's the C code to help them out: inferno/cor3/actor.c and inferno/cor3/actor.c), I will embalm my left testicle and give it to you as a reward.  I am confident in offering this reward because that invention is a masterpiece of logic, and you would have to scour the globe to find someone with a mind clear enough and simple enough to understand it—even though almost anyone who looks at the description would think it is too simple to do anything, it is actually one of the most useful classifiers in the world. > > Point being: just because I have a mental illness (wait, no, like three or four mental illnesses) doesn't mean you get to talk down to me.  I rely upon external feedback to know how I'm doing, but when I sense you're manipulating me or using me as the identified patient, those are the nights when I seriously consider packing a backpack, going off my medicine, and seeing how long I can last in the woods with my array of illnesses.  I want to collaborate with you, but, "I'll not be juggled with." —Shakespeare in *Hamlet*. > > Sincerely, > > Matthew Temple > > **P.S.** I know you all are doing your best.  Unfortunately on the other side of the equation you've got me, for whom few people's best is good enough (certainly not my own).  I am at a breaking point.  I have been pushed too far.  I think sometimes I am being pushed.  Not by a person, or people, necessarily.  But I think often the stories we tell where a person jumped (metaphorically, of course, in terms of their life progression)..they were actually pushed.  I feel pushed right now.  I need extra help.  And if you can't give it to me, please just tell me and I'll leave.  I've been homeless before and I'm not afraid of being homeless again.  As well, I've stayed in five different mental hospitals so I have a small mental map of where I might find refuge or a starting point.  I'd like to simply stay in my room in Nashville, but I will not choose to continue to live in a house where "Every single night's a fight" —Fiona Apple of course.  I don't relish my presence causing my mom trouble—it tears me up.  I'm going to stay in my room with the door closed and locked *[because I literally thought my mom was mad enough at me and hated me enough that she might try to come in my room and kill me]*.  Please just give me a break. > > END OF COMMUNICATION—FOREVER—HAVEN'T I WRITTEN ENOUGH—EVEN THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW ME DON'T EVEN KNOW ME—GOODBYE—I AM NOT SUICIDAL BUT I WOULD PREFER IF MY FAMILY WOULD JUST EXECUTE ME BECAUSE IT WOULD BE THE ULTIMATE REFLECTION OF THE TRUTH THAT I AM OF NO USE TO THEM Any questions? *(**Note: if you would like two police officers to come to your house banging on the door the next morning, write this note and cc your doctor. Edit. Then press send.)* ### 188 I wake up to a call from my doctor. "*Do you know that you're manic?*" "Um..well..I've known for a while I had some of the checklist items, but..did I know I was manic—fully manic—I guess I do not know that." "Well you are. I want you to get off the phone with me and call your counselor and have her get you in touch with the crisis team. She'll know what I'm talking about." "Yeah, I know what crisis teams are." "You need to take this seriously. You're in a very dangerous state." "Well, look, my counselor happens to be calling now so I'm gonna switch over." "Ok. Take care of yourself, Matthew." I'm on the phone with my counselor for a couple of minutes when there's a loud banging on the door. I get up from my computer and go to the front door. Out a side window I can see a police officer. "I've got to go, the police are banging on the door." "Ok, call me back." "I will, I'll call you back as soon as I'm done with this." "Ok, Matthew. *Find a psychiatrist.*" "I will. Bye Lea." I put my cell phone in my pocket and open the door. "Mr. Temple?" "Yeah. That's me. Come in, come in." "Thank you." Skip skip skip skip skip skip skip. I convince two Nashville police officers, a mental health crisis team member who they have me call, and my therapist, all, that I am not suicidal and do not need to be 5150'd to the nearest psych hospital. I said I *convinced* them—maybe that's a Freudian slip. I did not *convince* them, I told them the facts about my mental state and *they decided* not to take me away. I decide not to call my mom at work and go out of my way to tell her the Nashville PoPo were at our apartment this morning—I let her be. But she finds out in some email I send and this turns out to be much worse. People who aren't chronically suicidal (or criminals) aren't used to the police showing up at their apartment all the time. I've been through this before, with the police showing up and (usually) taking me to a psych hospital—my mom has not. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** My doctor's office > > **Subject:** thank you all > > I apologize for being alarmist and saying scary things in the email I sent yesterday. But the reason I cc'd you was to get your input/feedback—that was no accident. My family rarely communicates with me and I admit that just knowing that my health providers care about me, that the police who showed up earlier care about me at least enough to do their job, makes me feel much calmer now than I did this morning. I am not blaming anyone here, not blaming my family—I accept all the blame because I am hard to deal with and culturally unacceptable, etc. But I can't deny, and I want you to know, that your giving a crap about me made a real difference for me today. > > Thank you. No one writes me back—if you haven't figured it out by now everyone thinks I'm fucking crazy! Plus nobody writes anybody back these days—it's not seen to have enough *utility*. I chat with my friend Davina about the police visit right after it happens. > **ME:** [photo](#) Look I made blue cheese burgers coffee and I added Colby Jack and fried eggs and red pepper for good measure. I'm excited, I admit! =) *[Huh..I was cooking back then. I've since decided that cooking any way but the microwave is too dangerous with my shaking/clenching/flailing arms.]* > > **Davina:** That's fucking amazing! > > **ME:** Yeah! Just now eating it bc the police came to my door! I must stop sending scary emails. I am sorry to you, and everyone, for doing that. > > **Davina:** The police came to your door over your email?? > > **ME:** Yes. I gotta stop sending emails and put it in my books. > > **Davina:** How the fuck did your email warrant the police coming? > > **ME:** The part where I said I thought my family executing me would be an appropriate way for them to reflect how little regard they have for me. But I specifically said right before that I am not suicidal!! > > **Davina:** Who called the police? > > **ME:** I'm not surprised. But I gotta play my cards closer to my chest, just talk to you and my cousin Kristi, who both understand. One of my doctor's nurses. > > **Davina:** That's so fucked up. > > **ME:** I agree. Sign of the times. Family members don't talk to each other, we go to talk to therapists and police individually, then try to come together to be family..and wonder why it doesn't work. > > **Davina:** I guess it makes sense that a nurse would call it's kind of her job. Why did you include her or your doctor? > > **ME:** But I do not like scaring my family..ugh =( I do love pretty much everyone except pure bastards. I included my doctor so that that would review my state—I wanted their input/evaluation. > > **Davina:** Oh I see. > > **ME:** Yeah I mean I do want their help and recognize that I have signs of mania right now. So..I wanted them to see it bc I wanted their opinion. > > **Davina:** Well I guess you got it. > > **ME:** Hahahahaha lol you a funny girl =) I guess I did. I actually feel better knowing that my doctor gives a shit. > > **Davina:** Well yes that's good to know. > > **ME:** Yeah I mean I need help. But I'm ok for now. He told me to take an extra lithium. I agreed. I'm gonna do that now. Me, my mom, and my Louisiana psychiatrist discussed that on our last visit and the psychiatrist left it up to me. I decided I didn't need it. But I'll take this doctor's recommendation. I don't think lithium is going to slow this mind down to lethargy or uselessness. I want to be a better person, Davina, even though a lot of me is ok! > > **Davina:** We should all have that attitude. > > **ME:** Yeah, actually, yeah!!! =) Mom drives me to an inpatient facility to see a nurse practitioner. This is the night of the police visit. The NP sees me privately. After an hour and a half interview she says, "Well, you're definitely manic!" but decides I don't need inpatient care. > **Davina:** How's it goin'? > > **ME:** Hi! It's going well. Worked all afternoon and got an appointment with a psychiatrist who might be able to adjust my medicine to help..me?..hopefully me and everyone but especially me. Actually I feel quite a lot less agitated just taking an extra lithium per my regular doctor's suggestion. > > **Davina:** I'm so glad thats helping. Good boo. > > **ME:** Mom is either in need of help and/or (probably and) being a real tricky bitch. Speaking so quietly I can't possibly hear her. Refusing to speak, even with the NP we met with just now she was morose, said as few words as possible. Looks horrible emotionally yet when I ask if there's anything I can do, says no. I'm used to this from childhood..she did that to my dad all the time. Refuse to engage or accept help, but make sure everyone else knows she's miserable. > > I feel sorry for her. But I can't help. > > With this extra lithium in me what she's doing isn't agitating me or my mania..I think..I think that's what's going on. Like she said a fight-starting remark a minute ago and I was chill enough to politely deflect it. Easily. > > Thanks for being glad for me, baby =) > > I feel fine now. Not agitated. Not scared of Mom. My door is open again. > > **Davina:** Right. Well I'm so happy to hear that you're able to let things go easier. I'm sorry your mom is having a hard time. That's great! Maybe your mom needs lithium too. > > **ME:** Me too and me too. Ha! Maybe! I don't wish anything bad for her you know that. I adore her, love her, probably idolize her too much!! > > **Davina:** Lol. > > **ME:** I hate to see her like this but I can't fix it. I can't even talk to her bc she won't let me in. Nothing I can do about that though. Gotta focus on my own health. > > **Davina:** Yes you're doing your best for yourself and too bad you mom isn't doing the same for herself. > > **ME:** It's sad. And I'm a fucked-up fatherfucker so if I think it's sad, it's really fucking sad! I've been taking it on me and not getting my needs met, feeling like she's upset because of me. > > **Davina:** Yeah but I truly don't think it's because of you it's just that you happen to be in her line of fire. > > **ME:** Yes, that sounds smart! ### 189 I call my therapist. Get voicemail. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea > > **Subject:** I left a long message > > so long it cut me off > > sorry > > let's just cancel our appointment > > working with you has been very helpful to me but I don't even know if I'm going to be living in Tennessee next week, so, I have to cancel > > and apologize > > I just didn't have my life together enough to even be able to attend counseling regularly > > I am sorry > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea > > **Subject:** I left a long message > > Called a bunch of psychiatrists, none with appointments in 2015. One recommended I go to Sentential Hospital because they would have on-call psychiatrists I could see. Went there. Actually it's an inpatient psych hospital. An LPN or LN or RN or some kind of an *N* named Alice did a thorough interview, informed me as Dr. H did earlier over the phone that I am manic. They both asked me if I agreed and I said I had noticed some of the signs of mania but hadn't gone through the DSM checklist to see if I met the full criteria but I said that yes I agreed with their assessments, trusted those assessments. Alice, my mom, and I discussed whether inpatient treatment was necessary. Our consensus was that it was not. Alice was able to help us set up an appointment tomorrow (Friday) morning with a psychiatrist who can possibly make a medicine change—and who takes my insurance!! Mom reported to Alice that she thought today was the first day she saw a slowdown or a calming in my behavior. I openly speculated that this might have been an effect of the additional 600 mg of lithium I took with lunch per Dr. H's instructions. I internally speculate that while the way I went about doing it was rude, evil, transgressive, or whatever you want to call it, that my email yesterday saying my part on some unrights, released me from some of the silent weight-bearing that I do in this family. Last night I slept for eleven hours, the longest I've slept in months. > > ---- > > **From:** Lea > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** I left a long message > > I'm glad you are seeing a psychiatrist tomorrow! Yes I knew you were manic!! Hence why I kept bringing up the psychiatrist every session. I also think you are having psychotic features during your manic symptoms if you are still seeing the patterns on the wall. Tell them everything you tell me. Good luck and see you Tuesday! > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea > > **Subject:** I left a long message > > Yes everyone knew I was manic but me! When the two police officers showed up at my apartment this morning I started to get the picture!! Ok, I'll tell them, tomorrow, everything I told you. Thanks for your help because, gosh, I need a lot of it. See you Tuesday. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Kristi > > **Subject:** relevant articles on classifying "episodes" and "psychosis" > > Couple of cops showed up at my door this morning and I called my doctor and he was like, "You are manic. Do you think you are?" And I was like, *Hmm, somebody obviously thinks there's a danger here, since these two police officers are considering taking me with them*. So..cutting out a lot of detail..I ended up taking an extra lithium and everything turned fine..in my mind, I'm totally on top of things. Even tonight, Mom made a fight-inviting remark and I was so chill and on top of things in my mind that I kindly and quickly deflected it. No fight. Mom's doing a bunch of weird emotional tactics I remember her doing to Dad when I was young and I now have the presence of mind to know that it has nothing to do with me and she's going to have to help herself out of that little snarl. It's suddenly easy for me not to be drawn in..and she can see it, too, she went to her room and I hope she's getting good rest and will feel better, too, tomorrow. You're right about compassion, it's a quality I still don't quite do all the time, and yeah, Mom and aunt Susan, and everyone, deserves it from me. Obviously that's a hard one for me, but I'm still willing to learn. > > I hope the best for you with your job..wishes for a promotion! Or transfer! =) > > Thanks for sticking with me, Kristi, I know I've been really off lately. [I wanted to put an emoticon, but there's no emoticon for that.] Text to Kane (AA sponsor): > **ME:** I was in a psych evaluation today to see if they were going to lock me up in a mental ward and when they got to the question about alcohol or drug use and I said I hadn't drank in 16 months and hadn't used other drugs in many years, I leaned back in that chair and had a silent celebration. That is something I am overjoyed about no matter if they put me in a psych ward or not. I'm not drunk. I mean, fucking yeah!!!! So, you know, this is how it goes with me. A couple of cops here, an extra lithium there, total family destruction and complete loss of any respect anyone might have ever had of me, here. But fuck that shit. If you are still worried about what other people think about you, you are an amateur, my friend—being crazy will teach you that *right quick*. ### 190 Aftermath. > **From:** James (my sister Leona's husband) > > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > Google Inbox has been kind enough to suggest these helpful replies to your email [I love this! | Thanks for the tip! | Thanks for sharing!] A masterpiece of logic this app is not. Funny though. Kinda. Because I hesitate to laugh while you're in such a hard place. > > I know it doesn't actually matter all that much, like, pragmatically, but I super (super) care about you. I hope you can somehow find a way through this shit. It sounds like people aren't treating you the way you really need to be treated right now, and that, in a word, sucks. > > Anyway. I'm not sure what I can offer that would be helpful. Other than a virtual hug. No pressure on that though. Just a virtual hug offer. Hope things get easier for you soon. > > I am going to review your source code tonight, though. I'm coming for that left testicle, brother. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** James > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > The left testicle is yours for a reasonable discussion of how cor3 works!! It's a beauty, too—the testicle (see attached photo) *[just a joke obviously—I attached no such photo](#)*. > > Actually, your saying you care about me super super much is of the utmost importance James. That and your virtual hug are the kinds of things that can keep me here a little longer. > > Super (super) thanks, > > And love, > > Your Idiot Whatever the fuck I am to you, > > Matthew > > ---- > > **From:** James > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > And hey, watch who you're calling an idiot. Be gentle to Matthew, ok? He's the only whatever-the-fuck I've got <3 > > ---- > > **From:** James > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > So, I just have one question. What does score_solutions look like for "I'm psychotic or having an episode"? > > **P.S.** If I'm bothering you, please feel free to tell me to fuck off. I was assuming the whole "end of communication forever" thing was directed at the originally addressed recipients (I was a lucky fucking cc) ;) But I do want to be cautious not to overstep or pile on any extra shit. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** James > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > Well, today it looked like two police officers banging on my door, coming in and telling me to call my doctor, who then said, "You are manic. Are you aware of that?" > > And you're not bothering me. Please don't fuck off. Please stay in my life, even though I am fucked up some of the time. > > My doc upped my lithium and I got better right away. Mom said I seemed calmer. I was suddenly able to deflect fight-bait that she laid out easily and kindly. She was critical as hell of me and my grapefruit juice in a pitcher etc. etc., railing at me over nothings, but with a little extra salt in my brain I was loving and able to deflect. She realized this and stopped trying, went to her room. There's more to tell about her but I'll swerve back to me and say I have a psychiatrist appt. in the morning to do a little more adjustment to the meds and it is amazing and confounding how dependent I am on a little salt to think and act rationally. > > How is your evening, may I ask? I was in the process of cancelling all my doctor's and therapist's appointments, cancelling my health insurance, and as soon as I got my Ally bank card in the mail I was going to pack a backpack with just my laptop, get on a place, and fly to another city and never speak to my family again. And somehow try to survive, without doctors or lithium or my antidepressant. That is mania. My doctor called and asked me to trust him, that my plan was not a good one, that I was manic, and I said ok, I trust you, I'll do what you suggest. He suggested I take an extra lithium at lunch and now, in the evening of that day, I feel totally different. I feel embarrassed, but I don't feel like I have to leave town just because Mom is being critical and moody. Now suddenly I have kind and loving ways to deflect all that and until she actually kicks me out, I feel like I deserve to live here—I'm paying rent, I'm not hurting her. Her health is her responsibility, and she clearly doesn't want input from me on that or anything else. She's skulking in her room now, making it exceedingly clear that she's unhappy. But she's not talking to me about it, so I can only respect her space, hope for the best, and spend my energy helping myself. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** James > > **Subject:** oh experts on my mentality (and others who get to watch my demise—lucky fucking you) > > Basically, score_solution for "I'm psychotic or having an episode" looks like this: > > [commion image of girl who drew a concentration camp when asked to draw her home] > > Matthew That's no shit right there. ### 191 The manic apology email. Better stock up on Ho Hos and build a campfire before you jump into this one. See, if you were reading this in the age of paper books, you could tear out each page after reading it and add it to the flames. But, you can't, so you suck. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Matthew > **Bcc:** Everyone > > **Subject:** Manic apology email > > Ever have one of those days where you wake up to cops banging on your door telling you to call your doctor and your doctor says, "You are manic.  Do you know that?"  Well, I have those days from time to time, and for me, yesterday was one of them. > > This is not the first time police have come to my house in roughly this same capacity over an email I sent or a phone call I made.  Sometimes I end up in a locked ward because I'm deemed a danger to myself or others.  Sometimes I walk away, with everyone's trust that I will be safe enough to handle the situation while outpatient with the help of my caretakers and close relatives. > > Yesterday morning and the night before I was in the process of cancelling all my doctor's and therapist's appointments, cancelling my health insurance—to save money and because they were completely unnecessary—and I was going to pack a backpack with just my laptop, get on a plane, and fly to another city and never speak to my family again.  Somehow I would try to survive without doctors or lithium or my antidepressant, and if I failed—I didn't care. > > Apparently, that is mania. > > It's impossible for me to tell because it feels normal to me.  The high I felt yesterday, feeling suicidally depressed, and normal—while they are all distinct feelings for me—all feel normal to me.  I can distinguish between them to some degree, but none of them seems out of order.  All those states seem acceptable and natural in my mind. > > My doctor asked me to trust him that my plan of stopping treatment and leaving town was not a good one, trust him that I was manic.  My counsellor and an RN at a psych hospital told me the same thing.  And I said ok, I trust you, I'll do what you suggest.  Doc suggested I take an extra lithium at lunch and by yesterday afternoon and through yesterday evening, I felt totally different—the extra lithium calmed me down, it seems to me. > > I feel embarrassed, I feel bad for my mom especially who has been living with me for however long this has been going on (I've been sleeping four hours a night and waking fully rested almost every night for over a month, so that's a clue), and I am sorry to the rest of you for sending an email (or two, or more—I don't know) with language that is rude, scary, outside of cultural norms, containing violent metaphors.  But right now I do not feel like I have to leave town because I am intolerable to everyone who knows me, and useless, and incompatible, and simply a pain in the side to others such that communication with them is pointless.  I'm probably still manic, but I am calmed down a little.  I only slept briefly again last night, but I feel great—I've felt great for months—I've written something like six-hundred pages in the last forty days; the only thing that's felt horrible is that I can see I'm driving my mom crazy, which tears me to my core—but which I haven't been able to fix, no matter what I try.  The extra lithium helped yesterday.  Mom and I have an appointment with a psychiatrist later today to discuss possible further medicine changes. > > [That's the summary.  If you're running to catch a plane, this is a good place to stop.  If you're on a layover and you just finished your Dean Koontz novel, you might find time to delve a little deeper.] > > When police officers show up at my apartment saying my doctor is worried about me, and I call my doctor and he says, "You are manic.  Are you aware of that?" and I realize that my therapist has told me I'm manic and then an independent RN gives me a two-hour interview and tells me that I am "definitely manic," and also asks me if I think I'm manic, it is a strange situation for me.  I did not expect any of that.  I did not think that RN, especially, would think I was manic—we had a perfectly normal interview.  I didn't see anything manic about my behavior with her.  The content of what I said and the manner in which I said it seemed to me acceptable, safe, and unremarkable. > > If this is manic, then I've been manic a lot of my life since at least the tenth grade and had no idea until recently. > > That is one of the very tricky things about bipolar disorder: as my doctor puts it, my sense organ is broken—I'm not in the best position to judge my own state.  I have read, insidiously, that denying that you're manic is one of the symptoms of being manic!  ("..even when family and friends recognize mood swings, the individual will often deny that anything is wrong.") > > I'd known for days I had some of the features of mania, but I hadn't looked at the DSM checklist (the next to latest version) to see if I met the full diagnostic criteria for mania—and if I had thought I was anywhere near mania, I would have been going to the checklist to self-diagnose.  I thought I had some mild features, two or three bullet points, but not enough for a diagnosis of full mania.  I'm simplifying the diagnostic criteria a little for brevity, but this is close to true: you need to display four out of the eight criteria for at least one week to be diagnosed manic—in my opinion, now that I look at it, I've had at least seven out of the eight criteria for at least five weeks.  And here's a little glimpse into my bipolar brain: when I read those criteria right now, I don't consider many of them to be negatives—I consider them to be desirable qualities of a vibrant human being. > > I have to face the idea that what I feel is going on with me and what others feel is going on with me is sometimes very very different.  I trust my doctors, I trust my therapist, I trust that RN I met today, but trusting even my closest family members to give an objective evaluation of me is more difficult because we have such emotional relationships that by definition we are not dispassionate with respect to each other.  We have long, complex histories and we share the same genes and generational behavioral patterns, so it's harder for me to believe that family members have the capability to be objective about my state—I trust my close family members to a large degree, but I can't trust them 100%.  If that is hurtful, I am truly sorry.  I ask that those of you I have active relationships with continue to give me feedback when you think I need it, because I do trust you to a great degree—and I need your help to arrive at any kind of objectivity.  You certainly don't owe me that, so if you don't feel like helping me see that I might be in a dangerous position, so be it.  That's your business, not mine. > > I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder about ten years ago, and my life has been a new kind of odyssey since then.  I'm finally understanding that bipolar behavior seems crazy or weird to observers on the outside.  I have to say I think that non-bipolar behavior seems crazy and weird to me.  It's seems very nonsensical, illiterate, unpoetic, extremely boring, and dull and unintelligent.  And yet the extra little elemental pill my doctor asked me to take yesterday improved my whole outlook in less than an hour, so I trust him to do things that will help me, to have my best interest at heart.  Non-bipolar people have saved my life at least a couple of times with their processes and their studies, so of course I see myself as needing them—I also think the world of mentally healthy people would be a lot less human without some mentally ill people in it.  And even though I think it should be obvious to any intelligent person that the terms mentally healthy and mentally ill are grossly simplistic, totally gross misnomers, I can believe that in some ways bipolar is a disorder, even though it affords clear advantages. > > I think the hard thing for bipolar people to understand is that bipolar is a major disorder, that it's a deadly, life-destroying, debilitating illness, not solvable by oneself, not solvable without medicine, not solvable through thought alone. > > I think the hard pill for people without bipolar disorder to swallow is that bipolar disorder gives a person major advantages in terms of creative intelligence, problem solving, emotional power, and just plain old joy—but only when we're not trying to kill ourselves. > > It's a mad situation—nothing clear-cut about it.  The disease costs the US $45 billion dollars a year according to an old estimate, makes a person 20 to 30 times more likely to kill themself, and costs employers double what major depression costs in terms of sick days.  "While the vast majority of people who are violent do not have mental illness, people with mental illness are five times more likely to be murdered than mentally healthy people and "people with severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychosis are 2.5 times more likely to be attacked, raped, or mugged than the general population."  Conservatively, fifteen to twenty percent of people with bipolar kill themselves.  That might seem like something society would obviously want to treat (or eradicate).  But do we really want to take away all the demons of [these famous people with bipolar disorder]?  As Jessie says in *Transsiberian*, "Kill off all my demons, Roy, and my angels might die, too." > > In my mania, bipolar disorder presents itself not as my condition but as other people's limitations—which is infuriating to me, that I would ever think that way—I want to focus on myself, my own healing, not blame other people.  I hate that I've ever done that—and I do it all the time. > > All of this, all of it, is true at the same time.  In the world I live in, I cannot afford to be so naive as to think that even true contradictions indicate that either side is wrong.  It is quite clear to me that multiple simultaneous contradictory truths exist side by side in our world—even the world outside of the bipolar mind. > > When that RN, at the end of yesterday's two-hour interview, said, "Well you're definitely manic," I wondered, What did I say or do in the last two hours that gave you that impression?  I have read the criteria for mania many times.  But here I must admit that my ability to evaluate this aspect of myself breaks down.  Because to me it still seemed like I partially met some of the criteria for mania, but what I felt like did not feel manic to me.  It felt very very normal. > > I used to assume, during periods when when I did hard drugs (I include alcohol and some other drugs despite their legality in the US), that everyone was doing hard drugs.  Not literally that they were doing hard drugs, but that they had the same mentality, the same general outlook on the world as I did when I was doing hard drugs.  I couldn't comprehend that someone might be walking down the street with no reason or outlook like my own—to me everyone must have been wanting, lacking, needing some kind of drug to have fun.  But they weren't.  Most people were in a totally different mentality—like to them it was important to walk down the street to go to school, to get some flim-flam degree that I would look down on them and their whole life for caring about.  That's where my mentality was. > > It's the same with mania (or depression, but I'm increasingly manic and less and less depressed in recent years).  I feel like everyone is thinking pretty much like I am, has similar goals and similar views on life.  But that's totally not true.  And while I like normal people and am friendly with normal people and sometimes respect the intelligence of normal people, (mentally healthy people), I find them all boring—they're too simple.  I think I've only ever been interested in crazy people, especially people on the bipolar spectrum.  Everyone else seems dead to me.  Unless you're bipolar, I just can't get it up. > > I am saying I'm sorry: I am sorry.  This note is my most recent apology for my most recent bipolar mood episode (mania or depression).  This might be your first time receiving one of these from me, it might be your twentieth.  My email archives are full of them—that is painful for you, insulting, tiring, inconvenient.  For me it is tragic.  You might worry your heart out over me (if you're my mom or someone close who does truly love me)—that is bad.  This is worse: I lose friends, family, apartments, cars, jobs, the chance at schooling, and even my ability to make money and live in the so-called normal world (which to me is an insane world) even though I have lucrative skills. > > I am not asking for your forgiveness, pity, acceptance of me, or understanding.  This is an apology, not an offer of psychic indentured servitude, not an invitation to be psychologically abused by you.  Unless you have something really significant to say, and you're pretty sure I'm not already automatically deleting your incoming mail, would you please just ignore or accept this apology in your own mind and not start a discussion with me?  That would really be best for me.  To those of you who are in active relationships with me, who write to me often and respond meaningfully and peacefully to me when I write to you or call you or text you or video chat you, please feel free to respond (preferably in the comments of this post, not as a private email reply—be public, be bold, be willing to put your name beside your words in a context that opens them up to scrutiny—I have).  But if you're only kind of peripherally involved with me, and you don't have something of substance to add, please ask yourself what your real reason for responding to my apology would be, unless it is to simply and sincerely accept it. > > To prevent myself from communicating with some of you and your family in disrespectful ways, I have already quit Facebook (a year and a half ago), and yesterday I cleared out a lot of contact information so that those of you I am especially mad at will not receive any more communication from me (I hope—I plead with myself and the universe to make this true).  After I send this note I will take additional steps so that it will be harder/impossible for me to communicate with those of you who have unquestionably, in archived writing, used my mental diagnoses as insults or to try to create a power imbalance—that's not cool and you don't get to play that game with me anymore.  Unfortunately, I can't guarantee my own proper, cultured, appropriate, polite, societally-neutered behavior with just my brain, so I have to delete contact information as a kind of training wheel to help me not say mean things to those of you who have taken psychological aim at me in your own moments of weakness.  Rest assured, I have no intention of hurting any of you in any way—I know that in some cases I have hurt you psychologically, and for that I am truly sorry. > > Matthew Feel pretty lonely at this point in my development. Like there's no real closeness between me and any of these people. But I feel like I've gotten an inch wiser. ### 192 I added this reminder to my inbox: > Stay in my room with the door closed. Don't answer any calls, emails, do not make any. Discuss nothing of substance with anyone especially Mom. Then I was on my blog, just checking something, and I noticed my *manic apology email* post had a comment. No one ever comments on my stuff. Hardly anyone even *reads* my stuff. So I checked it out, and it was from my cousin Lily, and I read it, and was astonished: > **Lily:** I said this to you already but I'll say again that I am happy that you are feeling better and you have a plan to work through things. > > Also I don't feel you owe me an apology so I don't even know if this post is directed at me, but you emailed me the link, so many some of it is? I see the challenge in you writing this post—you are addressing a wide range of people/relationships and you have a lot to say to each person but are trying to say it all with one post. It is also a challenge for me to read it and figure out in what category you consider me. I think you are requesting me to comment here instead of in an email so I am doing that. > > I hesitated to do this for a few reasons. First, I know so little about everything that is related to you—how could I really have anything to say when I truly know *nothing* about the situation. Second, as you mentioned, writing publicly puts me in a position to be evaluated by others—namely family members that I do not feel know me so would not be able to read anything I write in the correct context—and why would I want to do that? Third, I am unsure of how you might be evaluating me or might use my words against me in the future. > > Then I realized that all three of these reasons (and the others I didn't list) are just messy ways to say that my main driver for not commenting here was fear, and since I've been really trying to kick fear's ass lately I changed my mind and decided to write. If it opens a can of worms, so be it. Please also know that I am invested and I do care about you as my cousin but I also have other commitments so my replies can be significantly delayed. > > I agreed with many things you wrote in this post. Terms like "healthy" and "sick" are too simplified by many. I also see the beauty in what you describe is the creative chaos of mania—that if you didn't experience the highs/lows you would essentially be dead. I recognize that many people live very stable, predictable, "boring" lives and that you happily will never choose to live that way. You are more alive, thoughtful, aware, and compassionate than the majority of "normal people" I know—most are Christians—that seem to "have it all" in life at a quick glance. Writing emails with you has challenged me in a way not many people have to be more aware, thoughtful, compassionate, etc. BTW I really enjoyed your post on compassion. I can relate to feeling very out of place in the world (I know that might be hard for you to believe but as you know things are not always what they appear to be)—the idea that you are surviving in this mess of a world with only your mind to help you through—maybe I'm wrong but I don't see you leaning on a higher power very much—is absolutely something I cannot comprehend. I am so weak I could never do it. > > [My husband] went hunting today so I had a few hours to read, and the more I read, the more damaged I felt our relationship became. Not sure if this is my fault or yours—are you just being yourself and I am mind fucking myself or are you really doing some damage? I am still not sure. I questioned—do you view me as "normal" or boring or of lesser intelligence? I guess your view of me shouldn't matter, but this sparked some self-reflection in me—what drove the choices I've made, the fact that my life has been mostly predictable, and what my future holds. Is it so bad to keep a stable job? Choose to marry out of a desire for a solid relationship and someone I was sure wouldn't ever leave me? I started asking myself these questions which then revealed to me how insecure I must be to allow your potential views (not even confirmed real views) of me to question myself on this level (or is this what is called being challenged and actually learning about yourself and why you do what you do and this is self-analysis eventually a good thing? I don't know). The truth is it scares me to think that you might see me—like, as in, truly SEE ME and psychoanalyze me (since you are somewhat of an expert after everything you have read / been through) if I shared anything about my life or how I wound up where I am or what I want to do next. I guess that means I don't trust you enough to self disclose significantly and I think it is a shame because as I stated you do challenge me, and I think those challenges make for real character building. Oh what potential for some awesome stuff on the other side of fear. > > I have always felt we were equals, but now I'm not so sure you feel that way. > > I hope this isn't out of place or insulting to you because that is not how I mean it at all—but the more I read the more you reminded me of the character Carrie in Homeland. And it feels strange to me that I am only primarily able to relate you and the experiences you describe through a fictional person. > > I know very little about you. As you said in a previous post—one could be in your life for many many years and still never know you because of the complex framework that is you. I would not disagree with that and I think this is something about yourself to be embraced. You don't need me to tell you that you are talented. Another reason I hesitated to reply here is because let's face it—you are an incredible writer and I am not. I don't do a good job at translating what I really mean into words. It took me hours to construct this post—I worry I'll write something which will make a reader assume I am x y z or that I mean x y z when I'm not and I don't. Also all of this is unedited so it is scrambled and not linear and I am holding so many contradicting ideas/feelings in one place. So now you see why I can't always write back the way I want to—I do not write all day for a living and I can't spend every Saturday like this. You are more experienced than me and you have indeed spent much more time contemplating and philosophizing than I ever will so I can't stop thinking about how elementary (and full of errors because who has time to proofread!) anything I write to you must seem. This is much of why it took me so long to reach out and email with you in the first place. Before we started communicating via email I was only aware—through sometimes third or fourth hand knowledge, that you were a writer, that you had a tendency to be unstable and that in an effort to disassociate from the family you changed your name but then changed it back at some point. I'm glad I know more about you now. > > I started thinking about the measuring sticks we use to evaluate ourselves. When I was younger, the primary measuring stick was the measuring stick of predictability—your parents expect you home at a certain time and if you follow these rules and do what they say because you trust them, you are predictable and "good". (Or am I confused, and the stick was really using my parents to determine if I was good—it was the desire for them to tell me "You're ok". In any case, we both valued predictability and I was predictable and so "I'm ok" and I think I grew up with a good self image.) Then as I got older the primary measuring stick was one of niceness. If I was nice I was good regardless of how I truly felt. But I didn't like that because I wasn't always thinking nice things and sometimes I wanted to kick someone in the face but I would still smile and be nice to him. Then the stick was a "love stick"—can you love everyone no matter what? Oh and make sure you put yourself last while you are loving others. That didn't really work so instead these days I'm using a "grow stick"—how much can I learn, how much can I open my mind, how much of my current reality can I improve / change by using new approaches as I grow instead of repeating the same cycle over and over. This creates conflict of course because others expect (remember the predictability stick) you to react a certain way and when you don't it throws everything out of balance. > > When I re-read this, I wonder how it became "all about me" but I guess I learned that from you—to talk more about yourself instead of talking about other people's situations as a way to share. I used to think this made a person self-centered. For every word I wrote, I read 100 of yours so in reality there is a lot of "listening" involved before there is a lot of writing about what I think / feel. I think being self-aware is the first step to being able to be aware of others. To be self aware, you have to think a lot about yourself—your own thoughts, motives, reasons for your actions, etc. and I wasn't encouraged to do that for most of my life to avoid becoming self-centered. You helped me release myself of that belief and it has helped me. > > You are in my prayers and I am always wishing the very best for you. > > Love, > Lily A comment like this, a reply of this depth and length is not the sort of comment you respond to tomorrow. It's the sort of comment you respond to right away. > Dear Lily, > > I feel honored that you wrote such a deep and thoughtful reply to my frantic apology. Thank you for being patient enough with me and caring enough to stay in relationship with me while I am at times such a chaotic person. I wish I could be more stable for you and others, but look, you—you particularly—are still here, talking with me, and that is a fountain of blessings to me. Thank you for your staying power! > > I'm going to respond to some of your points: > > Please email anytime if it makes you more comfortable. I like public communication because it precludes triangles and secrets and it keeps me honest. If I say something publicly to you, then I cannot say a contradiction to someone else publicly or privately. I am not going out of my way to evaluate you, though I do have a tendency to classify everything under the sun—to be obsessed with status. It's a lesson for me not to do this. I have no intention of using your words against you, but, yes, if for some reason I was mad, I might do that too—I don't want to, but it's a possibility. The other reason I prodded you and others to reply publicly is I think, certainly in the case of what you wrote, that it's valuable for others to read. It's an education for people you and I will never meet. > > You have my mad respect for kicking fear's ass. I am a beginner at doing the same thing. Currently failing miserably =) I'm afraid of my doctors, my mom, that anything I say that's critical of them (even if it's empirically true) will be interpreted as a feature of my bipolar illness, so, way more than I should, I just keep my knowledge to myself to avoid conflict with them. If I was in a position of greater power I would never do this, but I perceive myself as being completely dependent on others at this point, and I have succumbed to fear so great that I don't even speak the truth when I know it's the truth for fear of others' judgment and anger. > > Writing emails with you has challenged me, too, in the best ways. You keep me on my toes, say things I don't expect and never thought of—I learn from you. You have my thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts, feelings, perspectives to me. You have benefited me greatly, and given me that benefit freely, and I am indebted. Or just: thankful and happy to have had the writing interchanges we've had. > > I don't have any answers on the higher power thing. I stopped being a Christian when I was in the tenth grade and I am an atheist and a god-is-everything and everything-is-god pantheist. I still pray, stating what I am thankful for to the universe. I don't believe anyone is listening, but I believe the act of prayer puts me in the mindset I want to be in—gratitude. I've slipped a bit from this practice and you're reminding me to get back to it. But, yeah, no, I don't believe in God. I'm always open to new information, though, and I've seen some YouTube videos on aliens and DMT that do not make me believe in God or a soul—but they make me wonder. > > I think your life is beautiful, Lily! Every interaction I've had with you, you've been loving and empathetic and smart and you work to include everyone at the table in the conversation. I think you're awesome, actually =) I am not judging your life choices in any way—to each their own. I don't think people really have a choice. I mean, of course everyone makes lots of choices, but aren't you also compelled to do to the best thing you know is possible? And some people's lives go through drastic changes and some people's don't. I love making money. I worked at an options trading company in my early 20s because it was a field I was interested in and I thought the work would be challenging. Years later, the activities of that company and others like it caused tons of Americans to lose their homes. So..I mean, I took money from them and helped them do what they do, so I'm a tiny bit complicit in that huge piece of American corporate crime. I don't feel bad about it one bit—at the time I had no comprehension of the big picture of what we were doing (even though my bosses told me—I didn't believe it). I think people who think they can do everything they want and also act completely within their morals are, by and large, dreaming. I do think acting in accordance with your values is essential to happiness, though. But to me life tends to be a restaurant where every dish on the menu contains foods I like and foods I don't—and at this restaurant there are no substitutions and you have to clean your plate!! You wrote: "Oh what potential for some awesome stuff on the other side of fear." I am not trying to psychoanalyze you, now or ever, but I could never think that someone who wrote that was normal or boring or of lesser intelligence than me. > > I have a chip on my shoulder. I'm trying to get over it. I just spent 12 years working for companies where really lazy, sloppy, unintelligent, imprecise, ass-kissing, lying, time-wasting folks took my childhood fantasy that work was going to be like a heist movie, like Ocean's Eleven or Sneakers, where some mastermind gathers a team of diverse skills and they all work together toward the same goal in a cooperative manner and come away with the coup of making something great happen in the world..and those companies and the people they were made of showed me that no matter where I worked, I was not going to be a member of an elite, collaborative safe-cracking team. That was a ridiculously unrealistic, idealistic hope of mine. And it was dashed. And I am left with so many memories of people in my own company or my own family working against me, or working against the family or company in general, and I have contempt for those people and razor-fine detectors for people like them so that as I meet folks who do not have pure intentions for empathy and collaboration, I can cut them out of my life as soon as possible—or, if I'm not having a good day, I can berate them until they cry, start to hate my fucking guts, and hopefully get the fuck out of my way. Very mature, no? I am working on this by myself and in therapy and through not using alcohol (no judgement—but I'm an alcoholic, so I can't drink). I am trying to be a more loving, compassionate person and I am finding it nearly impossible with some people. But the weakness and lack of an effective strategy is mine. It's not my place to judge, to be incredulous at another, but I still do it sometimes because it gets me high. Now that's a scary drug. > > Cousin, I cannot *truly see you* and I don't have any special insight into you. I just like talking with you =) > > I apologize for the intelligent/boring/normal people talk. In some ways it's a defense mechanism, which you have obviously made your way through. It's a way to intimidate people who aren't savvy enough or bold enough to really engage with me. It's fucked up—I'm going to try to stop doing it. It's also part of the bipolar experience, I think: right now I'm coming down from a manic state into a normal state (hopefully!) and the contrast is so stark that..well..I myself am not currently suicidal..but most bipolar suicides occur during the transition out of mania because mania feels so good that, by comparison, living normally seems pointless, unbearably mundane. So I have in my own consciousness several (or many, a gradient of) states and there is an implicit categorization that I do of myself (obviously everyone does this but I think it's more pronounced in bipolar people, to our detriment). I hate, for example, the awful terminology of people who are "woke" versus people who are not—I believe that we all have great potential spiritually and in every other way. But I can't deny that I've met a few people in life who are more turned on and aware *by far* than everyone else I've ever met. I'm sure they are not all bipolar, so please allow me to walk back the suggestion in my apology email/post that this lightness is reserved for people with bipolar disorder. That just cannot be entirely accurate. Forget the bipolar club. > > "Another reason I hesitated to reply here is because let's face it—you are an incredible writer and I am not." I'm not buying this—I don't think it's true. Your comment here is fantastically written and I already know you're a writer because you want to (and do) write. You have selected yourself into the role. It's like coolness in high school—no one confers it upon you..you confer it upon yourself. I expect to read your books in our lifetimes, Lily. Oh, and thank you for the compliment! I accept! =) > > I've never seen Homeland!! Do you believe that?? I really want to. I'll check Netflix or cable and make an effort to watch some of it, at least. > > I'm so glad we're getting to know each other better through text. You're extraordinary, remember it. And don't let some manic immature anger on my part make you doubt that. It is you who is the more mature. Your paragraph on measuring sticks—Lily, wow—that gives me chills. It belongs in a sermon, or a philosophy, or maybe a really deep and reflective memoir!!! =) > > Look, I'm doing my best and my best isn't that good right now. Thanks for holding on—I need you, cousin, as I need the rest of my family and friends. It's no excuse, but it is an explanation: I am speaking to you through a tunnel of crazy and lately the tunnel has been very shaky and at those times I don't even know what I'm saying. It's horrific from my point of view—because I can see that it is painful from yours. > > Love, > > cousin Matthew A day later Lily wrote back with this little gem: > "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." —Hemingway > > Matthew LETS BE RARE!! I believe in your best if you believe in mine. Thank you for this exchange. You are brilliant. That is all. > > Love, > > Lily To which I replied: > "Let's be rare!!" That's my new toast, Lily—I love it! I believe in your best, whole hog!! No reservations!! You're helping me believe in mine. This exchange has been magical—you've got me choked up and energized. Thank you, cousin. You are *phenomenal*. See you in email =) \<3 My sister and her husband responded in email, briefly but wonderfully. But Lily did what a thinker would do, did what someone who cared would do. She thought deeply, she took time, she expressed herself precisely and honestly and vulnerably. That's what's required to get my attention these days. I am not drawn as simply as a moth to a flame. I do not go out of my way for people who don't go out of their way for me. That *manic apology email* wasn't a test. It was a manic apology email. But my brilliant cousin Lily decided that I was important enough to write to, or that it was important enough for her to show me what *she* was made of, show me how *she* felt [hurt](#) by what I said, and to lump in the good with the bad, which shows a realistic understanding of the world. I divide people into many categories, but this is one of the most important: *People who are willing to write* and *People who aren't*. Writing isn't just another thing you learn in school. There is a fundamental difference in how you participate with history based on whether you are willing to publish your signed thoughts in writing..or not. I consider a person *more of a person* who is willing to communicate in public, in permanence. Otherwise you are just hiding. I only like bold people. People who are unafraid. If you're not willing to say the hard thing, to the hard person, then what are you? I say you are nothing. Only the one who stands up against racism *in their family* is real—everyone else is fake! They aren't even real people. If you believe something, then say it in a way that can never be taken back. Otherwise you are sitting at the kiddies table. ### 193 I see a psychiatrist. He interviews me, makes a medicine change. I report this to my mother and caretakers. The extra lithium makes me take a nap today and while part of me feels this is the classic lithium exchange (dull me out enough that others don't have a problem with my wonderful energy) I don't mind getting the sleep and a nap a day won't interfere with my writing. I am genuinely glad Mom didn't have to deal with me this afternoon—'cause I was sleeping. Mom continues her morose expressions, one-word answers to the two questions I dared to ask her just now. The windshield cracked this morning—I asked her if she had luck finding someone to fix it. One-word answer. In the two-exchange talk that followed, where I [joyfully but restrainedly] asked her if there'd be singing at tonight's Christmas concert at her church, and wished her enjoyment of the concert, she did not look at me, but kept her eyes firmly planted on her laptop. Very early today I wrote her a generous, apologetic text about my grocery store freak out—she has offered me not a crumb of relief in the way of forgiveness, not even an emoji of acknowledgment. I just said pleasantly but gently, "Good morning, Mom." She said sarcastically, "Good morning Matthew." I said, "How'd you sleep?" She defensively said, "Good," like I was asking her an inappropriately intimate question, and offensively said, "How'd *you* sleep?" as if out of a duty to heinous pleasantries or as a turnabout or attack in a sporting event, to turn the attention away from inappropriately being on her and more appropriately being on me—*the one we need to be worried about*. I said, "Good," and smiled, and left the room. That's what it's like, too: like any focus I put on her she is resentful of, because she is the caretaker and I am the sick to such a degree that for me to even ask her how she slept upsets the dynamic she prefers, of her being the mental health supreme being and me being a schizophrenic ant. To me that does not indicate mental health for my mom. But it's not my place to say. I'll focus on myself, steer clear of her, and celebrate the fact that I'm now in a mental state where her little remarks don't compel me to respond in a way that participates in the fight that is constantly invited here, in this apartment, in the car, anywhere we go. In general, I like to be with people who I can say *Good morning* to without it being a negatively charged experience. I'm just trying to say something nice, you know, it's not complicated. I'm not able to help, my help is not wanted, but I'm more able now to leave her actions uninterpreted, not taken personally, and live my life around her without halting myself to a screeching stop just because she's being so impersonal. The medicine changes and psychiatrist are good for me in this dynamic, because (at least temporarily) I'm fixed. The doctors consider my issues momentarily addressed, and we haven't had any fighting at the house because I've had the wherewithal to stay above it, deflect, ignore, and not enter a situation I would be blamed for. If Mom was hoping I'd self-destruct and leave, that's looking unlikely. I'm genuinely happy about this, and for reasons having nothing to do with Mom. I want this move to Nashville to be successful for me. Mom and I not arguing over petty things, my mania being even partly addressed, makes it less likely that there'll be a reason for me to leave this apartment, wherever that reason might come from. I showed Mom my new health insurance cards active January 1st and I celebrated—she made no positive retort. I hope she's ok, I wish I could do something to help her if she even needs any help, but she does not frolic with me these days. I am some kind of criminal, ward, or enemy and she refuses to mingle with my sort. Something has changed for me, though—it may be as simple as the extra lithium started yesterday—but whatever it is, I am glad, because I feel my head is above water, I feel in control of my own ability to start and stop speaking, to hold my tongue, to feel like the floor isn't about to drop out from under me with my living situation; and that feels good. I'm not about to say or write some unexpected thing to someone I know—I can control my social speech to manipulate another's impression of me, to do what is expected so as not to draw attention, and I genuinely don't feel compelled to speak and write antisocial things. In a way it's very very good..in a way it's very very sad. But given the world I live in, this puts me in a position where I am less likely to be rotting in a psych ward and more likely to be writing and doing my thing. I text Davina. > **ME:** After those medicine changes, it feels like my head's above water, instead of being partway drowning—that simile is almost perfect for the change. > > **Davina:** I'm so so happy for you Matthew—it gives me peace. > > **ME:** Yes! Thank you! Peace for us both!! I sent the same text to my mom. She didn't respond in text or verbally. I asked her at 10am this morning if she could drive me to the Apple store. She said she didn't have time. Then she sat on the couch for five hours watching Hallmark movies she'd already seen. Actually she wasn't even watching them. She was playing games on her iPad with her headphones in, movies playing in the background. And you know what, I don't slight her for that—it's her call whether she has time to take me somewhere, her call what she wants to do with her day. I'm dependent on her, though—she controls whether I'm able to leave the house and travel a significant distance. And at 3 o'clock when she was rushing to get out the door to her church function, she was questioning me about why it was so urgent that I pick up my stuff from the Apple store today. I was very calm. I said, "It's not urgent." She said, "Well if it could wait until tomorrow that would be better because I don't have time to work out extra credit cards and I just haven't had time today to do anything but I can take you tomorrow." I said, "That's great." She had already walked away without waiting for my response and she came back, fussing in her purse and said: "I didn't hear that?" And at perfect conversational tone, in perfect neutrality and with thankfulness and pleasantry, I said, "That's great." It was like she wanted to be frustrated, but there was nothing about me to be frustrated with, so she left. I had sent her some text messages, the one about how I felt like my head was above water after this medicine change. One asking her if I could use her credit card to pay for an Uber trip to the Apple store tonight since Uber wouldn't take my SSDI debit card and I would transfer her the amount of the ride as soon as I returned. She was like huffing, telling me she just hadn't had any time today and all this bullshit. She's my mom—she knows I've had medicine changes. In my mind if she cared about me she would have proactively asked me how the medicine changes were going—you know? We've had weeks of fighting, probably partially because I was manic, and now that we're on our third day of not a single fight, I don't know, if I was a mother living with my child—even a 37-year-old who under other circumstances wouldn't be my dependent—I think I'd ask: "Hey, how are those medicine changes going? How do you feel? Are you doing ok on different doses and entirely new medications you've never been on before?" I think I would ask that if I cared. Instead she ignores me all day. Literally says nothing to me after the seven words she begrudgingly pulled out in response to my light and pleasant *good mornings*..until she is late, running out the door, and insinuating that my request for help with an Uber ride has to do with *urgency*—I must have my Apple products tonight—when to me it has to do with *independence*—I'd like to be able to do something today, that I wanted to do today. I'm not independent. I don't care if I get my new laptop today or tomorrow. But it does hurt when I have a mom who *knows* how crucial psych meds are to my peace and the peace of our household, and she never even asks how the medicine changes are going that are supposed to make me more palatable for her to be around. That's what those changes were for: I was manic and driving her crazy. Well I'm far less manic now, on half my antidepressant, time and a half of my lithium, and back on a schizophrenic-sized dose of a recently-released antipsychotic. Do I ever hear her say, "Things are going better?" or "We haven't fought in three days!" No. And it gives me the distinct impression that, for whatever reason, we're not in this together. The reason I sent that text saying that I was doing better on my meds was the hope of starting a small exchange with my mother about the fact that I (at least) was feeling better. I'm gonna move on, I'm not gonna let it ruin my night or even a minute of my night, but her not even acknowledging my statement that I feel better—it hurts. - - - - Doing medicine with Mom early Sunday morning, I say I'm glad we've had four going on five days of not arguing. She says that's not the case. By checking dates on email, I determine that it's been 2.5 days, which seems pretty indisputable given the data I have. She says, "I'll give you that." She says the sap on her energy affects her in her church situation, in her other relationships. I suggest that I'm probably still manic, it's just that at the point of taking an extra lithium (now 1800 mg/day up from 1200 mg/day) my mania just switched from an agitated mania to a euphoric one. I admit to her that more than ever before I am aware that I don't know when I'm manic, and wonder how far back this has been going on..10th grade? Was my head-shaving, while morally inert and culturally shocking only to a minority, a manic act? I don't know. I don't know how long this has been going on. My parents didn't think to take me to a psychiatrist, so they must not have thought my behavior was shocking, didn't know how to recognize mental illness, or maybe just didn't have time to focus on my problems. Mom said she felt like I trampled over her, up her as if she were a staircase, and she got the shit kicked out of her while I arrived at this euphoric mania where I possibly now stand. I apologized and said that I felt I was in an impossible situation. She said she appreciated my apology and lamented that while right now I know that I need to rely on outside perspectives, that when I'm highly manic again, I will forget, I won't believe I'm manic, etc. I brought up forced talking/pressured speech and said I was sorry, but at the time, I was compelled to speak or write everything I was thinking. I said I knew I hurt her, and I apologized again. She said we need to dispel the myth or the romanticizing that she's so wonderful for me and such a good effect on me and is so helpful: she cried and said that what she was doing and who she is were just making things worse. I was receptive and comforting but had the presence of mind to not say what I was thinking, which is that she was particularly agitating me in a way that few other people in my lifetime ever have..really the only one I can think of is Rishi. With most people, I think even when I'm manic, I'm quite calm and polite and loving. But even though I love Rishi and I love my mom, they are sick people, too, and they press my buttons on purpose and play all sorts of games from their childhoods and marriages and I don't respond well to that kind of convoluted antagonistic behavior whether I'm manic or not. - - - - A dangling thought: when I said we hadn't argued in four days and Mom said I was wrong, the way she went about it was as if the purpose of doing that was to *prove* that I was bipolar. But if Mom had made a similar statement I thought was wrong, I likely would have never mentioned it to her—because what would be the point? To *prove* to her that she's fallible by illuminating her mistake? No. I just assume we're all human and make mistakes. I don't point them out unless it's useful to do so. But when you're bipolar, it's like people have this sick need to prove to you all the time that you're ill. It's like *Ah-hah! You're wrong! I've proved that you're bipolar and by virtue of not having a diagnosed mental illness I am superior to you!* How is that healthy, useful, positive? At times it is helpful to know..*Oh, my timeframe is off here.* But I encounter illogic all the time and usually I keep my mouth shut and let the person figure it out for themselves..or not! Perhaps it's just a matter of style. ### 194 I decide to write Lily again. Maybe it was presumptuous. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lily > > **Subject:** Act 2 > > Dear Lily, > > I think that was Act 1 of our correspondence. Perhaps this is Act 2. > > I'll start slow. > > After however many weeks of mania, some medicine changes seem to me and to my mother to be calming me down. I've been getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night for the last 50 days and last night I got 8 hours 20 minutes. I feel quite different and much better just with a full night's sleep. > > Mom is upset with me, won't talk, won't accept my apology, which I offer every day. Yesterday I even offered to clean her car or her bathroom as a symbol of my apology, and she said she couldn't think of any penance that would be sufficient to right my wrongs. > > So..I will not be apologizing to her again. I'm not gonna beg forever for someone's forgiveness, especially when I offer to do work as a sign of my apology. I mean, that's all I can offer. I'm sorry I've hurt her—and I don't even know what I did to hurt her. I know I talked too much, force-talked a lot for a number of weeks. That's annoying. But I didn't say, "F---- you!" or anything like that..I just know my nature and no matter how wild I got, I don't feel that toward her so I know I wouldn't say it. I remember a couple of the things I felt compelled to say, like I said I think she has a subtle underlying hatred of men—which I still think is true, and who can blame her with her alcoholic father and workaholic husband. I happen to have a subtle underlying hatred of men myself, you know, so I'm not saying I can't relate. But she denied this vehemently and she's the expert on herself, so I must defer to her if she says she doesn't. But I see in her behaviors that she doesn't—maybe I'm seeing things that aren't there. > > And the bottom line is I don't know what I said to her that was so awful that we never cook, watch TV, talk, or do anything together anymore. She is in her room with the door shut and I am in my room with the door shut. This morning I went out and sat in a chair in the breakfast nook. Mom was in the kitchen. > > She said, "What?" > > I said, "What do you mean, what?" > > She said, "You just look like you sat down like you have something you're about to say." > > And I said, "I'm here to get the trash can to take it out and I'm waiting for you to be done in the kitchen." > > I didn't want to crowd her. But it's just so tense between us. Like she thinks I have some kind of motive or something—my present motive is not to get kicked out of my apartment because she decides I'm intolerable. So I'm giving her lots of space and I'm ok with that. I have work to do, she has work to do. I feel like she's being abusive to me, though—she never responds to anything positive I say, even "Thank you." It's like she's trying to deny that there is anything cheerful or good about me, and will only discuss problems or medicine or mania or doctor's or therapist's appointments. If I say, "I hope you have a good day," she scowls and does not respond verbally. Like: *How dare you say something nice to me.* > > So I must have really hurt her feelings, and I don't completely know why (mania isn't quite like a drunk blackout, but it does negatively affect your memory). She won't tell me, she won't talk to me. It really hurts me because—if you want the truth—she's my favorite person in the world and I love being around her and hearing her thoughts and watching Deal or No Deal with her!! And we don't do that anymore! So the once-fun house is dead. I really love my room and I do not want to leave, so I'm just hoping against hope that she will let me live here even if she's hurt by me or mad at me or if she doesn't need me anymore because she has a whole life with her job now, where during the year in Baton Rouge, she couldn't find a job, so we were kind of forced to just give up in a way and have fun while she moved various job applications forward. > > Yesterday I started editing Davina's memoir (this is the fourth draft that either of us has done). It has 37 chapters and my goal is to do one or two each day. I could probably do more, but I'm steering away from my tendency to obsess and be a workaholic like my dad, and I'm keeping it to one, two, or less if the chapter is really long. But I did two yesterday and two today, so I'm 4/37 of the way through this draft. I'm making pretty minor changes: adding and removing commas, substituting dashes for commas and vice versa, correcting spelling errors of which there have been like two, and adding commas, sentences, and italics for clarity of reading (especially reading aloud or with a voice in your head). It feels good. She and I started this project almost exactly two years ago, and to me it feels like it's settling down into a stable piece of text. I'm really enjoying the process. I read aloud because it helps me slow down and not skip words, and it's interesting to read the story rather than write it =) > > Tonight I go to my counsellor. I'm trying to keep my head clear and not plan what I want to talk about. I feel worried that she'll judge me because last week she found out how crazy I really am (something people seem to like to remind me that I don't even know) but I know that's silly to worry about her judging me—she's there to help and she's a good counsellor for me and I've been doing the meditation exercises she suggested for me and those have been helpful and fun, really—they're in my calendar with a reminder for 8am each morning. I've been looking forward to this counseling visit basically since the last one, since I've been such a crazy and destructive force and I need all the help I can get. I'm seeing her once a week right now, whereas I only see my PCP once a month, so my Lea visits are my main source of mental health help right now. > > I saw a new psychiatrist last Friday and he made medicine changes. I liked him. He seemed like he really cared—ditto his office manager. He put me back on antipsychotics (but a new one) and even though that combined with the Xenazine I take for tardive dyskinesia have a strong possibility of worsening the TD, I'm just taking it for now because in the past antipsychotics have given me a lot of sanity—they just make my world feel more solid. I sent a note to my caretakers mentioning the interaction warning between Latuda and Xenazine that my medicine program showed me, and said, look, y'all, I'm doing everything you say, taking all medicines as prescribed, like clockwork, but would you please give another look at this "Severe Interaction Warning" that my database alerted me of? Sometimes I feel like they don't give enough precision to their care, sometimes I do. But I'm always surprised when doctors seem to take lightly putting a person on many medicines at once. As a former recreational drug user, I know that one of the cardinal rules of drug use in general is *Take as few types of drugs as you can at one time.* You don't get drunk and then shoot heroin..you know?..I mean it's an obvious property of complex systems that little changes can cause big results, and you don't want to make twelve different little changes at once when you could only make two. But, you know what, they're the doctors, I'm not. I've alerted them to the interaction warning, and I'm gonna let them take it from there. It's too much for me, it's inappropriate for me, to take on the weight of the doctor's role. I'm the patient. I'll try to remember that I'm the patient. > > I've been listening to tracks off an album called Calmsound. It's one of two ambient environmental soundtrack albums I bought right after my last visit to the Brattleboro Refuge, the main hospital I stayed at (was detained at!) in Vermont. While I was in there, in the morning meetings, we'd go around in a circle and say our name, what we were thankful for, and our coping skill. It's funny to feel like an adult in some ways, someone capable of doing hard things in a corporate environment (something you know about! =) without ever naming or being aware of my coping skills. How do I cope with bullshit in a meeting? I mean, it just comes naturally!! Who *can't* do that? But there is a cutting back to childhood when you are locked in a psych ward. You don't have your power clothes, you really don't have anything except a marble composition book you can get from the nurses' station and certain other niceties you can check out. For instance, there was a ward radio, and this bipolar woman named Faith, the only only other bipolar person there (instantly making us best friends)..Faith would check out the radio and lie her head down on a table next to it and sing. That radio was Faith's coping "skill"/device. When she had music, it was the calmest I ever saw her. And I found a device that worked for me too: this little sound machine. It had four settings: forest, desert, ocean, and something else. But I liked the ocean one. And I got over my self-consciousness and I just fuckin' carried that thing around everywhere I went, set it on the table at low volume with others eating breakfast right there, and asked if they minded. And they didn't, of course, because they saw this over-medicated, out-of-control, psychotic bipolar adult act a little calmer when I had the sounds of the ocean playing. I slept with it all night long, on, playing the sounds of the ocean. So, my reminder for myself, kept by my email program for the last few weeks, a reminder I recently deleted, said, "Stay in my room with the door closed. Don't answer any calls, emails, do not make any. Discuss nothing of substance with anyone especially Mom." That was my reminder to try to encourage myself not to come into contact with anyone lest I might hurt them (or in the long term, me). I failed miserably at following that reminder. So today I'm making a new reminder and it's just going to say, "Listen to the sounds of the ocean." I might even take it with me to counseling tonight, and to listen to on my earbuds in the grocery store because I need soothing, and that soothes me just a little bit. > > In my dream, I was in a house, and my dad was up a floor. Someone went out to get alcohol, and while they were gone I noticed that there was blood seeping through the walls from upstairs and Dad came down and he said, You're not taking pictures, are you? And I said, No. And I knew since he wasn't bleeding that that was someone else's blood, there was a corpse upstairs. And I documented the shit out of it, making sure every picture was in focus, because I didn't think it was right to kill anyone, even if you were my dad. But I found something aesthetically beautiful about the red and orange color on grody sheetrock and a porcelain bathtub. Weirdly, in the dream, my main concern wasn't the body or the alcohol or my dad, it was that I had to get *every single picture* perfectly in focus. The screen on my phone had that old circular viewfinder that used to be in film cameras, and I was obsessed with making sure every photographs was perfectly in focus. This is probably simply pulled directly from my waking life mind: I can't stand pictures that are out of focus! Lol. I mean even in a movie I *love*, *In Bruges* for example, there's one shot that's out of focus and it takes me out of the reality of the movie for a few seconds. I did photography in high school, and we developed and printed our own pictures, and that's where my obsession with focused images or prints comes from, I'm sure. But it's not a terrorizing obsession—it's a joyful one. > > I like your mind, my cousin. I am so thankful for our correspondence. Your Hemingway quote was perfect. Let's be rare!—Ok, I'll be rare with you. And let's find as many rare people as we can to be friends with us, to be family with us. I get sad sometimes when I think of the dynamics of the generations before us..and I get scared when I think I might be helping to make the dynamics of *our* generation *worse*. But overall I am thankful for our parents and uncles and aunts and grandmother, and nephews and such. I think we are doing the best we can, and actually I think it's pretty damn good. But..I think *I* can do better. And I plan to gently work on myself so that I can walk this journey deeper and more serenely. > > Love, > > Matthew After this, our communication fizzled. The one shark had jumped over the other shark, or whatever they say. ### 195 I'm editing and I get a text. It's from Leona! > **Leona:** What are you up to today? > > **ME:** Right now I'm watching YouTubers tell their mental illness stories. > > **Leona:** That sounds interesting. > > **ME:** Earlier I watched a movie with Davina and ate sausages!!! > > **Leona:** Oh, fun! > > **ME:** Yes it calms me when I'm at mental health extremes to hear others' stories. > > **Leona:** I'm sure! That makes sense. > > **ME:** Reading the textbook description gives you one point of view, but people telling their stories rounds it out for me. > > I feel good though. With this new medicine change, Mom and I haven't argued in three days!! > > I'm able to deflect and ignore her moroseness. > > And criticality. > > It just doesn't warrant a response for me anymore, so no argument happens. > > Definitely takes two to tango. > > What about you? Whatcha doin'? > > **Leona:** That's so great to hear! I'm really glad you're feeling better. > > I was just getting my nostril piercing jewelry adjusted. They put in a loose stud initially to account for swelling and then it starts to feel annoying and sticking out of the inside of the noise randomly so it's feeling much better already! > > **ME:** I think she's unhappy..with me..with her church..with Tennessee..? I don't know. But she's not having much to give these days. I'm trying to stay out of her path. When I say nice encouraging or pleasant things she ignores me or responds like how dare I say good morning to her. It's been rough. But I'm telling you, with these new medicine changes, it doesn't get to me. I wish I could do something though. I don't like to see her unhappy. > > Wow, ok, I'm glad it's feeling better!!! =) > > This counselor once said to me, You know what it means when someone treats you well? > > I said what. > > She said: It means that they're having a good day. And if they treat you poorly, it doesn't mean anything about you. It just means they're having a bad day. > > **Leona:** That's very true. You have a wise counselor. > > **ME:** I think so too. It took me a while to accept that one. Anyway I can only control myself, and that not even 100%, but I got the help I needed, got new medicine, and I'm not having pressured speech anymore..which I was having really bad..so regardless of Mom's feelings about me, I'm able to treat her better like not feeling compelled to speak/write everything I think. I feel bad that I'm so hard to be around, but I'm doing what I can to manage my symptoms. This has been a severe mania, I think, though I've mostly seemed fine to me! But it's coming on five weeks now where there were only three days I slept for more than four hours, and I wake up at 2:30am and have energy for the whole day. It's great for me but not for those around me. Anyway. Sorry so long winded. > > I want to treat Mom the best I can..and everyone, of course. > > **Leona:** I know you do. I'm sorry it's been so hard. > > **ME:** Thank you <3 > > That means a lot. > > It's horrifying to find out that I'm manic and didn't know it, and all the while I'm destroying relationships with the people I love. To work against that..it's like impossible odds. > > **Leona:** I wish there was a system in place for us to be able to give you feedback without it hurting your feelings or making you more upset. That part is the hardest for me. > > **ME:** Yes, that is hard. I'm sorry if/that I haven't been open to your valid, constructive feedback in the past, Leona. I know you want to help—and I want your help! What can I do better, or try to do better, just in our particular pair relationship? > > **Leona:** I wish you could leave my past indiscretions in the past. > > **ME:** Ok. I hear you. We've dealt with the past and I will do my best to never mention the non-stellar moments again, I will. > > I'm sorry. > > **Leona:** I'm sorry too. > > I just want to feel forgiven. > > **ME:** Totally fine. You are forgiven. I'm not mad about that. I'm so sorry I've brought it up again. I'm going to do my best to leave it behind. I love you and respect you so much and that was five years ago. In all fairness to us all, there should be a statute of limitations on these things that is much shorter—like a day. I'm so sorry I hurt you by bringing it up again. Consider the waves to have washed the shore clean, ok? > > **Leona:** You've got it. [wave emoji] > > **ME:** =D > > **Leona:** It helps to just hear you say that you do forgive me. I still feel a lot of regret and shame about past things.. > > **ME:** Oh, well let's let it go together? I have been the worst brother and son imaginable, but even if no one else forgives me, I'm going to forgive myself so that I am not so burdened that I cannot live today. Let's do that together. *tear* > > **Leona:** You have NOT been the worst. > > **ME:** Ok =) Just hearing Leona say that I have not been the worst possible brother heals me a lot. ### 196 I'm having a great day. Good editing. Good fourth therapy session. Lea says she knew from session one that I was manic, and it kept getting worse and worse each time she saw me—she knew I needed an antipsychotic. And she says this fourth visit I'm the best she's seen me, and I can tell, too—our conversation is pleasant and organic and efficient. She gives me tons of suggestions and I remember them, excited to try them out. Then Mom and I go grocery shopping, doing our separate-carts thing and I have trouble, at one point feeling like sitting down on the floor next to my cart and calling my therapist and telling her I can't do it anymore..but I don't. I find most of my items and Mom even helps me find the few remaining ones that are housed in sections of the store I never would have imagined. Then I ask if we can drive through Burger King—I want some comfort food. And we do. We drive through and get food. Making a left turn out of the shopping center, another car swerves into the lane our car is entering and Mom swerves to avoid hitting them. A little bit of Coke spills from the top of my plastic cup where they had filled it beyond the brim. Mom yells at me for putting the straw into the Coke. "That's why we usually wait till we get home to mess with the drinks!" "Mom, there was Coke on top of the cup *before* I put the straw in—me putting the straw in didn't decrease or increase the amount of Coke on top of the cup!" "This is why I wish you would *ask* me if you need help with something like there being Coke on the top of the cup. I could have helped you remove it or told you to wait till we got home!" "I don't believe you're blaming *me* for the Coke spilling! It has nothing to do with me! It's the one car that swerved and then we swerved and then a little bit of Coke *from the top of the glass, that was put there by the Burger King employee*—" "You just need to ask for *help* when there's something you can't handle!" "Oh my god, Mom—no, you know what, I'm not gonna argue with you about this. You're right. I should have asked for help. I'm sorry. Next time I'll ask for help. Ok? I apologize. I will clean up the Coke when we get home and next time we're in a similar situation, I will ask for help." I used her terminology—"ask for help"—even though I think it's ridiculous for a 37 year old to ask his Mom for help removing some extra Coke from the top of a plastic lid. I am mentally ill—I am not a three year old. But I agreed with everything she said. I said I would clean it up when we got home—the tiny amount of Coke that had spilled on the passenger seat but mostly on my pants—and she shut up about it. Kind of hard to argue with someone who is agreeing with everything you say. And you better believe that's my new strategy for dealing with everything *Mom*. See? I don't have an intrinsic need to be right. I have an intrinsic need for peace. It's much less important for me that people have the right idea about me than that I get to do what I want to do without being surrounded by turmoil. And there is a secret weapon for diffusing every fight: let the other person win. There is not that kind of pride in me that gives a *fuck* whether I win or lose petty battles. My focus lies elsewhere. I want my peaceful room where I can write—where I am writing this now. And if I can win one more day writing in this peaceful room, I will lose a hundred petty battles to get there. ### 197 Word circles. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** I want you to know that I heard what you said.. > > ..and I'm asking for clarification. You would like me to tell my professional caregivers that as long as the way we're all going about things is causing you such extreme stress, that I am not well taken care of because the fact that you are worn to the bone makes things unstable for me? > > Is that what you're saying? > > I love you, Mom. I want to get this right. And I don't want to be the cause of your stress. That is a very unhappy moment for me. > > Matthew > > ---- > > **From:** Sharon > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** I want you to know that I heard what you said.. > > Thank you for listening and for caring and for asking for clarification. > > I concede that your stability factors are best figured out between you and your professional caregivers. > > I love you, Matthew. > > I'll drive you anywhere you want/need to go. I can do that. That's all I've got at the moment. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** I want you to know that I heard what you said.. > > **> I concede that your stability factors are best figured out between you and your professional caregivers.** > > It's hard to tell, isn't it? Sometimes it seems you and occasionally I have insight or a level of caring they don't. Myself, I have to just give up 90% at this point to the professionals. They haven't always done me the best, but they know more than I do in general about their subject area..and that 10% I'm reserving is when I have a red flag from a medicine interaction database or I have knowledge that they don't have about my medical history. I am conceding with you, and acknowledging that trusting them is difficult and not completely rational, perhaps. > > I will listen anytime, the best I can, only when wanted. And thank you for the driving me places—it's totally appreciated. *cries* Look, let's please just give the current situation some time. I want to stay out of your way psychologically/physically so you can do what you need/want to do without me getting in the way (not said self-deprecatingly..I just want to give you space). I know we're not matched up right now, or anymore, or whatever it turns out to be. But I would like to live peacefully (I'll do my best—which sucks) in this place for a while. I love my room, I like being able to work on my book here and crawl into a bed here where I feel safe. I won't ask anything of you except driving to a minimal set of appointments and—I hope—just the ability to live in this room *for now—*not forever, just for now, please. > > I have been trying to keep conversations I start to a minimum—I'll keep doing that for as long as need be. > > I love you, too. I will try to be gentle with you, hands off, and not assume much closeness. I want you to be worry free so you can do your work. > > I want to do my work too. I'm going do that for as long as I can. Then we text: > **ME:** I'm so sorry I've been worrying you, Mom, I don't want that. I'm doing what I can in terms of going to my doctors and therapist, taking the drugs and using the strategies they provide, and I'm trying to be my best for you—not arguing with you, not over-talking you, trying to be polite but not overbearing. I plan to give you as much space as you want, and help get whatever and as many types of external help to guide my wellness so that—I hope, too—we can relate as mother and son again. There's no ultimate reason you need to worry about my every minute. I will do what I can. > > **Mom**: I appreciate your desire and work to do your part. ???—@!#%$^—??? ### 198 Susan writes me back a few days later about my request for her to either cancel or let me pay for my part of the phone service: > **From:** Susan *[at her work email address—freak]* > **To:** Matthew > **Cc:** Sharon > > **Subject:** Mom says what if her phone is at work > > Matthew, > > I don't hate you. I could never hate you. I love you! I still remember when I found out you were born and I ran across the street jumping and yelling "I'm an aunt!!" And the first time I held you was in Alexandria, LA..in a hotel room..My heart loves you more today than I did even then. > > I can't force you to keep the phone but as I said in the text, I want you to have it. I understand that you are feeling uncomfortable and unhappy with our relationship and that makes you uncomfortable having the phone. I feel like there is very little I can do to make your situation better but the phone is a small thing I can do..hopefully it makes some small part of your struggle easier. > > *[Susan's work email signature block—Why do people write personal email from their work accounts? It's like such a basic thing.]* > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Susan > **Cc:** Sharon > > **Subject:** Mom says what if her phone is at work > > Ok. Thank you for saying that. I love you too even though our relationship makes me cry. > > I would be in bad shape without a phone and phone service, so thank you for the gift. I just don't want to feel beholden and I don't want it to come back on me someday where I screw up in y'all's eyes and someone says, "You failed and we've been buying you phone service all this time!" or I succeed and you think you have some ownership in it because you helped me out. But unfortunately I have been in such a position of weakness that I have had to take y'all's help—creating psychological entanglements that at least I would have avoided if possible—all the same I am deeply and simply thankful for your help. > > I think severing my family relationships as much as possible is a good idea but unfortunately I can't do that due to my illnesses which you routinely use as an excuse to avoid admitting your own issues. I think, I hope, that my illnesses will kill me ASAP so that we will all be free of me. > > It lifts my spirits to hear you say you love me, so thank you so preciously for saying that, even as we necessarily drift apart due to our various paths in life and divergent brain developments. I think we are as far apart as we've ever been in terms of being able to understand each other, but I love you too, wish you the very best, and will be happy to use this phone to coordinate doctors appointments for the rest of what I hope will be a long life, but will (statistically) probably be a rather short one. > > I give up, > > Matthew I don't really give up, that's just an idiotic communication method of being ultra-pessimistic to disarm any pessimistic tactics the other person might have been able to try. But if I'm already as low as I can go, they can't make me go any lower, so they won't try, even though I'm really not that low—it's just a defense mechanism for a very scared human being. You know what's fucking disgusting, though? People who love to talk about my issues but are never willing to talk about their own. ### 199 I love to write emails. To me, a thing happens when it happens in writing. To bad the people I want to communicate with most, don't feel the same way. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Van, Sharon, Joanne, Leona > > **Subject:** family is supposed to stay together > > Ours has done the opposite: splinter. > > I hold you all responsible, and myself. > > And most of all our parents, for breaking the *vow of marriage*.  Marriage exists for stability in society.  By splitting, you two have decreased the stability of society especially your three children.  I will never forgive you for this.  To cut contact, even after divorce, is unforgivable to the children..it says that you reject that we are still a family in the sense that we were formed as a family, which is still true.  I hate you both for breaking this contact and hold you very very low for your laziness and fear. > > As for our siblings, we fail at friendly relations as well. > > It sickens me, it weakens me, it turns me into an orphan. > > Matthew ### 200 I remember watching *The Joy Luck Club* with my dad—this is in high school—and afterward he asked me if I liked it and I said yes and he obviously didn't from what he said and the fact that he was sighing and groaning and adjusting himself on the couch through the whole thing..and he accused me of liking it only because it was artsy and I wanted to be like "those artsy people." But I did like it, I liked it simply and sincerely, and he didn't, and instead of it being just a matter of preference (or ability to comprehend) he used it as a way of accusing me of being pretentious and accusing me of liking something just because I wanted to be part of a particular crowd. I bet he doesn't even remember that, but it'll always be with me, a little sign that my dad doesn't support my artsy and exotic side, that he doesn't subscribe to deeper art or appreciate it whether it comes from me or someone else..that I'll always be a stranger to him in that way. In terms of splintering, my dad is the worst offender. He won't call me. He's had my number for years and he will not pick up the phone and call me. ### 201 The current thinking is I have not Bipolar I with Psychotic Features, the previous best description of my mental type (let's discard the term *illness*, shall we?), but that now I have a Bipolar-type Schizoaffective state of mind. NAMI says that schizoaffective in general occurs in about 0.3% of the population and that men and women experience it at the same rate. Here are the symptoms, according to NAMI: **Hallucinations,** which are seeing or hearing things that aren't there. *[I sometimes have a visual hallucination which is like a fast-motion monochromatic petri-dish effect on top of existing textures in a color lighter than the actual surface, usually a wall painted with a roller or a fibrous piece of paper]*—*this only appears sometimes, when I am especially agitated or euphoric, in other words: manic. I also have a constant hallucination (actually I think it's more accurately described as an illusion in that it is a misperception of something that is really there, unlike my previously-described hallucination, which consists of an extra layer of moving texture which seems to exist only in my mind). Anyway this secondary disturbance is the illusion that a Jackson Pollock poster is 3d—dimensionally deep, when it is really flat: my brain presents the paint drips not as compressed into one layer, but separated such that the first drips painted seem to recede, while the last drips painted appear on top, or closer to me. This is constant, has been like this since the poster was given to me, and has not ever appeared flat, as I would expect a poster appear. It does not disturb me; it is fascinating, but I have learned not to become fixated on it to the point of distraction.]* **Delusions,** which are false, fixed beliefs that are held regardless of contradictory evidence. *[Not sure you could ever positively say you had a delusion, since you would believe it, and would not ever really be able to believe it was truly, certainly, objectively false. Hence, I don't see how I can discuss this further!]* **Disorganized thinking.** A person may switch very quickly from one topic to another or provide answers that are completely unrelated. *[This symptom definition is so shortsighted. I get feedback from people sometimes that they do not understand how what I am now talking about is related to what I was talking about before. That does not mean that the topics are unrelated. It just means I have neglected to explain, or they have neglected to see, the path connecting them. I travel very quickly through logically-related topics and just because I surface somewhere far down the chain does not mean there is no logical path between them. Me operating at a quicker speed than you does not mean that I am disorganized!! Providing answers that are completely unrelated is also not so cut and dried. I usually extend the courtesy to others of moving with them through a dialogue at a similar (usually slow) pace so that they will perceive continuity in the dialogue. This is a courtesy—it is not something I owe you. Is it always]* my *job to adjust to* your *limitations? Or is it sometimes* your *turn to keep up with* me*? Also, in rare cases, I will simply respond with nonsense to a person I feel is incredibly stupid or boring, who presents no opportunity for an interesting conversation for* me*. It is a way for me to entertain myself in the face of psychologically deadly banality, a combination offensive/defensive move that is extremely effective as only extremely intelligent, playful people can tolerate or enjoy nonsense..most people will find themselves unable to participate in a nonsense dialogue and will leave you alone.]* **Manic behavior.** If a person has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder: bipolar type they will experience feelings of euphoria *[Oh yeah—got it. I was feeling agitated by what I perceived as my Mom's fight-inducing questions. Then my doctors "fixed" my mania with medicine changes (more lithium, less Lexapro, and the addition of Latuda (which may be short-lived since Risperdal caused me TD.)) Now, I'm either less manic and perhaps less irritable because of that, or my agitated mania has turned to euphoric mania]*—*which is what I think has happened*—*and I am loving this state and hope it never goes away. I perceive my mom's behavior exactly the same as before, it just doesn't bother me. She is still morose, uncommunicative, and launching barbed, fight-inviting critiques of me, but I have the presence of mind to deflect them lovingly and easily, and my euphoria is so lightweight that its balloon cannot be punctured by anything, certainly nothing she says or her complex fight patterns which I recognize right out of the playbook she used with Dad. For instance, let everyone know nonverbally that you are feeling put upon, victimized, and hurt beyond belief, but refuse to talk to the person you are blaming your own feelings on when they try to help you. Basically, act wounded to the point of emotional death, make it clear which party has wounded you through little remarks, but refuse to participate in the solution*—*maintain with your nonverbal cues, facial expression, flashing accusing eyes, physical distance, that you are the hurt party—but keep your supposed tormenter at a distance by turning down every effort they make to love and help you. Yeah, that shit don't work on me in a euphoric mania. In my agitated mania, I was helpless to my mom taking out her own unhappiness with the move (most likely) on me..every little stir of the knife and I felt compelled to respond, so we were in a constant of argument. Now that my doctors ostensibly fixed me, a) Mom has less to critique of me*—*I'm fixed, the doctors said so, so she can't blame my mental state since it's purportedly fixed, according to the doctors!, and b) My head's above water again, so to speak. I'm happy as a bird in the sky, my mom could say* I've always hated you since you were a baby and by the way we shot heroin into your eyes as an infant and sexually abused you by sticking cotton swabs up your penis*, and I'd be like,* cool, you want some coffee?—I'm making a pot*. In this state my shit is unfuckable. I care about my mom. I want her to get happier, but I'm not about re-enter her world of nebulous blame and sadness.]*, racing thoughts *[Lol. I've never had the experience of racing thoughts. Caretakers have told me my speech or production rate of writing or drawings or paintings indicated to them I had racing thoughts, but to me my thoughts have always felt exactly the right speed, and they always go the same speed—warp zillion. Unless I'm depressed or sleepy]*, increased risky behavior *[Fool, you don't know what risky behavior]* is *until you've spent a night with me]* and other symptoms of mania *[NAMI, you're copping out on me here. Specifics or just delete the clause!]* Here are the causes of schizoaffective disorder, according to NAMI: > The exact cause of schizoaffective disorder is unknown *[Yeah, we know, psychiatrists don't know a whole lot about what causes the diseases they treat or how their medicines work—"it works on neurotransmitters" is pretty much all anyone knows about any psych med at this point in history]*. A combination of causes may contribute to the development of schizoaffective disorder. **Genetics.** Schizoaffective disorder tends to run in families. This does not mean that if a relative has an illness, you will absolutely get it. But it does mean that there is a greater chance of you developing the illness. *Yeah, got some relatives diagnosed bipolar, never heard any schizoaffective cats tho. Fifty percent of people with serious mental illness go untreated even in high-income countries..so we're not really aware, as a society, who half of our mentally ill even are. I know some people in my family that* I *think are mentally ill but I think they are afraid to be categorized in that way (understandably). But that's not me—I'm the guy that sits in the front row, raises my hand first, and says, "I'm fucked up. Can you help me?" It's a great skill for survival, trust me—much greater than hiding real problems and letting them grow in the dark into* unsolvable *problems.]* **Brain chemistry and structure.** Brain function and structure may be different in ways that science is only beginning to understand. Brain scans are helping to advance research in this area. *[Blah, science: hurry up.]* **Stress.** Stressful events such as a death in the family, end of a marriage or loss of a job can trigger symptoms or an onset of the illness. *[I've had more than my fair share of these stressors, to be sure. Leaving out the majorly stressful events and listing the two salient super-stressful events, I would say the death of my girlfriend Rebecca and my suicide attempt and subsequent psych hospital stays were the two most stressful events in my life.]* **Drug use.** Psychoactive drugs such as LSD have been linked to the development of schizoaffective disorder. *[Tricky, tricky. Yeah, I've done LSD twice, mushrooms eight times. But the vast majority of psychoactive drugs I've used have been mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants..my hallucinations started when I was in a mental hospital and I was on a shitload of serotonergic drugs at once]*—*I never hallucinated before that, not as a usual matter. I'm not saying eating mushrooms eight times didn't affect my mind*—*it did, in wonderful ways, in scary ways, in ways I don't understand. But all the street drugs I've ever taken, you take them, they cause a certain feeling, then the feeling goes away. Only after my psych hospital stays did I start having hallucinations that persisted after I stopped taking the drugs they prescribed!! I don't know for sure what caused my persistent hallucinations. It could be that stressors, as mentioned above, further developed my bipolar schizoaffective. It could be street drugs. It could be the slew of psychoactive drugs given to me by psychiatrists to be taken eight and ten at the same time. It's probably a combination of all three. But I've done a decent amount of street drugs, and all of those combined is probably one or two percent of all the psychoactive drugs I've done in my life—the vast majority have been prescribed by doctors. I just want us to be careful where we point the finger on "psychoactive drugs"—you know what I'm saying, NAMI?]* ###### This is what NAMI about diagnosis of schizoaffective. > Schizoaffective disorder can be difficult to diagnose because it has symptoms of both schizophrenia and either depression or bipolar disorder. There are two major types of schizoaffective disorder: bipolar type and depressive type. To be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder a person must have the following symptoms. A period during which there is a major mood disorder, either depression or mania, that occurs at the same time that symptoms of schizophrenia are present. *[Even though I feel under control, the appearance of police at my door just yesterday and my doctor's statement to me over the phone of "You are manic. Do you know that?" I think is sufficient to say that I'm manic. I was about to sever all ties in Tennessee and go to the airport to fly..where? That's a rash decision of the type I've made many times before that is a symptom of mania. Anyway, yes, mania, we got that. Also in the last approximately fifty days, I've slept for 2-4 hours only, feeling completely rested. Only a handful of days did I take naps. Only three days during that period did I sleep for six or more hours. Is this mania occurring at the same time as symptoms of schizophrenia? My therapist obviously thinks so since she suggested the diagnosis of schizoaffective, but she hasn't told me why. I guess if you count an obviously flat Jackson Pollock print appearing at though I could put my fist inside it and touch between the layers of paint..I mean if you count that as a hallucination, then I suppose that's a sign of schizophrenia. And it is a sign of schizophrenia as opposed to the psychosis of bipolar mania because I had that poster for about a year before my sleep was disturbed or I had agitated or euphoric mania and the poster has been 3d for me from the moment I took it out of the tube. I think I can say yes to this symptom. Also, I remember some period earlier this year when I thought that music was transmitted through tattoos. This was during waking hours, with over a year sober off alcohol and many years sober off street drugs. Yes, I think this symptom is a yes.]* Delusions or hallucinations for two or more weeks in the absence of a major mood episode. *[I don't believe I can evaluate which of my presently-held thoughts are delusions, but between the texture hallucination and my Jackson Pollock illusion/hallucination, I'm pretty sure this criteria is met. I think my doctors and therapist would think it is met. I'm a little shakier on whether it's met—but that in itself is probably indicative of psychosis in the sense that I can't commit to one version of reality on these possible hallucinations. Let's say the best my self-diagnosis can do is]* maybe *to* yes *on this symptom.]* Symptoms that meet criteria for a major mood episode are present for the majority of the total duration of the illness. I have already said that in my opinion I met the DSM IV criteria for a manic episode for at least the last five weeks, so this criteria is met, in my opinion. The abuse of drugs or a medication are not responsible for the symptoms. *[This sentence is written ambiguously but I have not used any drugs except my prescribed medication in many years, have been sober for a year and four months, no longer smoke, take no over-the-counter medicines, limit caffeine, and I am not abusing my prescribed medication. Whether my medication is responsible for the symptoms, I have no way of knowing—that's part of what makes this whole thing so insidious. Once you start treatment for an illness, it becomes impossible to say what's responsible for what. The act of isolating your variables could be life-threatening. So, I dare to say that even my doctors cannot answer the question implicit in this criteria.]* There were symptoms of schizophrenia as early as the second or third grade (reading in the library, isolated, instead of playing with the children outside during recess) but due to ignorance, probably, not teacher, not parent noticed this as a sign of mental illness. I was, through neglect, through chance, allowed to grow up mentally ill with my illness not only untreated but accepted by the adults around me. They were so ignorant and accepting and loving that they never considered I might be developing a problem!! And let's talk about that Risperdal withdrawal, shall we? When my psychiatrist took me off Risperdal and put me on Saphris, I felt it in my brain, like I felt the change, and it felt like I was going to die..hallucinations..bugs..drew dots on the ceiling so I could test whether they stayed the same or turned into bugs..seeing bugs on the floor and little snakes while Susan, Mom, and I were out shopping..holding onto my mom's sleeve like a kid and apologizing, apologizing, always apologizing..seeing flashes of light in the living room while I sat, manic, for days on end on the couch enhancing my mood with coffee reading *every single Tweet* that came by all day when I followed three-hundred fifty people. Maybe that's why I got banished from the couch: my grandmom didn't like her manic grandson spending every waking hour on the couch doing weird hallucinating manic shit, drinking eight cups of coffee a day..excuse me but try being bipolar someday, see if you don't sometimes feel like doing things a little differently. ### 202 I decide to tell my family. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Leona, Sharon, Joanne > > **Subject:** New diagnosis > > When I was in Los Angeles 10 years ago I saw a billboard: all pink, with white lettering that said, "i break up in email." It was edgy at the time, because back then 90% of Americans would have considered it rude to break up in email. Not anymore! And that is my introduction to this email, in which I am telling you significant news that 10 years ago you would most likely tell someone in person. > > I have a new diagnosis. It is called schizoaffective disorder, and it's actually quite difficult to give a brief definition of it because its definition in the DSM has recently changed, and the latest definition is frankly quite involved, compared to the checklist-style definitions of say bipolar disorder or major depression. But if you'll allow me a little inaccuracy, schizoaffective means a person displays psychosis (hallucinations and/or delusions) outside of a mood episode, where with strict bipolar disorder, psychosis only occurs during depression and/or mania. And with strict schizophrenia, there is no mood component (other than a flat affect). > > I had already pretty much figured this out from my own reading, and observation of myself, so the diagnosis doesn't surprise me *[Perhaps that's why on occasion schizophrenic people have really gotten under my skin—because I am one]*. > > The medication I'm taking is already targeted to treat schizoaffective disorder as well as we can, given that antipsychotics are off the table (because they caused my tardive dyskinesia, as far as anyone knows). But me and my doctors have been "treating the symptoms, not the diagnosis" for the last five years or so, so we've been treating the right thing even though we may not have arrived at the right name for it (and may not have even now). > > Unfortunately our culture holds mental illnesses in a hierarchy, and has strong associations for them. If you're bipolar, you're Van Gogh; if you're schizophrenic, you're a crazy homeless person who thinks he's a prophet. I don't hold these associations strictly—I doubt you do either—but this new diagnosis does present additional opportunity for abuse (of me) by those who know me. Dad strongly abused his knowledge of my bipolar diagnosis, using it to claim that his potty-training humiliations of me never occurred, and that they are merely bipolar delusions. I think he and I both know that his assertion is not true. My wonderful aunt Susan, whom I will always love, even made fun of my bipolar disorder in a derisive way in text messages to me. If you want proof, I will show you the messages—this is no delusion. So there is real risk in me revealing this information, even to my closest family (note the small number of you who are left in this group by viewing the To: line of this note). > > But I have basically come to the conclusion that I don't care. I'm telling you my truth, my new diagnosis, and I will not try to exert any control over you with respect to what you do with it. That is none of my business, I have learned in recent years. Treat me how you will, tell who you will—I trust you to do the best thing *for yourselves*. I have learned through observation of myself that while I may become discouraged from time to time, that nothing—not mental illness, not homelessness, not death of my favorite people, not being fired, not being insulted, not a lack of protection by my elders—nothing has stopped me. I always get up and keep going and when I realized that, a certain type of fear left my life: I never have to fear that I will encounter something that will make me give up. It's not in my nature. > > It would be helpful to me if you would take it upon yourselves to do a small amount of reading (I recommend the *complete* Wikipedia page on schizoaffective. However, I don't expect you to do that. I am not being sarcastic when I say that I know it is difficult to take ten minutes out of our seemingly busy 2015 lives to read some information on a family member's life-shortening, poorly understood, major mental illness. So, if you don't read it, I understand, and I won't be checking up on you. > > I love you three, and will love you my whole life, > > Matthew Only Leona responds. I don't take it personally. I take it to mean that people are tired of and/or unable to interact with me. They think I'm crazy, not worth their time. They just don't write as much as I do—email, novel, whatever—they're just not into writing people back when people write them. Whatever it is, after so much non-response I'm getting used to it. It stops bothering me. Mom admits she didn't read the Wiki page and starts an argument at 6:32am the next morning questioning the validity of the diagnosis. Not anything feeling-based to start with, not checking on how I'm doing with this, but a factual interrogation about my conversations with my doctors. Joanne, as usual, really since childhood, is absent—no response to this for days and days. And even though I need her help the most, I don't blame her, because I know what she faced growing up from Dad *and* Mom, because I was there, right beside her—we faced the same things. Texts to Leona: > **ME:** I thought if I stopped drinking that would help me be a good uncle. But it just uncovers mental illness that has been there forever and is a lot worse than my drinking behavior. I'm cutting communication with everyone who doesn't really understand me. That includes your family. I'm sorry I won't be able to be in your sons' lives, because they are beautiful and their beauty reflects on you and James. Goodbye. > > I'm blocking you so please don't text me anymore. I didn't actually block her. I'll never block one of my sisters. This is just my immature way of saying I feel hurt very badly. > I'm sorry. I just can't function as I have been. It's too fake.. > > And I feel like I've been treated very badly by my family and I can't allow that to continue. > > Bye again. > > And I won't text Daniel, so don't worry about me contaminating him. Text to Mom: > **ME:** I'm blocking you so please don't text me anymore. I didn't actually block her. We have to communicate to live together. But our communication is fucked anyway. I foolishly asked Susan to turn off my phone service and she might actually do it..I also asked if I could pay for part of the phone service—more than Mom has offered to do—and Susan never responded..she won't even give me the opportunity to contribute, so how am I a real part of this family? I talked about this with my therapist. She asked me what I wanted—what I wasn't getting—and after some work together we settled on me wanting to be allowed by my mom to be part of *the conversation* and *the family*—two things she has specifically held me away from. She's not the only one who does this. GranGran, Susan, Bob, Perish, all of them as well treat me as a second-class member of the family by not involving me in *the conversation*. You know what, though, if I honestly ask myself the question: *What do I want from Susan, Paula, or Perish, the answer is* nothing. What, in the whole history of our relationships, have they, or Dad even, ever given me? Like Joanne says, they're non-rent-paying tenants. Evict 'em. And strangely, Joanne herself, in her almost total lack of communication with me since she moved to Portland, has become one of those, too. > **To:** Joanne > > **Subject:** I don't have much to say but I'll give you the update > > *Here, Joanne, this is just my generic update letter that I send people. Normally I wouldn't send you something so boilerplate but I thought it might be a good way for you to familiarize yourself with the facts before/if you call today. I will try not to speak, but just listen to what's going on with you, as my story is pretty well laid out here. Feel free to share this with Leona if you want—I don't care. This may sound grandiose or egotistical, and you may not want this title at all!, but it's the truth: you're one of the few people in our nuclear or extended family that is even qualified to talk with me as an equal. Few people are ready to hear what I have to say or able to say anything relevant to the world I live in. Most others are mere simpletons. And while I can love a simpleton, I will not abide being insulted by one.* > > Packing is almost undone but we still have a bunch of empty boxes we're giving away, a few at a time, to a guy at Mom's church who wants them. > > I'm seeing a doctor here who does neurofeedback—they put an EEG cap on you and show you some kind of a reward on the screen and it reprograms your brain to do what you want it to do. The doctor seems very smart so I guess it's worth a try. He also sold us a zillion new supplements. I'm taking them but I suppose I'm suspicious it's all a big scam where he makes money, I lose money, and I don't get any better in the long term. So I'm sure it's obvious to you that I have a pessimistic attitude toward it. Maybe that's because they're very disorganized. It's like..this genius doctor comes in and wows me with great new technology but then *forgets to refill my medicine* so we have to call them and do it over the phone. I think it's fair to say their process is lacking. But, I do understand what it's like to be so excited about something that you lose track of the nuts and bolts. But the nuts and bolts are what makes the big plan possible, in my mind, so we can't forget them. People talk about being a big picture thinker or a details person..honestly, without both, how can you get anything done?? > > I'm seeing a counsellor. That is going very well. Well worth the money—and she doesn't take insurance! She's given me good insight and mental exercises I can do to stave off a manic episode or any type of "flying off the handle." I'm seeing her once a week for now. Will switch to twice a week later. We both agreed on this. > > Mom and I are not getting along. For the year we lived together in Baton Rouge, we had approximately five rough, or arguing, days—I know because I kept notes. Here, we've argued heatedly or significantly about half of the one month we've been here. > > It's wearing me out. > > I'll respect her privacy and not repeat exactly what she said, but she has let me know quite clearly that her driving me to therapy (once a week) and the doctor (once a month) are major impediments to her living her own life. > > She views me as an invalid, mentally and physically. I do need help with some physical things, because of my tardive dyskinesia. But she told me yesterday that because I am younger and less wise than she and her siblings, that she doesn't want to hear my opinions on them. For the record, all I was telling her is that I don't want to go to Baton Rouge for my birthday! I just don't want to stay in that house, for various reasons (that have to do with her siblings). > > She is critical of my sobriety, saying things like, Well, is there *ever* going to come a day when you can be around, say, Susan, while she's drinking and it not be a problem for you? And I'm like, Mom, you don't understand alcoholism if you're asking that question. When I'm around people who are having fun drinking (or not drinking) I want to have fun with them, do what they're doing. That doesn't mean that if I'm around alcohol, I'll necessarily drink—but why would I want to put myself in a situation that even stresses me in that way? > > I've been sober for 1 year and 4 months as of yesterday and I'm not about to put that at risk. I'm not asking her to understand what it's like for me as an alcoholic/addict, but I am asking her to respect what I need to do to stay sober, and unbelievably she isn't respecting that!! She thinks I should be "over it" by now and I tell her, Mom, I'm an alcoholic, I'll *never* be over it. There's no graduation from "addict" to "ok again"—I stay sober by making a commitment each morning to stay sober just for that day. I've been to over 1,000 AA and NA meetings over the years and that's how people who stay sober do it. > > Anyway. =/ Not happy. If I could, I would move away from Mom since she *constantly* shows me how disgusted and unhappy she is with me. The other day we drove to Wendy's. Everything I said—zero response from her. When she spoke to me, I spoke back. She makes a point *never* to say "You're welcome" when I say "Thank you." She requested that I not say, "I hope you have a nice day," because it's "patronizing." I wish she would ask me to leave because I would in a heartbeat. But I don't want to leave..this is *my* home, too—I *like* my little room—I *live* here—I'm in the middle of writing a book, *etc.!* And I pay half the rent and everything else, so I'm not about to leave her in the lurch. > > And if that wasn't bad enough, I've been diagnosed with a new mental disorder. I'm removing my medical release forms that allow Mom to discuss my medical situation with my doc and counsellor because she, Dad, Leona, and others in the extended family have all used my existing diagnoses to marginalize and discount someone who frankly has a lot of love, experience, and talent to offer (and I do offer it generously), and I'm not interested in giving people who do that one more reason to think that I'm less capable than them (or than I am), so I'm keeping this new diagnosis to myself. > > I hope your world is better than mine is at the moment, > > But, though sharp-tongued, I'm actually feeling quite alive!, > > Matthew No response. I don't know if my sister is just out of pocket with her own stress, doesn't care to receive email from me anymore, what. I-d-k. ### 203 Now I'm technically a pastor's kid and there are all kinds of stereotypes that go along with being a pastor's kid: we're the wildest people you'll ever meet, the most a-Christian, etc. but my mom became a pastor when I was in high school so I didn't *grow up* a pastor's kid, and so I can cross through that boundary like it's permeable—I can be a pastor's kid or not, depending on what I want. Now generally the belief is that the goal of the steps in 12-step programs is to go from being a selfish person to being a compassionate person. But I met a guy in NA who said this: *It's a program of recovery, but what are we recovering?* And his opinion is that we are recovering the self we were when we were a child. So you see, even though my movements are severely impaired right now, I wasn't born that way, and therefore I don't think of myself as a person whose movements are severely impaired. I am in touch with my idea of myself as a child, before tardive dyskinesia. I operate as a spastic, but I don't think of myself as one. That's why I think recovering that image and that feeling and that essence of yourself as a child is so important. Because things go wrong. And if there was anything good that came before, we need to hold onto that like the mast of a sinking ship. Because the ship is sinking. And we are going to drown. But between now and then, it's important to—and it's possible to—feel as much of that recovered childlike self as we can. So I'm not a spastic, and you're not fat, and you never got raped and mugged and robbed and cheated on and fired and I was never homeless and no one was ever hungry. We're the children we recovered by some process—at least we can act that way. And I think by acting that way, we can feel that way, too. ### 204 Parking lot at Costco. "Well," my mom says. "Well what." "There have been other factors." "Ok. What kind of factors are you thinking of?" "Well..all the drugs you did." "All the dr—Mom, I never did that many drugs. When I *did,* I did them to excess, that's for sure, but it's not like this whole time I've been out there just constantly doing drugs, you know—I've worked jobs, I've made art, I've been in relationships—the only drug I ever did on a daily basis for any length of time is *alcohol*." "But do you think the drugs you have done might have contributed to.." "To what?" "To your mental illness?" "To this new diagnosis of schizoaffective? To schizophrenia?" "Yes!" "No. No Mom. Schizophrenia is like bipolar disorder: it's genetics plus environmental factors, probably stress, trauma—" "Which could be the result of drugs." "Well, yes, if you have a traumatic experience as a result of taking drugs, that's a traumatic experience just like if you have a traumatic experience as a result of being beat up at school, or as a result of moving from one town to another, or having a friend die. But the only specific correlation I know of between drugs and schizophrenia is if you smoke pot in your late teens..that's positively correlated with developing schizophrenia later in life. But I never smoked pot in my teens, I've hardly smoked any pot at all! And when I did smoke it, it was way past my late teens, so I doubt that the little pot I smoked in my early-to-mid twenties had anything to do with there being a schizophrenic component to my illness!" "Ok. I'd like to..wrap up this conversation so we can go into the store," my Mom says, as we're nearing the doors. And I say, "There are lots of correlations. You wanna hear one?" "Do I have a choice?" "I'd just like to have some completeness to this conversation." "I'd like closure. Are closure and completeness close enough that we can stop this and go shopping?" "I just think it would fill out the *roundness* of the topics we're throwing around to mention another correlation.." "And that is?" "..sorry I was breathing. Childhood intelligence—high intelligence in children—is associated with adulthood mania, whether as part of bipolar disorder or not. So on the one hand we have the urge to say: *Hey, teens, don't smoke pot because you're increasing your chances of developing schizophrenia.* Are we also gonna say: *Hey, kids, don't have high intelligence as a child because it might make you manic as an adult!*" "Who's saying this?" "Anyone could be." "But who is actually saying this?" "It's a theoretical situation. It's just an example." "Of what?" "Of how you can't separate the perceived negatives from the perceived positives in these real-world mixed-bag situations—" "*What* situations?" "Mental illness, intelligence, artistic and scientific aptitude, predictors of job performance—" "I just want to buy some coffee filters for the house, Matthew, so that when you wake up in the middle of the night to continue these deep thoughts or when I wake up in the morning to begin my day, there will be *coffee filters* we can put in the *coffee maker* to *make coffee*." "Ok. That's fine. Do you want me to get a cart?" "I want us to finish this conversation before we go in the store." "What's wrong with talking about this inside the store?" "I just want to leave this topic of discussion right here before we go in, ok?" "Are you embarrassed that some *strangers* will overhear us talking about drug stuff or *mental illness*?" "No." "Those are important topics to me. The idea that you want to keep them under lock and key—" "I don't want to keep them under lock and key!" "Then why can't we talk about it inside the store?" "I don't know. I don't know, ok?" "Is it because your dad always made a scene in public places and you construe having an edgy conversation as an embarrassing event?" "Matt. Can we. Please. Just drop it." "Yeah ok." "Thank you." "But I'm noticing a pattern here." "Great!" Mom stops walking. She won't get any closer to the Costco, or even the Costco employees working outside, as long as we're talking. "We can go inside," I say. "What's your..pattern?" she says, wiping a tear from her eye. It fails me, how this is an emotional situation, but I don't doubt that for her it is. "What's your pattern." I exhale. "It's not that you don't like talking inside a store." "No?" "No, it's not, Mom. It's that you don't like to talk about anything that might be controversial or might *get you looked at* by other customers. I think you're overly concerned with what perfect strangers might think of you." "I think you're manic and you don't know what you're talking about." "Oh, thanks for sharing." "Yeah, and you know what else?" "Please, tell me. If you don't think I'm so manic I won't be able to understand you." Mom looks at me with knives in her eyes. "It's not just about me," she says, weepy. "I don't want to make people around us uncomfortable." "Like the other day at Starbucks." "Like the other day at Starbucks," she says, crying. "Mom. No one's even listening to what we say when we're *standing right next to them*. Also, I wasn't saying things like *all babies should smoke pot* or anything like that. I was quoting scientific data showing that cannabis, LSD, and ecstasy are safer than cigarettes and alcohol." "*Please. Can we stop. Now.*" "Yes. We can stop. I'll stop. But I think you need to ask yourself why you're so opposed to that particular piece of scientific data." "I'm sure you have a theory that explains me down into a pile of salt." "I think you have difficulty accepting that on the drug issue—among *many* other issues—that our government has lied to us and, just to collect taxes, has specifically kept alcohol and cigarettes off the drug classification lists. It's in US law—I can send you the statute if you want—" "No thank you," she sniffs. "I think it's hard for you because your dad died of alcoholism and if he and we and the whole country had a fair chance at seeing how scientists would have classified the danger of alcohol, we would have seen that it is more dangerous than drugs that people have spent their *lives* in jail just for possessing—drugs that *no one* has ever died from. And basically your dad died because the US made a calculated choice to hide the dangers of that drug to increase tax revenue!" My mom has her glasses off and she's wiping both eyes. Her fucking make-up is running. I feel terrible. She looks at me like: *Are you done?* I just stay quiet. I shake my head. This is the central problem of this whole fucking family. No one will have an open conversation with you. They expect that they can keep everything shallow, never touch anything painful, anything true, and somehow by doing this they will resolve their issues and everyone will have authentic relationships with each other. I can't fucking stand it. *Politeness* is literally the death of that and millions of other families. I vow to never be contracted so tightly to politeness that I can't have an honest conversation. Anywhere. The parking lot. The car. Inside the motherfucking Costco. Effing Christ. Who cares what some random shoppers in Costco overhear us saying. Who cares what they think of us. You know what? My mom, my grandmom, they *dress up* to go to the drive-thru at McDonald's. No shit. If I'm driving through a fast food restaurant, I don't even wear shoes. When I lived with my grandmother, she'd want me to dress up to go to our local Mexican restaurant. I've lived in big cities—she hasn't. I know what restaurants you're supposed to dress up for and *El Rancho* isn't one of them. My family—and they've both told me this freely and also denied it when I brought it back up with them—my family is overly concerned with appearances. Keeping up appearances. It is more important to them to look good for strangers—*to look like* a healthy family—than it is for them to do any real work toward becoming a healthy family. I guess I must have detected this young and rebelled against it—my philosophy is to dress down as much as possible, to (as Tyler Durden suggests) "let that which does not matter truly slide." And in place of all that bullshit, focus on the real relationship. Have I spoken with my aunt today? My sister? Have I refrained from drink, given that my whole family is an alcoholic? Yes I have. ### 205 Mom and my therapist decide I shouldn't be left home alone while my mom travels to see her mom. Mom uses this as more ammunition against me, reasoning why I have to move out of our apartment. See, if I go on this trip to Baton Rouge with my mom, Mom and her siblings have to admit that their relationships, actions, environment is hostile toward someone who is trying to heal themself—specifically someone who is trying to stay sober. I'm viewed as a problem element (and I am) because I'm a catalyst who is (very unwelcomely) reflecting some of the broken systems. Before my uncle Perish and I had our spat on Facebook, Perish and my mom didn't even have each other's phone numbers—that was a total shock to me. I thought I was growing up into an environment where my parent, aunts, and uncle were all communicating..that they had at least worked things out between them well enough to function as family even though they have differing political positions. Not the case. That my mother and her brother talk *at all* now is probably a direct result of *my* calling Perish out on his bullshit years ago. The irony in this family is so thick it's straight-up comical: my grandfather—all of their dad—died of alcoholism. And yet when someone in the family gets clean, that is not seen by most people as a good thing—it's seen as a threat to their way of life. I suggested Mom and I go to therapy together. The second time I suggested it, she agreed. > **ME:** Actually, with all that I'm paying for already, I'm not sure I can afford half of another therapy regimen. If we don't go, it could be harmful to our relationship. If we do go it might harm it too. It's not simple for me to know what's best for me in this situation. The best I can do right now I think is live here with my door closed, avoid unnecessary discussions, and keep myself in a position where I'm getting the medical care I'm getting. I need to keep myself physically alive and I can't be homeless or without transportation and do that with a high degree of certainty. That's the best I can do at the moment. I wish you happiness in everything, job, family, everything. > > **Sharon:** Ready to go to the driver's license place? > > **ME:** Yes I'll be right there. I guess what I was talking about in my text didn't deserve a response? Next day: > **ME:** Did you mail the letter to Canada? Sorry to ask you on an already-charged day, but it would help me if I knew that was on its way. Thanks. (no response, ever) > **ME:** I heard you say you want good things. So do I, for you and for me, and I would sacrifice my life in an instant if it meant good things would come to you. (no response, ever) Next day: > **ME:** Susan's probably going to delete my phone and sell the hardware soon, so I'm gonna have to use your phone to make doctor calls. > > I'll just stop texting and I already stopped Twitter. > > So. No problem. > > One must have integrity though. And I'm not going to have someone who isn't really an ally paying my phone bill. (no response, ever) > **ME:** Is there a cardboard box I can use as a laundry basket? > > **Sharon:** Pick one. I'm heading home now. Later on, about a trip to my counsellor, which she is unfortunately driving me to, putting her yet again in a position where she can hold these types of favors against me—for instance, saying that she isn't able to take care of her personal needs because she drive me to therapy once a week: > **Sharon:** I suggest that we leave a little before 4:00. Traffic is a little heavy. > > **ME:** Probably best to avoid the roads altogether, then. > > Can you ride a horse? > > **Sharon:** We can handle it in the car. *Boring!* Total lack of playfulness and creativity. This is where my life motto comes in: *You think I'm crazy. I think you're boring.* That's the story of so many of my interactions. > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** All I want is a quiet place to write > > I like this room. I was naively hopeful that this would be a good place for me to live. The actual unfolding of events between you and me has been horrifying, guilt-inducing, destabilizing. But me moving or becoming homeless right now seems dangerous and possibly fatal. And I want to live. > > Please I'll not speak to you and I'll eat whatever is in the house, keep my door closed as much as possible, and try to finish this current book (4-5 months). Please let's do that at least until this book is finished, and after that I will get out of your hair so you have less to worry about and you'll have more resources and time to do your life, which I want you to be able to focus on..not your mentally ill adult son. > > Ok? No need to respond. And please no more texts as Susan is about to cut me off of the phone plan. I offered to pay her a reasonable fee to cover my usage but naturally she didn't respond. Why would she? She doesn't respect me. You don't seem to either. I'm cutting off all communication with people who have shown that they don't take me seriously. I don't even think you know anything about me. Smh. > > ---- > > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** All I want is a quiet place to write > > I feel safe in this room. It terrifies me to think of being stripped of it and being in group home, hospital, homeless. This allows me to feel a touch of dignity, like I'm a real person. > > It kills me that I am unable to please you. It almost kills me in my sleep each night to know that I displease my mother. But if you are no longer happy having me around, please just be direct and tell me. It seems obvious that you no longer approve of me for some reason. I'm not asking what it is. Maybe I'm finally too crazy for anyone to live with or stand. In that case I have a list of homes for the mentally ill. Maybe Lea can get me into one of those. I don't know. It's new territory for me. Just please don't throw away my mail..I was almost to the point of having a bank account again, which felt good, also like I was a real person, or had a shot at being one. > > I desperately pray that things gets worked out for us both. It's a rotten life sometimes. > > ---- > > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** Just please don't make me leave > > I haven't had a safe place to sleep in a long time. > > And we can solve your upstairs neighbor's problem. I'll talk to them if you want. We can address that. > > ---- > > **To:** Susan > > **Subject:** Mom says what if her phone is at work > > So maybe you can let me pay you a portion of the phone bill each month. > > I just want things to be fair, and they certainly don't seem that way to me now. > > I know you hate me but maybe you could respond to my mom and let me know how much you want each month for my usage. > > ---- > > **To:** Joanne > > **Subject:** I've been trying to get in contact with you but I can't > > I just wanted to say goodbye. Mom was talking tonight in language like "if you leave then don't come back" so unfortunately what could have been an idyllic writing period for me in Nashville is more and more likely to turn into a period of homelessness, which without my medicine I will not survive. Goodbye. I love you. I'm not suicidal, I just don't have the resources to make it on my own. Susan will be disconnecting this phone soon since I am not actually wanted (even by Mom) as part of their family. I hope you have a healthy life. > > Matthew > > ---- > > **To:** Joanne > > **Subject:** I've been trying to get in contact with you but I can't > > I tried offering Susan a reasonable amount of money to pay for my part of the phone bill because I feel bad about her paying for both me and Mom's phone bill, but Susan won't respond to me. Even when I'm offering to pay for my part of a service I use, my own aunt won't call me back. I don't think that's my fault, I don't think I can take responsibility for the unfairness of the situation if she won't even communicate with me to let me pay a fair amount of the phone bill. I can't pretend things are working when they aren't. > > ---- > > **To:** Susan > **Cc:** Sharon > > **Subject:** re: Mom says what if her phone is at work > > Alright, since you haven't responded I'm just going to send you a small check every month in the interest of fairness. If you decide to cancel the phone, that's fine too. Subtext: *I don't care. Fuck you. I don't give a fuck.* I wanted to actually put that in the email but I'm trying to be a more reasonable person than my gut instincts would have me be. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon, Leona > > **Subject:** this is how I feel in general, embodied as Tori Amos lyrics > > If you don't like me just a little > > Why do you hang around? > > You can say it one more time > > What you don't like > > Let me hear it one more time then > > have a seat while I > > take to the sky > > more: (Lyrics to Tori Amos' Take to the Sky) (No response, naturally.) Also note that Mom is ok with using this phone service without paying Susan, so in a way I'm offering more respect to Susan than my mom is. Now, Mom says Susan doesn't care about the money, and that may be true. But my interpretation of the situation is I've got an aunt who doesn't respect me enough to let me be part of the conversation. That hurts, and it makes me want to stop talking to that whole fucking family—which I did when I was eighteen..and you know what, that was a smart idea back then and I knew I was never really part of that family, in other people's eyes, and that's why I stopped talking with them. They've never been welcoming. They've never been home. I knew that at eighteen. I knew it with Perish at four or five. The only reason I gave them a second chance in my thirties is Leona kicked me out of her house and I had nowhere else to go but my aunt and uncle's house in Baton Rouge. ### 206 I reach out for help and support from people I know. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Some people > > **Subject:** bipolar support and generally shaken (the solar system party email) > > Mom and I have had a rough time of it lately.  For a while it was rough because (probably) I was in an irritable mania and Mom was irritating me (partly because of my bipolar mood, partly because she is overdone with the move and with me and who knows what). > > Last night we had the second of two apologetic conversations, this one really productive seeming to me.  She said she didn't ever want to leave me without a parent if I needed one, and she apologized for not speaking anything of substance with me for days—for totally not being there.  We talked about making a bipolar response plan, or a set of numbers to call, basically, in case she thinks I need to be hospitalized and I'm not thinking reasonably.  I said I would do that and I spent like six hours this morning putting together a "bipolar wellness plan" based on NAMI guidelines for creating such documents.  It has several types of critical information that could be used by me and/or her if either of us thinks I'm in a bipolar mood state and we want to clarify that suspicion or get professional help. > > I went to her and told her about it this morning and wanted to send her the link and she melted down and reverted to her earlier position which is that she can drive me to a few places but she can't be available to help notice if I'm in a bipolar state or reflect back to me that information or call a caretaker if I'm not listening.  I put this wellness plan together to try to reduce danger and annoyance to everyone, and she told me that I can't count on her for anything except driving me to appointments.  No other support.  Not a hug.  Not a call to a crisis line or my therapist or doctor.  She said she thinks she has "lost herself" and I know I said some hard-truth-type things to her while I was talking uncontrollably during this last mania, but (to the best of my memory and to the best of her willingness to say and as I review my sent email) I didn't say f-you or anything like that.  I said things like, "I think you have a subtle underlying opposition to men."  Now that's accusative, but it's not an insult, and if she disagrees, she can say so.  I have a subtle underlying opposition, distrust, and hatred of men myself. > > But this morning she told me she's not there for me and she's not going to be there for me.  I can't rely on her to call 911 if I need to be hospitalized.  And I feel like I just lost my second parent.  And I wish she would take better care of herself—which might sound weird coming from me ("the sick one"), but it shouldn't: I see a psychiatrist and a counsellor weekly, my PCP monthly, take my Rx meds and my vitamins by the hour (which Mom rarely does, I know from much living with her—maybe you know this, too).  It's like..well I was gonna say it's sad and it is because I like Mom, I love Mom, and her current behavior indicates she's so low on reserve power that we're never going to have a fun day ever again.  A couple days ago I offered her some of my pineapple slices and she interrupted me and yelled at me saying, "No, I'm not going to eat your food!"  And in my mind I was like: "Ok, then just say, 'No thanks.' "  I don't care.  But I don't deserve to be yelled at for offering someone a slice of pineapple.  I'm pretty sure even my twisted bipolar brain is spot on about that. > > It's frustrating because while part of "the problem" is bipolar behaviors I can't control, I'm doing everything I can on the parts I can control.  I researched how to put together a bipolar response plan, I made a document for her and me and switched to a simpler mood tracking system that I'll actually be able to use every day (or more than once a day).  Part of the reason I picked it is it has a way to share a link with Mom showing my mood in a graph or diary format (I thought I might use that when reporting to my counsellor, too!).  And when I went to Mom I couldn't even get a sentence out of my mouth before she told me she doesn't want to see my bipolar wellness plan!!!  WTF??  I mean, she doesn't want to bookmark a link that has my doctors', therapist's, crisis centers', and emergency contacts' phone numbers on it?  Plus some other information that some random EMT or inpatient psychiatrist might find useful?  It's beyond her desire or capability to basically keep an electronic MedicAlert bracelet around for her severely mentally disordered son? > > The excellent thing is even though that was hurtful, confusing, generally shaking, I'm in a pretty good place of strength (whether from mania or not) where I can handle this emotionally without freaking out at all in my dealings with Mom, and truthfully my inner feelings are 1) Maybe Mom needs some help, why doesn't she go to the doctor if she feels so depleted? and 2) kind of a SuperIrony, where I'm just like, ok.  I feel ok.  My health is being looked at, medication adjusted, my writing work getting done.  I'm ok in some ways.  Maybe her depletion is the cost to be paid for my feeling good, but I don't think so.  I don't think I can be fairly blamed for her lack of health.  But if I suggested she went to the doctor or a therapist (I did suggest that) she would/did blow up at me and blame me for her not having any time to take care of herself.  I'm not upset that she's blaming me for stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with me (I have a few examples that my therapist confirmed are not my fault), I just want her, and me, and everything, to be well. > > And, ironically, this three-page resource guide she won't read contains sections not only on, "How to support a person when they are experiencing a bipolar episode," and "Coping skills for a person with bipolar disorder," but also sections oriented toward, "Keeping healthy as a caregiver."  I made it for both of us. > > Writing this helped.  When I started out I thought I'd be sadder than it turns out I am.  I'm difficult to deal with, no doubt—I have bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder.  Mom has lost herself (her words)—that's no joke.  I'm sorry that you and Mom and everyone I've ever met has had to deal with the hard parts about my unusual mind.  But those hard parts are rare—the great parts are sweeping and eclectic and beautiful and brilliant.  And you know what's great?  I don't have terminal cancer.  And even if you do, my friend, I find this to be a day worthy of celebration.  We're all going to die, we're all going to make mistakes.  In my strong opinion we should forgive as quickly and truly as possible, hug, and get back to the greatest party in the solar system (that we know about).  That's certainly what I'm going to do. > > Matthew > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Leona > > **Subject:** bipolar support and generally shaken (the solar system party email) > > I had originally figured this would be of most use to the person observing me the most, but now that Mom has taken herself off the duty roster, perhaps you could give me feedback if you notice anything awry. Part of the idea of this isn't in the paper itself, but in my signifying my formal willingness to be open to someone else's ideas about how balanced a state I'm in. The document is supposed to help the caretaker/observer by providing easy-to-reach lists of the bipolar mania/hypomania/depression/mixed episode symptoms. I thought that would help Mom 'cause she's saying I wasn't listening to her, but she never said she thought I was manic and I should call xyz doctor. That document would have helped that to happen. And there are resources on there for the patient, me, as well. This is a no-pressure-type deal, Leona, but if you feel like observing bipolar-related stuff to me, from your vantage point, I am formally attempting to be open to that—although, as Mom rightly points out, when one is manic one forgets these types of intentions. But I know that all animals can learn to do something by repetition, even break strong evolutionary instincts (in the case of intelligent animals). So this document is the first bookmark on my bookmarks page..I'm making a habit to review it and put those symptom lists right in front of my face, so easy for me to check that even if I'm manic, I want to be able to check 7/8 items off the list, for example, and know it myself even when the science says I shouldn't be able to know. > > *[URL redacted because the document contains phone numbers]* > > **From:** Leona > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** bipolar support and generally shaken (the solar system party email) > > Yes, I can do this for you. \<3 > > Thanks, Leona \<3 > ### 207 My hurt with Leona rises again. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Leona > > **Subject:** I am hurt > > by the fact that you are going to group therapy with Joanne. Was I not important enough to try to have a relationship with? Would you ever kick Joanne out of your house for no logical reason like you did me? It just stings that I don't feel you care about me as much as you do her, given your increased tolerance of her and increased effort (couples therapy) with her that you didn't afford me. You don't owe me an explanation, but I just want you to know that it hurts me. > > Matthew > > ---- > > **To:** Leona > > **Subject:** re: I am hurt > > Like, for instance, you gave me a hard time if I stayed in my room. So I was with you (and wanted to be, mostly) all day helping you take care of Daniel. So why is it not a problem (or it's allowed) for Joanne to do what you were up my butt about when I did..like when I sometimes slept a lot in the afternoons, you were all over me about how you were worried about me, etc.? Should I have laid down my own will more strongly, as Joanne does, and just done what I wanted? I did so much of what you wanted me to do while I was there, in order to please you, and you treated me so unfairly at the end. I'm glad Joanne's getting better treatment (as I think I stated in a much earlier email that I hoped she would)..it just really hurts me to see how much more accepting of her you are—or at least how much more leeway you give her. It's hard for me to wonder if you..I don't know..just..why there's such a difference. Those are just my feelings. I don't expect a response, I just want to express how I feel about this to you. > > ---- > > **To:** Leona: > > **Subject:** I am hurt > > Or: is Joanne with you *all day* taking care of your children? Will you be asking Joanne to mow your entire lawn using a *manual lawnmower*?? Etcetera, etcetera. I had two hours a day for my writing..during Daniel's nap..the rest of the time I was working. Joanne doesn't even speak to you all (that's what you've told me) and she gets the royal treatment of couples therapy? It just makes me think you don't value me as much as her (our relationship as much as yours and hers). Maybe I'm making up the wrong story in my mind to go with these facts. Idk. But the way I'm interpreting what I'm seeing, really, really hurts me. > > ---- > > **From:** Leona > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** I am hurt > > Dear Matthew, > > The arrangement between me and Joanne is very different than the arrangement when you were living here. We negotiated terms ahead of time and we have a barter agreement. When you were living here it was because you had no other place to go and you were threatening to be out on the streets. We were all in crisis mode, helping you get the medical care and prescriptions that you needed, checking you into the hospital, etc. > > Aside from that, you and I have a different relationship than Joanne and I have. (We're closer, in many ways, and it's easier for us to talk to each other openly, which is what we're working on in counseling: how to talk frankly with each other.) And beyond that, I'm a different person now than I was when you were living here. The two times are very difficult for me to compare, because they're so very different from each other. > > I never meant to do anything that made you feel like you shouldn't be alone in your room if you wanted to. I was concerned about you sleeping so much, not because I was upset with you for sleeping, but because I care about you and I wanted to know that you were ok. I thought that you spent time in the living room with me and Daniel because you wanted to. We watched tv together, we made meals and got takeout together..I was under the impression that this is how you wanted to spend your time and I never faulted you your writing times. You were always welcome to decline watching Daniel or mowing the lawn if you didn't want to. At the time, it seemed as if you were more than willing and happy to do these things to help us out. > > I would be happy to go to therapy together with you if you want. When you were living here, you were going to counseling on your own and I was going to see Debra and James and I were seeing Debra, too. We were in the thick of trying to get services for Daniel, taking him to multiple OT appointments per week..AND we bought a house and moved. There was a LOT going on in my life that had nothing to do with you. And I was also caring for you and supporting you..I bought you a custom-made bike. You picked out a bed that you liked and we got that for you *[I had nothing to do with picking out that bed]*. I bought you a bunch of clothes. Whenever we went to the grocery store, I bought you whatever you wanted *[I was using my own food benefit card]*. There was always a stack of prepaid MAX tickets by the door so you could go on the train whenever and wherever you wanted. You were never left out of any takeout meals, and I drove you through and paid for fast food several times even when I wasn't getting anything for myself. I was so happy to do these things for and with you, and to this day I'm glad to have given to you everything I did! These are things that Joanne doesn't have that you did. The two arrangements are different in a lot of ways. > > I feel like we just weren't in the place to do counseling together at that time. I know I was dealing with a lot, myself. Maybe I wasn't in the place of feeling like I could give more to our relationship because I was overextended. I don't remember you expressing an interest in us going to therapy together at the time, either. > > I value you and our relationship very VERY much. I'm still very sorry about the way things ended here when you left, and I've apologized many times and I thought you'd forgiven me, but I'll apologize again: I'm so sorry for the way I behaved. I hate the way things ended. I was feeling very triggered at the moment when you left the house and that had nothing to do with you, and I'm sorry you were on the receiving end of that awfulness. > > From my perspective, I didn't kick you out. James offered for you to pack a bag and you declined. He offered to drive you to the airport and you declined. I was expecting for you to come back home to Portland at the end of the two weeks in Baton Rouge, but you decided not to come back and I was very sad and shocked by that. I thought our relationship was more resilient than that.. But I packed up all of your things and shipped them to you so you would have them, including medications. > > We've been over and over this in the past three years and I really wish we could move forward and stop dwelling on the past. I am only human and I make mistakes. I would hope you could extend some grace my way and forgive me for not being perfect, for making mistakes, for being fallible. I don't bring up over and over all the things you've done to hurt me over the years, and I would appreciate the same from you. I'm being open and honest and forthright with you. Please, let's move forward together. > > I love you, > > Leona Leona texts me the next morning in response to my saying that I'm cutting off contact with her family and I won't text Daniel because even though I haven't drank alcohol for well over a year, I don't consider myself safe because of worsening bipolar, or schizoaffective, or whatever it is. > **Leona:** I'm really sad to wake up to see this. I hope you will change your mind because we all love you very much and want you to be in our lives. > > **ME:** Do you really? Because according to a lot of people in the family, I'm too fucked up to be around. I don't want to hurt anyone else, so I run to the idea of seclusion. All you mostly healthy people can have a great life together, and I'll just go to a hospital or something. > > You might actually be the last one who loves me. > > **Leona:** Yes, I really love you! I really want you in my life! > > I also want you to feel supported and maybe family aren't the best people to provide that for you? I don't know. > > I know I'm not the last person who loves you. James and Daniel and Joel and Joanne love you. Mom loves you. Susan and Bob and GranGran love you. Dad loves you! We might not (all or always) be loving you in the ways that speak best to you, but I know I'm trying. And some of the others just don't know what to do, how to best show you how much we love you. > > I hope I'm not hurting you further. I'm really trying here. > > **ME:** I don't want to hurt you either, so I'm going to save my protests against the statements you just made and not say them. Instead I'll say this: you're not hurting me further. I feel we are resilient now, more than we were five years ago. I've been bragging to Mom how even when we don't see eye to eye, we continue to return to communication with each other. I am very happy with how our relationship has developed, Leona—it's wonderful as far as I'm concerned, the best relationship I have going at the moment!! =) So feel good! I absolutely want you to know that I am not going to text or respond to Daniel when I know that I'm not in a normal stable state, which obviously I am not right now. It destroys my mental fabric, it feels like, to think that I might not ever be a good uncle to your boys, but I love them enough that thinking about it makes me cry as I'm writing this. It makes no sense for me to compare Joanne's stay with my stay at your house, if only for the reason that it's five years later and we're all different people..plus all the other really good reasons you gave. I remember some of the facts differently. I understand some of the power dynamics between you me and James differently..maybe not better..but differently, and I'm going to leave those alone, too. I love you. Let's keep texting as we feel like it. > > **Leona:** Sure, I understand that we will see and experience things differently and I was just presenting my perspective. > > I love you too. I trust you to make good decisions when it comes to my kids. I have never had any doubts about that. > > **ME:** I appreciate and value and honor and even believe your perspective over mine in some cases!! =) > > Thanks for trusting me with your kids. That means a lot. > > **Leona:** Are you doing okay? Is there anything else I can do to be supportive of you today? > > **ME:** I'm doing better than the vast majority of people on this planet, so yes, I am doing ok. Thank you. I have all that I need. But very nice of you to ask =) Thanks. > > How are you doing today? > > **Leona:** I'm okay. Slept well last night for the first time in quite a while, so I'm really grateful for that. > > **ME:** Good!! I remember our talk about that recently (yesterday I think?)—I'm glad you slept!! > > **Leona:** Thank you! > > **ME:** You're welcome! I know it makes a big difference in your next day! > > **Leona:** Very much so, thank you. > > **ME:** Of course. ### 208 When I send Susan and Bob nice *thank you for letting me stay with you emails*, they just don't respond. That stings. Am I not worth a quick "you're welcome?" Guess not. But I have a new guideline in my mind: not to interpret other people's behavior. There are a million reasons why neither my aunt or uncle responded to my thank you note, and most of them have nothing to do with me. I know now (and sometimes even remember) to not make up stories in my head about what other people's behavior means—it's a losing proposition. But some things you can make rudimentary conclusions on. And when an aunt and an uncle both fail to respond to a warmly written thank you note from their nephew, I make the rudimentary conclusion that these are failing, nonfunctional people, who don't have loaded the programs of basic decency within their brains. And that is a type of person I want nothing to do with. ### 209 Email from Mom: > **From:** Sharon > **To:** Matthew > > **Subject:** Respecting your food needs > > Matthew, I did hear what you said last night about food, which is a very personal and important thing. Even though it has not always gone well, I do want to respect your needs and support your needs. This is not my apartment and it's not my refrigerator. > > As a visible apology of my thoughtlessness in not making room for you and your stuff in the fridge, I have taken a lot of stuff out of the fridge and labeled a shelf for you and one for me, and a drawer for you and one for me. Also there is a half top shelf for each of us for drinks and tall things. The things in the door are available for both of us to use and either of us can put things there, of course. > > *[The real effect this had on me was to make me think of Mom and I as more separate, more like roommates and less like family. Separate shelves, etc. It's not like we were eating each other's food. To me, this makes everything so much less personal..and it eats at me.]* > > Also, as a sign that I do care about your food needs, I have two offers for today: One is that, on the way back from the driver's license place today, I will buy you food at a fast food place of your choice. > > And then, when I get home this afternoon, I will drive you to the grocery store and then, as much as you want me to do so, stay out of the way (and out of sight) while you buy food for you with your food stamps. We can make that a regular outing, adding it into our "things to do" when we set our calendars for the week. Or spur of the moment trips are fine, too. > > Another thing I will offer is to cook for you whatever food you buy for yourself, if and when you ever want me to do that. > > I hope you will hear in this all the love that I want to show to you in practical ways regarding our living situation. I also think this will take some pressure off of me—the pressure of really wanting to provide good food for us and not feeling confident about that sometimes. > > Of course, if there is anything more or different that would make it even better for you, things can be adjusted. > > See you soon. > > Love, > > MOM And then my replies, three smashed into one: > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > > **Subject:** Respecting your food needs > > Unfortunately I took your good intentions and couldn't handle them so just drop me on the side of the road somewhere. You can have my stuff. > > You wrote me such a nice email me I'm sorry I trashed your intentions on the way to the DMV. That was horrible of me. I'd say I'm sorry but it probably wouldn't have any value anymore coming from me. > > I'm going to keep this email around to remind me that you care because unfortunately my brain keeps convincing me otherwise and that is totally unfair to you. Smh. We go to the grocery. Mom grabs a cart, as usual, which I thought was—as usual—*our* cart. Then she says, "Ok, get your cart!" And I was like *what??* We always shop together. I hadn't read her email carefully. I don't do well with change. I grabbed a cart and basically flipped out in the grocery store. I thought she was trying to draw a line between us, and that she was saying that she didn't enjoy shopping with me. For me, it had always been *something we did together*—a social activity. And that she was terminating this social activity with me hurt me and made me basically flip the fuck out in the grocery store. I was driving the cart around every which way, putting nothing in it, desperately trying to get one of my sisters on the phone for psychological support. Later, a text from me to Mom: > **ME:** The refrigerator sections are working great for me—I hope they are for you, too. I re-read your food email and you do say that you were taking me on an independent-ish shopping trip and talked about giving me space if I wanted it. I did read your whole email but just must not have understood at the time what seems clear to me now when I read it. So..I am so sorry I flipped out. I shouldn't have been surprised; you laid it all out for me in the email. I am horrified that I treated you the way I did. I am sorry. I didn't realize I was confused. Fuck. Another fuck fuck *fuck* by Matthew Temple, Idiot of the Fucking Century. Shoot me in the fucking head. I mean I really wish I didn't exist at times like this. It would be so much easier for everybody. ### 210 I'm going to tell you the weirdest hallucination I ever saw. Most hallucinations look like hallucinations, at least on a reasonable dose of mushrooms or LSD..but if you take too much, or you trip too long, you don't even know you're tripping anymore. It was this tear I saw coming out of Ashley's eye *because she wiped it away*. If she took her finger away, it was gone, her skin looked dry. But if she wiped the tear away, I could see that it was there. It was completely photo-realistic, visual-realistic, no psychedelic patterns or movements..and seeing that, I realized how deep the rabbit hole of the mind goes, how much processing the brain is doing to what you see with your eye *before you see it* with your mind. Hallucination, psychosis, is not skin deep, it's deep deep, it's deep like *you don't know that you're hallucinating, you don't know that you're delusional*. A moderate amount or even a double dose of LSD is like a child's toy compared to sober psychosis or an overdose of hallucinogens. A double dose of LSD is *intense* but you still know you're tripping. An overdose of mushrooms, or severe natural psychosis, and you don't know where the edges are..you have *no handle* on reality..reality isn't there for you anymore and it's like you never knew *it existed.* I have this Jackson Pollock print that Joanne gave me and when I look at it, it doesn't look *flat*—it looks 3d. Like instead of the end result of Pollock's paint splatters, I see *the order in which* he painted them. Based on their technical definitions, I think this is an illusion rather than a hallucination, because in a hallucination you see something for which no stimulus is present, but in this case the stimulus is present, it's just that—like that tear hallucination—my brain is doing some amazing sort of processing between my eye and my mind. There's nothing disturbing to me about how it looks. I know this must have *happened* to my brain at some point because I've seen Jackson Pollocks before and they didn't do this. It might have something to do with the way this one is printed. But while it isn't scary, the fact that I see Jackson Pollocks in 3d while other people see them flat is a reminder that my brain is off—it's either another example of psychosis or maybe an example of a particular kind of visual brilliance. I checked the internet and couldn't find anyone else describing this experience. I *know* that this is new for me because I remember seeing flat Pollocks before—the point is, what other experiences am I having that are different (psychotically and/or brilliantly) that *I don't know about*? What other ways has my brain warped or grown, due to psych meds, bipolar disorder, recreational drugs, or just natural development by exercising certain types of cognition..that may be different than the ways others think or experience the world? Just like that tear hallucination, I think I know enough to know that at least with some types of experience, thought, cognition, I might never have occasion to realize that I'm thinking in an unusual way, whether psychotic or brilliant. They say the scary thing about being crazy is that you wouldn't know. It's hard to imagine. But I think it's true. And I think the same thing is true about being brilliant, too. ### 211 One day I'm feeling nostalgic for Vermont, and Brattleboro, and even the Refuge and everyone it contained, and I Google Rose, the heroin addict who fed me Skittles. The one with the perfect face. The one who, when I saw her in meetings, I wanted to *be* her. So I searched her name. And what I found gave me pangs for a life I'll never have. Everything was colorful. Everything was beautiful. Everything was free. It was pictures: Rose posing in sunglasses. Rose smoking a cigarette. Rose's famous beauty mark, right below the eye. Rose freezing in a red coat, looking like Little Red Riding Hood. Rose's face grown older. A restaurant she worked at. Then trips to tropical places, Rose hugging her grandmother goodbye, pushing her dad in a shopping cart, her boyfriend driving a truck. Rose sitting in a tree. Rose saying bye to Brattleboro. Rose in Los Angeles, fake scared as a fake Hannibal Lecter fake chokes her. Hugging a stormtrooper. Rose standing on a rooftop—looks like Central America. Pink dress, like something out of *Miami Vice*. A picture of a drink in the background, and in the foreground, a wrist bearing a bracelet with the Serenity Prayer on it. *Damn*, that girl's still sober. It's almost too much for me to take, seeing this happy girl-turned-woman apparently living a happy life. I know from therapy that I'm not supposed to compare my insides to someone else's outsides, and stalking Rose's Instagram definitely counts as doing that. But, life, oh *life*, why am I not like Rose? Why couldn't *the first time I quit using drugs* have been *the last time I quit using drugs*? I see that either I'm a lot stupider than Rose or maybe I have a deeper hole to fill or badder monsters that I'm running from. Or maybe I just never worked the program. And then my jealousy slides away, because *fuck*, I love that girl. I loved her as an addict and I loved her in detox and I love her happy, on Instagram, with captions like "Found a shark tooth on the beach! \#treasures" and the picture of the tooth to go with it. Is she in Hawaii? Australia? There's a Zen garden, swept in lines and circles. And just Rose smiling. She's in Japan. Back in Vermont ("\#brrrrrrrrmont"). Pictures of snow. Pictures of ostriches—one going one way, one going the other. Then gorgeous shots of Rose, underwater self-portraits of her surrounded by schools of fish. Rose shining a flashlight into the darkness of a coral tangle. Funny captions for a *NO TRESPASSING* sign she found underwater. Rose feeding some kind of mammal I've never seen before, and this thing eating out of her hand. And more and more and more. Beaches. Cats. Friends. This is the life Rose has been living all this time. Six days ago she was in south Florida, scuba diving. The caption says "Blue Heron Bridge, into the abyss" and it's the *portrait* of freedom. Some diver, Rose or her friend, legs outstretched, arms outstretched, swimming between columns under the deep blue sea. Ocean floor covered with green. Algae. Diffuse light. Scenes so well composed they look like they're from a video game. I close the browser window. While Rose has been doing "Blue Heron Bridge, into the abyss," I've been in and out of mental hospitals, my still-living body passed between relatives until everyone in the house gets sick of me, resents my existence, hates every detail of everything I do, from the fact that I *sit on the couch* to the way I *rock* in the *rock*ing chair—they even hate the way I do their chores for them and they *go around behind me* silently correcting my work, until all humans cease any activity with me, and I succumb to drinking in my room, hiding from what *to me* is the intolerable noise of partisan politics and daytime television and angry voices on the radio playing *twenty-four hours a day* in my grandmother's bedroom. In some kind of shock, some kind of pre-death waking *coma*, I watch the same movie *on repeat* for six months and drink, and drink, and drink until I *should be dead*. And let me mention that just like when I'm manic and psychotic I watch *The Matrix*, *The Truman Show*, *Inception*, when I was drinking so *much* this last time I watched *Flight*—a movie about an alcoholic who gets sober. It kills me: I know what I need to do, I'm just too scared to do it. When I looked at those pictures of Rose from the last few years, her life just seemed so bright and happy and so *free* compared to mine..like she had some universal capability that I lacked—for living, for loving, for being ok. For a tenth of a second I hate myself for not being beautiful, young, female, desirable, and clean for the last five years. Well, I've been clean, just not sober, only sober for fifteen months, and my life hasn't bloomed into something carefree and gorgeous, like Rose seems to be. But she was gorgeous sitting sullen in an NA meeting in the Refuge lunchroom, as far as I was concerned. I wish her a hundred times the happiness her pictures indicate to me. And thanks for the Skittles!—which is another way to say: *Thanks for not treating me like a predatory piece of shit, even though you were a girl and I was a guy.* Outside the rooms, you would have been a youngish girl holding *all* the sexual coin and I would have been an old, fat, psychotic drunk who would have *killed* to do heroin with you. But in NA, we were both just addicts trying to get *one day clean*, and we set aside all the male/female bullshit (mostly) and when we held hands to say the Serenity Prayer, our focus was on the fucking *prayer*. I hate myself for that tenth of a second of jealousy and self-hatred and I remember what Jack said when that funky human caterpillar (with Rose at its head) came dancing down the hallway of Tyler 1. He said: - - - - "You see? The people on this floor are basically ok except they're drug addicts. When they stop using drugs, three days later, they're fine. Look!—Happy people! They'll go on to live normal lives, if they can keep from using drugs. That's Tyler 1. That's one thing rewarding about working down here: within the space of a week, you get so see someone who is fucked out of their brain, and in a series of days, with a little help—some medicinal, sometimes just some *love* from the mental health techs like me, you know, just someone to say *You're a worthwhile person* and *The world needs you*—you see someone go from completely nonfunctional to someone you can place right back in the world and they're useful at their jobs, they make up with the people they've hurt, and that's it. Of course a lot of them come back. But the ones who can simply manage to *stay sober* and *refrain from using* drugs..they're golden. That's Tyler 1," he said. "People on Tyler 1, when they stop using drugs, *their lives get better*. There's no underlying mental health problem besides addiction. I mean drugs are addicting to anyone who tries them, no? This hospital believes in the *addict brain* model—some people are addicts, some people are not. Most of the rest of the world doesn't subscribe to that model—only Americans think the addict has a special brain. In Europe and elsewhere, we believe addiction is like the flu: it's all a matter of *exposure*. If you're around people who have the flu, your chances of getting the flu go way up. If you find yourself in close proximity to addictive substances, your chances of becoming addicted to them go way up. So if you have a basically healthy brain, and you stop using drugs, your life gets better. But Tyler 2 is a different story. It's not as fun to work there. Addicts can get better. People with schizophrenia *do not* get better. They can take medication and suppress the *symptoms maybe* enough to live among normal people *for a while* before they end up back in the hospital. But they don't get better—the underlying problem never goes away. Same with bipolar disorder my friend." Jack puts his hand on my shoulder. "You're not a Tyler 1 person, I am sorry to say. You are a Tyler 2 person. And as your psychiatrists have been telling you since your first hospitalization in LA—I've read your chart in detail—your drinking is a problem, yes, but it's not the *primary* problem. And that's why it's so hard for you to stop drinking. Your friend Rose, there, head of the crazy caterpillar—look how happy she is. When she stops *using*, her life gets *better*—and *right away*—so she has an instant reason, an instant motivator, to stay clean. But you, when *you* stop using, your life gets worse. Rose's problem is that she uses heroin—don't tell anyone I told you that." "I know what she uses." "I figured you did. Just don't get me fired, ok?" "I won't." "But *alcohol* isn't your problem, my Faulkner-reading friend. Nor cocaine, nor crystal meth, nor *any of the others* in the pantheon of drugs you are attracted to. You are covering up a much deeper problem, and I've seen this before, *but you know* I will never lie to you—the longer you stay sober and clean off those drugs, *the harder it's going to get* to live with your bipolar disorder. Were you using when you tried to kill yourself?" "No. I was completely sober, no drugs." "That's what I read. I just wanted to hear it from you. In my country, we don't encourage people with mental illness to be completely sober off alcohol or drugs. It's unreasonable, in my opinion. Alcohol can be a disinhibitor, I know that's what everybody around here says. And it's true, it's true. But if you were drinking that night would you have attempted suicide?" "I don't know." "Your best guess." "Probably not, no. I would have had the motivation to go to the bar and spend some money, forget my problems, maybe meet some girl, which I would have failed at, and probably I would have passed out by myself at home and woken up feeling fine the next morning." "I agree. I'm not telling you to drink. Do what works for you. But don't take everything you hear in this hospital as the gospel truth. Sometimes when we try to cleanse every problem out of you we create new ones even worse." "Ok." "But Matthew, there is a reason they call bipolar disorder one of the three *major mental illnesses*. You wanted to kill yourself *three months ago?*—You will want to kill yourself *for the rest of your life*. But *you survived*. And if you can survive not the *act* next time, but the *urge*.." - - - - Jack's words fade in my mind. I've played them back so many times that I'm sure my paraphrasing is radical at this point. But the basic point is intact, and it's one of the most profound points I've learned on my mental health/addiction journey: *People in Tyler 1, when they stop using drugs, they get better. People in Tyler 2, when they stop using drugs, they get worse.* To some of you that probably sounds like a copout excuse for mentally ill people to keep using drugs. No. We have to stop using the dangerous/addictive drugs so that we can uncover the monster of major depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. We have to see how we act without those drugs, which we desperately needed to survive. It's a very risky business. Alcohol dulls my mania..like..magically. So in some ways I'm much more under control when I drink. But alcohol is a monster too, and I can't control it. Some years I drink within *some type of limits*. Some years I can't control my drinking *in any meaningful way*. So I can't do it. And even though I'm not going to meetings now, I'm sober for today, and that, for me, is an accomplishment worth celebrating. So I say a little, "Good job, Matthew," in my head and pretend to pat myself on the back. But my bipolar is worse than ever. I am paranoid. I am psychotic. I sleep two to four hours a night—for 60 days, I've slept two hours almost every night. I go to bed at nine. I wake up at eleven. Totally refreshed. Totally energetic. Instead of writing my normal two or three pages a day I write ten. Some days I write twenty. Some days I write forty. I've almost ruined my relationship with my Mom by talking a mile a minute when she's decompressing from work and by interacting with her in a paranoid mode where I think a simple question from her is her trying to gather information on my mental health so that she can decide when to try to force me into a hospitalization—*sometimes* I have the perspective to realize *this is not the case*. But it's insulting to her that I think she has those motives—but *I can't tell* whether she does or not. That's psychosis; I am unable to properly distinguish between reality and imagination. As I fill out doctor's admissions forms, I see what my handwriting looks like: it looks like the handwriting of a crazy person, it looks like the handwriting of someone with a disorganized mind. I write in the margins, filling every space on the page with corrections to the form's grammar and syntax, with random pieces of information about myself, with messages I'm desperately trying to communicate to my doctors but that I know I'll forget once we're in the office setting. In person, I often appear calm, but I need these people to know that it's chaotic in here, inside my mind. I had to stop watching a movie with Davina yesterday because what was going on inside my head was far more interesting and far more intense than the content of the movie—and it was a good movie, at least good enough to keep my attention on a non-psychotic day. I find myself looking at the patterns on the walls when Mom is standing in my doorway talking to me—the patterns are moving again, a sign that I'm manic—and I can't pay full attention to the *real* conversation my *real* mom is having with me because I'm distracted by a texture hallucination on my walls *that isn't really there* to anyone but me. And it's that way in general: what's going on inside my mind is more engrossing than what's going on without—and with very few exceptions that has been the case since early elementary school, since first or second grade. That's not social behavior and it doesn't help you succeed in this world. But it's been the way I am my whole life and I don't think it's about to change anytime soon. Or..*ever*. I don't want to trade places with Rose. It's a miraculous thing to see someone you were in NA meetings with, in detox with, now scuba diving, escaped Brattleboro, ends up in Florida, walking Florida beaches, finding shark teeth. Every smile I saw on that woman's face made an equal smile on mine. I'm not saying Rose's life is easy—I don't know much about her mind or heart or history. But I will thank the universe that I was wrong about Rose, that at least based on her Instagram pictures she seems like a Tyler 1 person, and it seems like she might be clean and happy and living the Serenity Prayer, day by motherfucking day. Every piece of my heart goes out to that relative stranger, that she encounter happiness with every step she ever takes from here on out to the end. - - - - And I have to go easy on myself for being a Tyler 2 person, who can barely make it from one psychiatrist's appointment to the next without acting in some unexpected antisocial destructive way. I communicate with people in accusatory ways, damning ways, sometimes benevolent but psychotically weird ways such that the recipients of my communication just don't respond. Then I get *angry* because *I demand respect* from everyone who knows me and *any lack of respect* is an affront that must be brought into the light, humiliated, and punished, the person's faults paraded before their relatives and friends. That's how sick I am. And that's fifteen months clean and sober, multiple doctors, medicines, AA meetings, meditation, spiritual books, etc. I'm just a crazy *mother* fucker, and the only people who want to be around crazy motherfuckers are *other* crazy motherfuckers. But I don't want to *hang around* crazy motherfuckers, because I want to get *less* crazy, so I don't hang around anyone. It's hard to live your life if you compare it to others who have more money, more sanity, more sex. But when it comes down to it, I'm doing what I want to do—write. I get to do work every single day that gives my life meaning..or gives me the feeling that my life is meaningful. I am happy about that. And I don't pity myself. My life so far has been fantastic, and the general trend at least is that it gets better every year. So what I have a major mental illness—some people have terminal cancer. I'm lucky. I'm *fortunate*. I'm fortunate, at least for this day, to be able to think clearly enough to write this sentence, this paragraph, this book. I've written something like eleven or twelve books—and for someone whose dream since the tenth grade was to write a book, that makes me one of the wealthiest people I know. My internal life is sometimes *crazy* active, but at least it's *active*—that's the only way I can imagine myself to be. *Bon voyage*, Rose. I have closed the browser window and will never Google you again, my friend, but I wish you happy times, wherever you go—and thank you for being a fraction of my life. ### 212 I used to break people down with my words, tear them piece by piece, using the verbal part of my SAT score to make someone who crossed me feel—not just like a piece of shit—but like a tiny puddle of rat piss with a fly sitting in it, shitting in the rat piss and drinking it at the same time. I'm observant—from the moment I meet you I am learning and remembering everything there is to know about you, and my memory is like an elephant's—I never forget. So people feel close to me, they feel special, because I remembered stuff they said when they thought no one was paying attention. I'm a great person to talk to when you're having problems. I'll let you cry on my shoulder. I'll keep your secrets. And usually that's the way it goes. But if you cross me, if you fuck with me at work, if you work against me, then I do this little thing I joke about with my sister by reaching around to the back of my head, at the top of my neck, and taking hold of one of those little YKKs and slowly unzipping my Matthew suit, brain first, all the way across to the front of my head, down my forehead, all the way down my face, and I plainly unzip the devil. Because that's what's inside of me. And that's what comes out when people push me. I don't like to be pushed. I actually tell people this. And then they push and push and push and I'm nice and nice and nice until one day—the YKK. Unzip the devil. Except my devil isn't an assassin. He's not a ninja. He's not a CIA torturer. He's a litigator. Yeah. He's a lawyer, the kind who puts you on the stand and asks you questions until you turn into a pile of rat shit with a butterfly sitting on top who gets stung by a scorpion *five times its size* and when the *butterfly* gets stung, *the rat shit feels the sting*. An example: one time I was in Home Depot with my friend Mike. We were looking at floor tiles for a film set we were building. I had my backpack on—a red JanSport—and this guy and his girlfriend come by and as they pass, the guy *pushes* my backpack with the edge of his cart. I looked at Mike. He saw what happened. The aisle was plenty wide—in fact it was a double wide aisle—so there was plenty of room for this guy and his girlfriend to pass us on the left without touching me. I could speculate on why he did this, but, realistically, he probably didn't mean anything by it. Realistically, he probably just has no spatial reasoning ability in his subpar brain and he pushed me by accident. But he pushed me. *His* cart touched *my* bag and *my* body and he didn't say "Excuse me" or "I'm sorry" or "Oops" or "Whoops" or "Geez" or any of the *civilized* things he could have said to make the situation right. No. This *asshole* kept driving his cart with a superior posture and a smug face with his unfortunate girlfriend lagging behind him at a subservient distance and I waited till this guy and his girlfriend rounded the aisle and they were across from me and Mike, on the other side of where the tiles were. The aisle was half height so he could see me and he was looking at me and I was looking at him and I pointed in his fucking face and I said: "You better watch yourself." This Hollywood *faggot* cocks his head and says: "Excuse me?" "You touched my bag with your cart and you didn't say anything." "I don't have to say *shit* to you." "Oh yeah?" "Yeah." I look around. I look at Mike. I consider the number of bow saws and cordless drills and nail guns that are practically *within my hand* inside this fucking store. And I can see by the look on Mike's face that he's got my back. And, no offense to this guy's girlfriend, but it's two guys against a guy and a girl and Mike and I were always drunk and usually not that far from our last lines of coke and I'm thinking the odds are stacking up in my favor and I want a fucking *Sorry* from this dickfuck so I say: "You must really want to suck my cock." *"What the fuck did you just say to me?"* "Well, I gave you a chance to say you're sorry and you declined that option." "Yes I *decline* that option. What are you, a couple of faggots?" Mike steps forward. "You got a problem with faggots?" He says it in this real sweet voice. I love Mike. "I wasn't talking to you," says the guy. And Mike says: "Well you're talking to me now. You hit my friend's backpack—you practically ran into him with your cart—and when he asks you for a simple *Sorry* you can't be man enough to say, 'I'm sorry'? And now you suggest that me and my friend are faggots? You know what I have a problem with?" The guy sighs. "I got a problem with people who got a problem with faggots. What do you think, Matt, do you think this guy is gonna have to suck *two* dicks today?" "You know what I think?" "What do you think?" Mike echoes. "I think—" I start. But the guy starts walking away. "Hey, dickstick, stop rolling that cart or you'll be dead before you reach register *twelve*." He stops moving. I look straight in this motherfucker's eyes. "Thank you. I think..and this is just my intuition..and I'm a very intuitive person—" Mike says, "He is a very intuitive person." "I think that your girlfriend there—" "Don't talk about my fucking girlfriend. "No, see, I talk about whatever I *want*, and you *listen*..that's how we play this game. What I think is that your girlfriend there hasn't been properly fucked in a long, long time, and I think by the end of this little *interaction* of ours I will have your girl's number and you will be sucking my friend's dick. You like to have your dick sucked, don't you Mike?" "I *love* it." "You cum a lot when you cum, don't you, Mike?" "I could prob'ly fill this whole faggot's mouth up in a single shot." The girl says, "Baby, let's just go." "Does he eat you out?" "I will fuck you up," says this Hollywood assman. I laugh, as always like fucking De Niro in *Cape Fear*—the only thing I'm missing is the cigar. "All I want from you is a simple, 'I'm sorry, man, I hit you with my cart and I'm offering you a simple little bit of civility' that doesn't emasculate you, doesn't make you less of a man, it just makes you a guy..who's a little bit less of an asshole..than the guy you actually are. You wouldn't give me that. So now I'm talking to your girl. And you will stand there with your hands on that *idiot* cart *and you will listen* and you will keep your mouth shut—" "Or else what?" "Well, I was getting to that, but you interrupted me, so you have actually *delayed* yourself and you're gonna be in this store a couple of seconds longer than you would have if you hadn't interrupted me." The guy starts pushing his cart away from his girlfriend. "Ah ah!" I say. "I wouldn't move that cart," Mike says. "No," I say. "Don't move the cart." "Baby just go," the woman says. "No," I say. "Don't go." I say this like I would to a small child. "Now your cocksucking boyfriend is not eating your pussy properly, isn't that right." The guy is like five shades redder than the last time I mentioned him eating out his girl's pussy. "Come on, baby," the guy says. "I wouldn't do that," I say. "*Why not*," this guy says. "Tell 'em, Mike." This guy looks at my friend and says, "*What*, Mike, *what are you gonna do?*" "It's not what *I'm* gonna do." He points his thumb at me. "It's what *he's* gonna do." "Ok, what is *he* gonna do." "Why don't you ask him." The guy and his girlfriend just look at me like they're sorry they woke up that day. Poor motherfuckers. They thought they were just going to Home Depot to pick up some mini blinds, but the real mistake was that this meek little kind little simple little girl got together with a fuckstick who is either passive-aggressively trying to pick fights or is just too mentally handicapped to push a cart through a store without accidentally bumping into psychopaths like my friend and I. Everyone's waiting for me, looking at me. "Ok so under the passenger seat of our car—which is a rental—" "I don't want to hear about your fucking *car*. "See you keep interrupting me. And every time you interrupt me, that's another time my faggot friend is going to whack off in your face. We're up to three now—" "We're up to *two*," says this asshole. "We *were* up to two, but when you said, 'We're up to two,' you interrupted me, so that makes three. See? I'm like the Oracle from *The Matrix*—have you seen *The Matrix*?" "Ok what's under the passenger seat of your car, *which is a rental*." "I'm glad you asked. What's under there is a crowbar." "So?" "So if you and your hot little piece of ass make a run for the parking lot, *we're* gonna make a run for the parking lot, and I'm gonna *get* that crowbar and—" "You're gonna beat in the windows of my Porsche." "Ohohoho!" I laugh. "First of all, you interrupted me again. Mike, get your dick out. Secondly, you Hollywood *piece of shit*.." I laugh again. I'm doubling over. I can hardly breathe. "..hahaha. Do you know *how low you are* on the moral totem pole for bringing up *what kind of car you drive* while someone is sincerely telling you how you're going to die?" - - - - The girl tries pushing her boyfriend, cart and all, but the guy won't budge. His ego is in it now, and there's nothing easier to manipulate than a man who has his ego invested in a fight. "What did you say to me?" "You heard me. You and your girl make a run for the parking lot *no* I'm not going to fuck up your Porsche. Ahhhh..ohhhhh..you're killing me with this Porsche shit. You're obviously not trying to impress *her*..'cause presumably she already knows you have a Porsche since she's sucked your dick in it a million times while in the bedroom you *fail to return the favor*— "You don't know that." "I would seriously advise you to stop interrupting me." "Fuck you," he says, but there's a crack in it. "No, I'm gonna fuck *you*..in the face..with my crowbar. Then my friend here is gonna jack off in your broken face while your girlfriend watches. Then we're going to kill you by injecting your jugular with a massive overdose of coke—Mike do we still have coke in the car?" "Plenty." "So you're going to die in the parking lot of Home Depot and your last thought is gonna be of me reaching these two fingers up inside your girl's pussy and rubbing her just right on that clump of nerves that's on the upper side, right there on the top of the pussy, just opposite the clitoris. That's what the G-spot is—a lot of guys don't know that—Mike, did you know that?" "Oh yeah." Mike rocks back and forth of his heels. "And while you're lying out there in the Home Depot parking lot with your head beat in *unrecognizably* I'm going to be pulling *my rental* out onto Sunset Boulevard and me Mike and your girl—faggots that we all are—are gonna rent a room at the Hilton just down the street. You know the one?" "Yeah." He rolls his eyes. "We're gonna get a nice big suite, we're gonna get your girl drunk, we're gonna do some recreational drugs, we're gonna fuck your girlfriend in both holes—" "Three holes," Mike says. "Three, four, depends on how you look at it," I say. "We'll make more. But I am going to make *damn* sure that your girlfriend doesn't think about you while we're making her cum over and over and over. In fact it doesn't look like she's thinking much about you right now—" The guy almost jumps over the tile display. His girlfriend barely holds him back. "Let's just *go* baby!" "Not before he says he's sorry!! Otherwise it'll be heart attack in the parking lot and I *will* make you cum, baby, about seventeen times in a row." The guys arms are flailing and he's kicking the baseboard of the tile display and he's just screaming obscenities. I can't even describe what he said 'cause it was something like: "COCKSUCKING BITCH ASSHOLE FUCK MY MOTHER YOU FAGGOT ASSHOLE *IF YOU TOUCH MY GIRLFRIEND*—" "She's practically not even your girlfriend anymore. She's got my cock in her mouth. Let's all visualize that." And he's like: "I WILL FUCK YOU SO HARD THREATEN ME I'M CALLING SECURITY MOTHERFUCKERS YOU CAN'T TREAT ME LIKE THIS I'M FROM *BEVERLY HILLS*." "Just 'cause you're from Beverly Hills doesn't mean you can eat pussy. I'm gonna get this real crack ho bitch that me and Mike like to shoot coke with and we're gonna start *you* out *eating her ass*. You should really learn to eat ass before you eat pussy it's sort of like a 101 class as opposed to a 400-level class. And when you eat a crack ho's ass, she *always* grateful. That's what we're gonna set you up with, kind of like a starter course, while me and my friend go to work on your girlfriend. She looks kind of meek—you ever think about the first time she got fucked and wish you were there? I know it wasn't you. And I bet that motherfucker's cock was so big it tore that little pussy that you don't even know how to fuck properly and your girl was bleeding the first time she had that big bad black cock in her." "I'M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!" "BABY LET'S *GO!!*" This guy is throwing tile samples all over both aisles, ripping his own hair out. The top button of his shirt has come undone. "I WILL FUCKING *KILL* YOU!!" "All I'm asking for is a simple sorry for brushing my bag with your cart. What is it that makes that so hard for you?" He's just panting now, his girl's arms around him, holding him back and she's looking me in the eye. "Can I ask your name? I'm not gonna fuck with you." "Crystal." "Crystal, is this the first time he's 'accidentally' bumped into someone in a store with his cart—was this an accident?—or do we have a little passive-aggressive thing going on here? Somebody looking for a fight." "He's done it before." The guy looks straight up and says: "Crystal!!!" "It's true, baby. Now can we just go?" "Yes, you can go. Once he says he's sorry." "I'm *not* saying I'm sorry." And Crystal says, "Are you really a psychopath?" And I say, "Crystal, *psychopath* is one of those words, like *narcotic* or *genius*, that has had so many definitions throughout history that it's really best not used at all. That term has become so loaded with meanings that it hardly means anything at all. If you look those words up in a dictionary when you get home I think you'll see what I mean." "Ok," Crystal says. "I understand what you mean. I'm not stupid." "I can see that." "You said 'when you get home.' Are you gonna let us go home?" "I'm gonna let *you* go home after I make you cum seventeen times. But *him* I'm not letting go any further than the parking lot unless he says he's sorry." The girl shakes her head. "Can I ask you one question—no bullshit?" "Yes." "And you'll answer with the truth, just the simple truth?" "Yes, absolutely." "Ok," she says. She breathes out sharply. "Is there really a crowbar under the passenger seat of your rental?" "Yes there is." "Baby just say you're sorry." He looks at her. "Please, baby, just say you're sorry and let's leave. Don't provoke them. Just say you're sorry like your mama told you how to say it when you're young." The asshole says very slowly: "My 'mama' never taught me to say 'I'm sorry.' " And I don't say this, but I think to myself: *This is the root of this whole altercation.* This Hollywood rich kid—I'm sorry, *Beverly Hills* rich kid—never learned to say *I'm sorry*. And I don't like to be pushed. Put those two together and you have a Home Depot customer service nightmare. The guy says "I'm sorry" under his breath and starts pushing the cart away from us without his girlfriend. Mike says: "*Louder*, asshole!" And the guy yells, "*I'm sorry!!*" and it echoes throughout the store. His girlfriend shakes her head at us and goes after her guy. - - - - Mike and I are unable to find a tile we like for the set we're trying to build. As we make a left turn out of the Home Depot parking lot onto Sunset Boulevard, Mike says: "Don't take this the wrong way, but every time we leave the house I feel like it's a toss-up between you and I to see which one of us gonna get us both killed." "You're right. I don't take it personally. I'm sorry. I'm a very angry person, Mike." "I know." He laughs. "I've know that since the day I met you." "Really?" "Yeah." "Since when exactly?" "You wanna know the exact moment?" "If you remember it!" "Well, we were eating Baja Fresh with Mhanna and Pete, and Mhanna said something you didn't agree with—it was something about a film, I think it was about *Mean Girls* or *2001* or something—do you remember that?" "No." "Well Mhanna said he liked a certain film and you looked at him like he had just said the dumbest thing that had ever been said in the *history of filmmaking*." "Well..Mhanna and I have different ideas about what makes a great film, and just because Stanley *Kubrick* does it, does not necessarily make it the greatest thing that ever happened in the history of filmmaking." "You don't like Stanley Kubrick?" "I *love* Stanley Kubrick. Love love love. But there are some parts of *2001* that are just too damn long. Period. You know. For today's appetite. And believe me, I've heard the argument a thousand ways, but *how fucking long does it take to introduce a spaceship???* Maybe if it's nineteen sixty-eight and you're popping ludes and tripping on acid and smoking pot and your girlfriend's hand is on your dick and she uses that long-ass scene as an opportunity to get you to cum all over her hand, then yeah, maybe it's a great scene. But Mhanna is of the age that he's hero-worshipping Kubrick just because he's a 'great filmmaker' but just because you're a great filmmaker doesn't mean everything you do is great. And *Mean Girls* is not a masterpiece. It's very funny. But it's not a masterpiece. It's a future cult classic. Which is respectable. But it's not a masterpiece." We drive up to the parking lot at Sunset and Vine. We always go to the same restaurant for lunch. The food's ok, the wine is great, and you can smoke outside which is perfect for us since we're both trying to get cancer. "Something else I wanted to ask you." "What, Mike?" "Do you have a problem with niggers?" "Do *you* have a problem with faggots?" "No, but I mean, deep down, do you have a problem with black people?" "Of course not. Why are you asking me this?" " 'Cause you always talk about black dicks recently." "I think you mean black *cocks*." "I'm serious." - - - - "Well, I'll tell you. I got that one from Rishi. I'm sure she'd tell you differently but when we were breaking up she was always telling me about other guys' cocks she'd fucked or was fucking or that she wanted to fuck. And the way *I* remember it she was telling me about some black guy's cock she fucked and she was describing it in infinite detail, it's length, it's girth, the way it felt in her hands, the way it felt in her mouth, and how much she liked to be fucked by *a big black cock*. And I'm like, 'Rishi, why are you telling me this?' And she's like, 'I don't know. We weren't talking about anything else.' And I'm like, 'When you say something, do you imagine what the effect might be on the other person, 'cause that's called *empathy*.' And she's like, 'I'm sorry if you're uncomfortable with me talking about other guys' cocks.' And I'm like, 'Rishi, I just don't see how it's relevant to *us*. How does the fact that you fucked a big black cock relate *to us*?' And she's like, 'Well, it's just something I wanted to talk about. If you have something *you* want to talk about, I'll listen.' 'Just not cocks, ok?' 'Why are you so bothered by other men's cocks? Do you feel you're inadequate?' 'Rishi, do you cum when we fuck?' 'Baby you know that I cum.' 'Do you cum a lot?' 'You know that I do.' 'Do you know that I do?' 'Of course! Remember when you came seven times in one day?' 'I'll never forget it. So, if I'm cumming at least once when we fuck and you're cumming once or twice, then why would I feel inadequate about my dick?' 'Oh, baby,' she says. 'I cum three or four times when we fuck. You always make me cum.' 'Then why are we talking about black cocks?' I said. But she wouldn't leave it alone. We're sitting in Groundwork, on that one couch? And I was programming some of my snail puzzles and she kept going on and on about black cocks and then I went a little crazy, I'll admit, and I kind of went on this poetic monologue about black cocks and Rishi's many relationships to them. I couldn't help it. She was driving me crazy talking about other men, I'm like, either shut up, or take me home and fuck me, or *get off the couch* and *go fuck some black cocks* while I program!! That girl was crazy about stuff like that. When we lived in Tucson, she'd come home and tell me that some guy flirted with her in the grocery store. I'd be like, 'So what?' She'd be like, 'He wanted to fuck me.' I'd be like, 'What do you want me to do, Rishi, follow you around and rough up every guy that wants to fuck you? Girls flirt with me *all the time* in the grocery store. They want to fuck me, I want to fuck them. You know what the difference is between you and me?' Rishi said, 'What?' I said, 'By the time I come home to *you* at the end of the day, I've forgotten about all those girls, and I want to fuck *you*. But when you come home to *me*, you're still thinking about that guy in the grocery store who flirted with you. And—*and*—what's worse—*you* feel the need to tell me about it.' " "So you don't have a problem with black people?" "No. Look, the only people who have ever beat me up or chased me home from school and one time if was four guys against one—four black, one white—do you think that had anything to do with color? Maybe it did and maybe it didn't but I don't go around hating black people just because in high school four black kids beat the shit out of me. I think beating someone up is a stupid thing to do, and I think those kids were stupid for doing that to me, but their stupidity has more to do with being poor than being black. Stupid white people too. Am I acting racist lately or something?" "No, it's just that guy back there, when you told him that his girlfriend lost her virginity to a black guy..it just made me wonder.." "If I dislike black people?" "I just wondered why you said that, is all." "I said that because I was guessing that *he* would have trouble with the image of a black guy taking his girl's virginity." "I think you guessed right." "Yeah, what a fucker." "You know what else I think? And don't take this the wrong way." "Mike. How long have we known each other?" "Well. I think you might need therapy." I look at Mike and can feel the laughter welling up inside us both. "*Might?*" I say. And we're both cracking up. - - - - We get a table at our favorite restaurant, outside, so we can smoke. We order bottles of wine and appetizers and pasta and lamb and Mike pulls out a Camel Light and I pull out a Kamel Red and we smoke and it's sunny and each of us has a friend and life is beautiful. Until these bitch-ass motherfuckers sitting several tables away from us start talk *really loudly* about the smoke, especially the woman, who says, "I thought smoking was *illegal* in LA. I don't want to get cancer just because *somebody* has to break the law to smoke on the veranda. Ugh. Some people have no respect for other people's *lives*, even. I would never date a man who smokes—I heard it shrinks your peen." I look at Mike. Mike looks at me. I smile. And Mike opens his mouth. He shouts back at the woman: "Uh..miss! Miss? First of all, it's Mountain Dew that shrinks your peen, and if you'd like to step into the bathroom I will be happy to demonstrate to you that I don't drink Mountain Dew. Secondly, this isn't a veranda, it's a patio—if you need further explanation of those terms, my friend here is very smart and I'm sure he can clear up the exact definitions for you but I grew up in the Bay Area and growing up in the Bay Area gave me an intrinsic—is that the right word?" I nod, chuckling silently. "Anyway a veranda has a roof, doesn't it?" I nod. I'm smiling hard—I love my friend. "So miss, if you don't mind, I would appreciate it if you would refer to this as a patio as that is the correct term and just to support everyone's understanding of *what the fuck you're talking about*. You show me *one piece of research* that says cigarettes cause cancer and I will put this cigarette out *right away*. I wouldn't want to offend you or give you cancer while you're eating—what is that, a chicken salad?" "It's just a salad." "Is your boyfriend worried you'll get *fat* or something?" I hear a chair slide along the brick floor of the patio. I turn around. This executive-type dude in a dark suit stands up and says: "I'm her husband." I point my cigarette at him and I say: "Husband!" I snap to get his attention. "Look at me. Smoking is legal on this patio so you better sit back down and shut your wife up or I'm going to go out to my car—which is a rental—and I'm going to get my crowbar. So eat your lunch, no more comments about the smoke, and keep the volume down in general or I'm going to have to beat your face in in front of your wife and all these nice people. I will cover your check to offset the fact that we're giving you cancer." "You don't need to cover our check." "No I *will* cover your check and get your wife something to eat. She looks like an American Apparel model on crack. In fact, she looks like a skinny, skinny boy—you actually like to fuck that?" The guy starts toward us. But I shout: "Franco!" The owner comes over. He gives me a big hug and greets me by name and kisses me on the cheeks and Mike looks like he's about to hang himself because, even though Mike is with me almost every time I come to Franco's, Franco always showers me with the hellos he showers on his own family—and completely ignores Mike. It's a puzzle we haven't been able to figure out, and Mike takes it very personally. "Matthew, is everything good? What can I get you?" The husband of this cancer-phobic couple has been standing behind Franco this whole time. "Franco, this is my friend Dick." "Hello Dick!" Franco shakes his hand. "Any friend of Matthew's is a friend of mine!" The guy kind of smirks—like someone who never learned to smirk properly. Absent mother, I'm thinking. "Franco, Dick's little boy is very hungry." I direct Franco's attention to Dick's wife, and Franco looks at her. "She would like the gorgonzola pasta and they would each like a bottle of wine." "One bottle of wine for them to share?" "No, they each need one." "No we don't." "Yes, you do. And I'll cover their check." "No. You won't." "Yes. I will." I smoked my cigarette and me and Dick had a little staring contest. And Dick was silent. Franco led the man back to his seat, got the woman something real to eat, and, even though it was confusing even for the sommelier, they each had a bottle of wine. I paid for their meal. And Mike and I sat there and smoked. And you know what we didn't hear? Some bitch whining about our cigarette smoke, some high-dollar executive *telling me* what his wife will and will not eat. *I tell you.* That was how I did it back then. I wanted to control you, humiliate you, and silence you. That's really what I wanted—for everyone to stop bugging me and *shut the fuck up*. ### 213 For me, in my mind, things are sometimes simple, things are sometimes complex. A very small number of people *augment* my desired state of mind, and most people detract from it. Back then, the righteous smackdown was still alive. Actually it was out of control like Audrey II (from *Little Shop of Horrors*?). Mike was right, he and I were risking our lives every time we left the apartment. We weren't fighters. We were just angry. And each of our anger was comedy to the other. We weren't about to beat someone's head in with a crowbar—we just discovered that *everyone*, bar none, was more afraid of conflict than we were. People are afraid. They're really afraid. And we were drunk enough and high enough and young enough to think it was funny to take out our own sadness on other people by doing crazy aggressive shit that these other people did not see coming when they woke up in the morning. Internally, each in a slightly different way, Mike and I were out of control. Our feeble solution was to impose some chaotic control over others. It got us high. If we weren't pretending to be psychopaths, if we weren't drinking and shooting stuff into our veins, we would have been standing in a church crying our eyes out with a bunch of other out-of-control addicts—which I did, later. I don't know about Mike. He sent me an email years ago, saying that you don't meet too many people in life you connect with, and it was a shame to waste a friendship over the stupid shit that ended ours. He was right—it was a mature position. I guess he grew. I guess I did, too. But I didn't want to be his friend anymore. Dr. Meggs cut right to the heart of things with me. In the first hour we spoke, she somehow asked the right questions to get me to tell her about my potty-training experiences with Dad, and she told me that we learn how to relate to others in the first relationships we participate in as small children. Dad had taught me the humiliator-humiliated pattern by standing over me, shouting at me and forcing my hands to clean the shit out of my big-boy underwear when I went poop in them. And I remember squatting over a heating vent, looking out the huge picture windows on our foresty street with big yards and almost no traffic. And I remember shitting in my underwear, feeling the hot feces spread over my bottom and legs. And it gave me pleasure..to know that it would infuriate my father. You have to ask yourself, who's controlling who in that game—who's training who? When I shit in my undies you can force me to clean it out with my hands in the toilet while you yell at me. But by shitting where I'm not supposed to, I can control you, Dad—I can make you angry, make your face red and your veins pop out and make you lose control of your emotion and the consciousness that governs correct behavior. Even by making you treat me badly, in a way, *I'm in control!* But I didn't want to be humiliated. That was the role my dad forced me to play, as he humiliated me by making me touch my own shit while he watched and controlled me by yelling at me and scaring me. So for decades, I learned to play the other side of that game. I learned how to humiliate my dad, first of all—learned all of his buttons and weaknesses. I loved learning our family history—partly because I'm interested in where *I* came from, what makes *me* tick, but partly, I have to admit as I write these pages, I needed that history to know how to hurt my dad. Every story about how his sisters humiliated him by forcing him against his will to wear girls' clothes and then prancing him around before his parents for their disapproval, every piece of information like: in my dad's family, the girls got to go to out-of-state colleges (good colleges) while the boys had to go to the college in Ruston, Louisiana (a lesser, state college)..stuff like that is fascinating just because I want to decipher the sickness of my family, of my now-dead grandparents, or my father, of myself. But it's also ammunition. Every little thing I know about my dad, that I learn from him, my mom, my sisters, his sisters, old letters—all that stuff is *power*—it's power that I can use to change the game. And that childish satisfaction of changing the game so that *I* was the humiliator and *he* was the humiliated..was all the satisfaction I could get for a long time. Simply *making him hurt*—even while he was still making me hurt!—it didn't make me happy, but it gave me some control. And I was willing to settle for that little bit of control because I didn't have the psychological tools to negotiate anything greater. It is said that the basic structure of all comedy is the structure of *making the powerful fall*. When the king falls off his horse, that's comedy because with all his power, the king is unable to avoid the simple mistake of falling. That makes us laugh because essentially we have no power. Regardless of your worldly trappings, your bank balance, your reputation, a human being basically has nothing. Is in control of nothing. We can't stop ourselves from getting sick, from ultimately dying. We can't stop tragedies from happening to those we love. We can't choose our parents. We can't raise perfect kids. So according to this theory that what underlies all humor is *seeing the powerful fall*, I think humor in general is a lightness and a realism—it's an admission of death, of imperfection. But instead of being sad, it makes us laugh, because instead of lying to ourselves, we're telling the truth. And according to this theory, I've had a pretty funny life, because I've been trying to make the powerful fall since I was two years old. My dad does such a good job of humiliating himself that he stopped being the main target of my humiliation once I went to college. But the lesson he taught me—which my tiny mind interpreted as: *never be humiliated, always be the humiliator*—was learned so well, fucking ingrained in me so well and so deep that I was never aware that I was even doing it until after I tried to kill myself and a smart psychiatrist heard this pattern in the very first stories I told her. Like they say, a fish has no idea what water is—humiliating others was like water to me. I did it so often and so well I didn't even know I was doing it. I loved the story of *The Emperor's New Clothes* by the formidable Hans Christian Andersen. My bosses were like the emperor: Ray, a boss I had, was such a pompous ass, he knew nothing but didn't know that he knew nothing. No skills as a programmer, politically gullible, when he heard on the radio that his idol, Rush Limbaugh, was a drug addict, he went into denial, dissociated. A guy who used to be such a capitalist-flag-waving workaholic that he missed his wife giving birth to their second child, Ray fractured over the years. Instead of working late each night for the owner of our company who lived in sunny Florida, while we worked in icy Ohio, Ray started doing thirty minutes of work a day and played chintzy MMORPGs all day at his desk. He put a two-hundred gallon saltwater fish tank in his office and spent hours searching for just the right fish on the internet. But Ray loved to insult me, make fun of me, steal my ideas and present them to the owner as though they were his, never mentioning my name. What did I do? I did what I learned as a child!—I humiliated him. In meetings with the whole company present, I pointed out logical errors in his project planning documents and his software designs and his code. I said things and showed things and asked questions of him in front of others that were designed to reveal his actual stupidity. I revealed his secrets to fellow employees, to the owner. This last got me fired. Our owner Jim was loyal to Ray, even though Ray was a fuck up. I wasn't about to have some faker take credit for my ideas. The audacity that I would revel, in a send-to-all email, that Ray was lying in saying *he* came up with an idea, when I had been presenting it to him for months and for months he denied me, telling me my idea was unworkable and we'd never implement it. Then he comes out and says: *I've had this great idea that we're all going to do!* When I publicly crucified Ray for either stealing my idea or being so brain-dead that he didn't remember it was mine, it was too much for Jim. The owner fired me. I've quit a lot of jobs—been fired from two—and while there is the inconvenience of figuring out where my next meal is coming from, quitting and even being fired has always been an extremely pleasurable thing for me—it means that I won't have to deal with those nonsense people anymore. Like Hannibal Lecter, mediocrity *exasperates* me. - - - - On the flip side, to live by this pattern my dad taught me, it is essential to never be humiliated. My method for this was twofold: *Be perfect.* This is extremely labor-intensive but it is possible for a smart person to do. At work, I always made sure my code was *perfect*—I thought about it from so many perspectives that a whole company of programmers would never think about it that much. I developed rigorous, brilliant, flawless thought—even people who like to debate don't like to debate me because *I wear them out*. I never get tired. I never get outdone. I never let you think of something I haven't already thought of first. As I said, this is extremely labor-intensive and, really, no way to live. Second method for never being humiliated. *Just don't give a fuck.* Minimize, in your mind, the importance of other people's opinions of you, of their judgements, their praise. Basically don't give a fuck about anyone else. Develop such a strong internal guide and self-assessment that your ship can't be tossed about by the waves. *Just don't care what people think.* Ignore other people, and almost everything they say—because almost everything they say is junk. Unlike (1), I think (2) is a pretty good way to live your life. I have humiliated many people—mostly coworkers and uncles, people who think they have more power than me, who are actually a lot feebler than they know, and I am happy to perform the service of knocking them down off their self-constructed pedestal, ideally for everyone to see. I'm not going to go into any more examples—just imagine me, with this hurtful technique that I go around using on people, getting my satisfaction out of knowing that people who tried to hurt me *got hurt worse*. Benign people or people who work with me, I gave my whole life to. People who work against me when, if I was never provoked, I would never hurt a hair on anyone's head?—I had a special hate for those people, and, unfortunately, usually I had the tools to make them comedy..to reveal to those whose opinions they valued and needed..that they weren't heroes..they were pieces of shit. It's a fucking horrible thing to do, but it's the best I knew how to do at the time. As the sage Maya Angelou wrote: "I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better." It took me trying to kill myself and having a sharp-as-a-tack psychiatrist hold a mirror up to my humiliator-humiliated pattern to *even start* to unravel that rat's maze of automatic behavior wired into my brain. I didn't get it when my doctor first showed it to me—oh, I got it intellectually, sure, but to get it *from the mind to the fingers*, that took about five more years of thinking, especially this last crucial year of living with my mom (read: 99% psychologically safe environment), being sober for longer than I have before (helps thinking!), and doing some sort of spiritual program (AA and meditation, in my case—which I failed at miserably, but at least with meditation, I'm pretty sure that's the whole point). ### 214 And there came a day when Mike and had our last words. I asked him if it was true that he had been talking bad about me to our common film school friends—if he was talking behind my back. Mike's last words to me were to tell me that yes, he was talking shit about me behind my back. And my last words to him were to kick his bedroom door in, splintering the wood, beating the shit out of this cheap-ass hollow door until there *was* no door, no door handle, only a partial frame and a pile of firewood in the larger of the two bedrooms in our Valley Village apartment. Earlier that night, I was passed out drunk. The *instant* Mike came home he barged into my room and turned on the light and we were in each other's faces in a yelling match. I asked him what he said to these assholes *who used to be my friends too* and he went on and on about how he thought I was stealing his soap and I was like: "Mike, I'm not stealing your soap!" I laugh hilariously. "Then what do you bathe with?" "I use shampoo." "For your whole body?" "Yes, look at the label. It's combination body wash *and* shampoo—this has been around for a while now." "So you haven't been using my special soap, in the eggshell dish?" "No one's using your soap, Mike." "What about my shampoo?" "I don't use your shampoo." "Then why is it going down so quickly? One day it's like up to *here*..and the *next day*..it's like all the way down *here!!*" "It's prob'ly because you take two-hour showers and you're jerking off with the stuff." Mike looks at me like he's ready to hit me and I just shake my head. *Hit me and you will see the wrath. You see this zipper starting at the back of my head? The devil will come out and kill your privileged ass.* "I just don't see how a grown man takes so many baths," he says. *"What?!"* *I'm laughing so hard.* "Well I never see you take a shower." "Sandow, bathing is a cultural thing. It's culturally specific. Some Europeans bathe twice a day—that's two *baths*. In fact, in Medieval times, the church banned bathing for a variety of reasons including that they believed disease was passed through water, so more bathing meant more diseases, aside from the fact that they wanted to discourage people from having sex in public baths. Women were banned from bathing. Then I guess it was just a bunch of guys sitting round getting clean and jerking each other off." "Ok, but..we're not in Medieval *Europe*. We're in America. People here take showers." "I take showers too but I find baths meditative." "Uh-huh." "What is your point here? Are you telling me you would like me to take more showers, less baths—is my *ratio* off for you?" "No, *asshole*, what I'm *saying* is: I know you're not into the whole use-soap-every-day thing, but in a *bath*, how can you be sure you're getting *clean*? I mean aren't you bathing in your own scum? And if you've taken a shit since the last time you took a bath, aren't you bathing in your own shit?" "Mike, when you take a shit, do you wipe your ass afterward?" "What is this, some *Pulp Fiction*-style question where I answer and then you turn my answer into a joke?" "No, Mike, this has nothing to do with *Pulp Fiction*, Quentin Tarantino, Samuel L. Jackson, or *what Marsellus Wallace looks like*. I'm just asking you, when you wipe your ass, do you *stop* when the last wipe has shit on it, or do you *keep going* until you get a clean piece of toilet paper?" "This *is* some *Pulp Fiction*-style shit. I'm not playing along with this." "Play along or don't play along, all I'm saying is *when I take a shit*, I clean my ass sufficiently that if I take a bath *at some point in the future*, I am not *bathing in my own shit*, as you suggested." "But your ass isn't perfectly clean." "*No one's* ass is *perfectly* clean, except an infant baby that's never taken a shit in its short little life. That's the only time in your *whole life* your ass is *perfectly* clean—enemas and cleanses aside. At every moment *after the point* at which that baby takes its first shit, its ass is not perfectly clean. But unless you have a *gaping* asshole, or else you're *taking a shit in the bathtub* while you're in there, the fact that *prior* to that bath, *at some time*, I have taken a shit, *does not mean* that I am bathing in my own shit. And on the matter of bath *scum* that you seem so concerned I am bathing in, be advised that you *can clean* something with something else that isn't perfectly clean and *still get* that original thing perfectly clean. The sponge behind the kitchen sink was only *perfectly clean* before we ever used it, and *yet*—through the magic of *soap*—that now-dirty sponge can still get our dishes *as clean as you could get them* with a brand new sponge—do you see my point?" "Whatever. I can't even deal with you right now. You and Courtney always get me in these smart people conversations where by the end I don't even know what we started out talking about. It makes my head hurt." "Is this the type of shit you've been talking to Brock and Jay about? Telling them I'm stealing the soap from your *eggshell dish*?" "Yes, ok, and I have the right to talk to them about whatever I want." "Yeah but don't you see how that feels to me? When you talk to *them* about it, it's *you insulting me* and accusing me of something I didn't do. If you had talked to me we could have cleared it up because I don't like your *special soap* in your *eggshell dish* or your faggoty brand of body wash anyway—*Jesus*, what man uses *strawberry* body wash?!" "What man takes a *bath* instead of a shower?" "Did you really go to Jay and Brock to talk shit about me instead of talking to me to my face?" "Well, to be honest, Matt, you're kinda scary to talk to." "And you think Jay and Brock are easier to talk to?" "Yeah. Definitely. They're more like normal-type guys." "You think their company suits you better?" "Honestly, I do." "You wanna know what I think about that?" "What?" he asked. And I braced my hands on my own door frame and kicked that motherfucker's door in. It didn't break all in once piece. I had to keep kicking it and kicking it and beating it with my hands and once Mike called me a "Psychopath!" I started beating his door in with my head. "Like that??!! Is that what you think a psychopath does, you stupid faggot!!??" He collected his cigs and his favorite baseball cap—Oakland A's maybe..I don't know..I don't even know what sport that is..or if it's really a team—but he snugly put on this cap that made him feel like he was some kind of baller, some sports-related character that he idolized in his simple fucking brain. He left and slammed the door *so hard* that the apartment number (16) *fell off the door*—previously it had been nailed in place but Michael slammed the door so hard that the nails came out of the wood. - - - - As for me, I beat that faggot's bedroom door into firewood—just splinters and hardware. Then I got incredibly drunk and started texting Mike to *watch himself* and maybe *don't come home tonight* and then I tried to get under his skin reminding him that he used to sleep on the same mattress with his friend Mario when they were growing up shooting meth together, so I texted Mike and called him a *faggot* and said *it's ok that you're gay, Mike, you don't have to hide it*, and then I remembered how he had shown me *Brokeback Mountain* and instead of him sitting in the chair and me sitting on the beanbag, we had both sat on the couch and talked intimately about the movie afterward. I wasn't sure if he was making a pass at me and in real life—in my real mind—I didn't give a shit if Mike was was gay or straight or bi. But that night I was pulling out the stops to try and get under that motherfuckers's skin for talking shit about me behind my back. I'll admit I'm a crazy motherfucker, but I do have rules for friendships and loyalty is rule number one. The fucker was *poisoning* Brock and Jay against me with lies! Now, granted, Jay is just a two-faced movie lover who fucks sixteen-year-old virgins for the same reason he fucks fifty-year-old *former* Victoria's Secret models—the status. I have just as much estimation of Jay as I do of a tadpole randomly picked from any fishing pond in North America. I mean the guy pronounces "Orangina" not as *orangEEna*, the correct way of saying it, but purposely as *oranJIna*, because it rhymes with *vaGIna*—then he shrugs his shoulders, squints his eyes, and giggles like a little child. I struggle for the footing I would need to respect a guy like that. And Brock—who fucking cares. But I did care what Mike thought of me, and he had let me know in a series of recent arguments that he thought his cinematography career was advancing in such a way that he had lapped me. *He* was the artist now and I was a no-talent piece of *shit*. *Of course* your film career is going well, Mike—your daddy's rich and your uncle is Jerry Bruckheimer. Oh and news flash: I'm the *only* one, out of *all* your LA friends, who didn't give a *shit* who your uncle was. You think Jay "Orangina" Cheramie would be hanging around you if your uncle wasn't Jerry Bruckheimer? Wake the fuck up. I suppose my texts must have gotten violent. I got a call from my friend Ashley. "Want me to come pick you up?" "No, I'm watching the Lakers. Lamar Odom is a genius." "You can watch the Lakers at *our* house," Ashley sing-songs. "I'm good." "Actually, I'm going to come pick you up. Mike is scared to come home." "Tell him to come home! I have lots to say to that motherfucker!!" "Are you drinking? That's a stupid question. Of course you're drinking. Look, I'm picking you up. The Lakers will be waiting for you at our house." "Ok." "I'll be there in fifteen minutes." In the time it took Ashley to get to me and Mike's apartment, I managed to unplug all the cords from the PlayStation, all the TVs, the refrigerator, microwave, and any lamps Mike might want to use. Then I went into Mike's bedroom (this is how drunk I was) and I stood on his bed and pissed all over his comforter, his pillows, his clothes, everything. Sometimes I lose control. I do crazy things. I hate myself for them afterwards. Usually other people forgive me—but usually I don't forgive myself. I live with the knowledge that I'm intolerable as a friend, a lover, an employee. What can I say? I'm fucking crazy. Nobody wants to deal with that. Even me. I don't want to live like this. I have suicidal-level self-hatred very, very often. I should probably be in a secure wing of some hospital to protect me from myself. But there are no laptops in a psych ward, no internet, no cell phones. And there are a handful of people out here who still put up with me. They say they love me, they say they always will. But I don't believe them. I can't—my illness tells me they're lying, that they're not real people, that they're stand-ins, actors playing roles. My doctor isn't really my doctor—she's just *playing the role* of my doctor. I'm not really her patient—I'm just *playing the role* of her patient. My mother isn't really my mother..she doesn't really love me..she's just appeasing me, waiting around until I die. Then she'll go off to play the role of mother in someone else's life. ### 215 Then one day I was talking with my mom, and I don't know but something in the conversation just clicked me into place. It was very simple. I said: *You know, I've been locked into this humiliator-humiliated pattern for so long, but I'm on a new kick now—I don't want to hurt people.* It might be as simple as age, but there comes a time where a lot of people *stop fighting*—*in a good way*. It doesn't mean I don't have things I'm working on with great passion. It doesn't mean I'm resigned to death. It means that certain arguments that I would have gotten into when I was younger, I don't get into now. Because I don't want to, I don't have to, and because they don't serve me. When people fight me, I don't have to fight them—and I don't anymore, ever. I just don't do that type of interaction. I do other things instead =) So there's a new game I've learned to play: it's called *do nothing*. Let the other person spin their wheels, wear themselves out, talk to someone else other than me. Or, there's this game I like called *flow*. It very literally is the opposite of fight. But none of that is the point. What clicked in that conversation with my mom—and I cried when I told her what I was realizing about myself in that moment—is that I'm putting down the humiliator role forever. With everyone. I'm never going to do that again. That's just half of it, though. The reason I'm putting down humiliation is that I am learning compassion (for everyone) and once I get that, of course I don't want to hurt or humiliate everyone. It is obvious to me now in a way that it wasn't long ago, that we are all one organism—the whole universe, the Everything, god, whatever you call it, it's all one living thing—and to hurt part of it hurts all of it and to heal part of it heals all of it. I don't want to hate anymore. I don't want to humiliate. I want to heal and I want to build. And I think of some of the people who do that so well, people I have known. Like Mike's and my sad comedy, some of the most insidiously powerful healers I have come across are also the people feeling the most hurt. Role-playing games get this right: the black mage deals the most damage, but has the least defense. The white mage heals her companions, but takes the most hate from the monster you're fighting. My friend Rebecca was a white mage. She took so much heat that she died before her twenty-first birthday—but before that she healed people. She healed strangers. She healed me. Words and actions she took in this life guide me to this day, so much so that in a very real sense she lives within me. I can be that black mage and I can be that white mage. I can destroy—good god, can I destroy. But that's me on a bad day, the me who no reasonable person would fight because reasonable people perceive themselves as *having something to lose* whereas (on a bad day) I care so little about myself that *I'll kill us both* just to destroy you—I count that as winning. (I'm in a psych ward for trying to kill myself, remember?) But that's not all of who I am. When someone I love is doing something hard, like raising a child or writing a book, I have another role, other than destruction, that I play so well and so naturally and that is so *satisfying* to me that I can't ignore it. In fact I want to water it, help it grow new pathways in my brain. This is the part where I start crying. Because this new role, or at least this underdeveloped role, is actually built into my core as deeply as the role of humiliator. I'm not sure I can say where it came from, except to guess that it came from my mom (and maybe a little bit from my dad when we were really young). But remember in the beginning when I told you that Joanne and I think that we had the perfect upbringing to become artist—one parent who disapproves of everything you do, no matter what you do, and one parent who would approve of anything we did, no matter what it was. I'm not trying to say my mom is all good and my dad is all bad—obviously life is not that simple. Both of my parents ignored us more than I think they should—and they still do. But opposite my dad's chronic pattern of humiliation, passed down to him by his sisters, his parents, who knows who..opposite that pattern was another pattern, which my mother exemplifies, which Rebecca exemplifies, which my massage therapist Libby exemplifies, and the reason I like these women, the root reason, the reason at the core, is that they're playing out a role that *I* want to play, intentionally, in my life. It is the opposite of humiliator—and that's why it's so fucking powerful to me. The humiliator makes you feel bad about yourself—I want to make you feel good about yourself. The humiliator rubs your face in everything you did wrong—I want to raise your face to show you everything you do well. The humiliator wants you to lose—I want you to win. And so I am intentionally trading humiliator in..for cheerleader. That's right, I'm hanging up the whip and picking up a pair of pompoms. It's really quite natural for me—I've been doing it all along. I encourage my sisters. I encourage my mom. I encourage all writers, everywhere, because I feel their task so deeply. So my white mage has been here all along—he's just been playing second fiddle to my black mage who thought winning was impossible and blowing everything up (including myself) was a decent alternative. I'm not doing that anymore—I can't. I've realized how *bad* it was making me feel, and how guilty, and how angry, and I have realized that I cannot live with anger, because anger makes me want to kill myself..and for me, killing myself isn't a fantasy..it's something where thoughts turn into actions and actions, if I go there again, may erase me sooner than I and some other people might want me to go. So I can't live in anger! Anger is literally *deadly* for me. I've had to find a new way to live. And step by step I am finding it. I've given an example of an altercation I had ten years ago with my friend Mike in a Home Depot in Los Angeles. Now I'm going to give an example of a conversation I had tonight on Twitter. This is the actual conversation, just copied and pasted from my Twitter window to here: > **MarieLamb:** There was a time when nothing was impossible. > > **Matthew:** I believe that time will come again. > > **MarieLamb:** I hope so dear. It seems so difficult now, if not impossible :/ > > **Matthew:** Yes, I know that feeling which is why your Tweet resonated so perfectly with me. You said "hope"—I think that's the key. > > **MarieLamb:** Hope, yes. > > **Matthew:** Keep your hope like the spark of the universe the Childlike Empress holds in the NeverEnding Story..nothing is lost. > > **MarieLamb:** This was so beautiful. Thank you. > > **Matthew:** You're welcome. *A deep bow to you* =) \<3 > > **MarieLamb:** Same here. That's me acting as a cheerleader. I'm playing a new role now. I can't cheerlead everyone—it's not appropriate. I still have to deal with people who are actively trying to hurt me, but now I "turn to the side," as Mamet's character says in *Redbelt*. "Everything has a force. Embrace it or deflect it..why oppose it?" I used to oppose it. Now I deflect it—I turn to the side. I'm doing this for myself—because of how it makes me feel. One of the wisest people I've ever met said of herself, "The reason I feel this way right now is because I want to feel this way." I don't think that's literally true for everyone at all times—bipolar disorder, for example, changes your brain at such a basic level that sometimes your thoughts and feelings are absolutely out of your control—but I think what she said contains a profound truth. There is a sense in which my early experiences with my dad gave me a deep need not to be humiliated—and my solution was to become the humiliator. I needed—I *wanted*—to feel the power side of the humiliator-humiliated relationship pattern. Now that need has expired, and I want to feel something new. I told Joanne I had to retire the righteous smackdown. "Really?" she said. "Yeah, I'm working on being less angry." She said she respects any decision I make. And one day as I'm telling Leona about my manic symptoms, ideas of reference (over a breakfast casserole coincidence) she says it's funny, because she's never experienced anything like that. Maybe I'm wrong about her automatic diagnosis of bipolar due to elevated mood on antidepressants—like my doctor says, my sensing organ is broken. Who am I to diagnose my sister? Or maybe she has mood disturbances without psychosis. Or maybe I shouldn't be worried about it—that's her, I'm me, I gotta let her do her thing and focus on my own life. - - - - Text to Mom: > **ME:** I wanted to tell you that I had an unusually good day yesterday, psychologically. Some evidence: I spoke with Leona on the phone without using my earbuds and didn't even notice we had talked for 55 minutes before Leona pointed out that we had gone over my usual half an hour limit..I didn't feel tired or drained by the conversation as I lately typically have by long phone conversations. Also I took a couple of breaks because I was feeling happy with where my book is going, laid down for a while without sleeping or working, then later watched part of Frozen..it's been a while since I did that. And this morning when I think about calling to get more tetrabenazine and more Lexapro, I don't feel overwhelmed, I feel capable. Maybe the rests were why I felt good. Maybe the Earthing. Maybe you being back. I'm not sure. But I wanted to file a special report with you on How Things Are Going For Me, just so you'd know. - - - - About half the time I still don't believe I have this disease. I asked my new doctor if maybe when he did the brain scan it wouldn't show that extra activity in the frontal lobe and we would know I'm not bipolar. And my doctor was like, "Oh, you're bipolar!" I'm always looking for a different diagnosis. But I never get one. And then eventually I did, but it's not what I expect. I was always looking for a diagnosis that's *not bipolar*—that I don't have bipolar disorder, that I'm well. Instead, with the new DSM and a longer history of psychiatric observation, I get the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder—bipolar-type schizoaffective to be precise—it should be clear from your reading of previous sections that this means you show signs of bipolar I disorder *and* schizophrenia. My diagnosis had changed again, from bipolar II to bipolar I to something even scarier. Be careful what you wish for. ### 216 I am worried about antipsychotics worsening my TD. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea, Doctor H, Sharon > > **Subject:** medicine interaction question > > My new psychiatrist, Dr. O ([phone number](#)), whose email address I do not have, prescribed me 40 mg Latuda daily with dinner as I noted in a previous email. > > When entering Latuda into my medicine app (Mango Health) this morning, the app provided a severe interaction warning between Latuda and Xenazine, which as you know I take 12.5 mg of 3x daily. In brief, it says Xenazine can increase Latuda's TD side effect. > > I trust my doctors and take medicine as prescribed, but I feel in this case I need to ask you all to give a second look at this decision—everyone together. As you know, I have suffered from TD for two years now, caused by taking the antipsychotic Risperdal, and this has had a major effect on my life: I can't drive, which affects my ability to attend support groups, social events, even medical and therapeutic appointments. It affects my mother since she drives me when I do go places. Also, the appearance of TD is an impediment to social relationships, which is of very high cost to my life. > > Antipsychotics work well for me in terms of creating a more solid conscious experience. But the cost of years of constant uncontrollable clenching movements and the resulting pain is too high—not worth the benefit, from my point of view. > > I will continue taking all medicines as prescribed by my care team, but I think I would be remiss if I didn't ask you all to consider and discuss the trade offs of this one with me. > > Thank you, > > Matthew Temple > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea, Doctor H, Sharon > > **Subject:** medicine interaction question > > Also, regarding Xenazine, the Louisiana neurologist who prescribed it indicated that it would have a major effect of lessening my TD symptoms, and this has not been the case (at all). This raises a number of questions for me. > > My current plan is to find a local neurologist to discuss the Xenazine plan with. The medicine is expensive and if it's not helping, I'd rather discontinue it secondarily for cost reasons but primarily to reduce the complexity of the psychiatric medicine effects and interactions in my brain. > > I'm planning to look for a neurologist. Does that sound like a good plan to you? I am trying to rely on you all more as I become more aware that I don't know when my judgement is sound and when it is not. > > Please advise, > > Matthew Temple My therapist, my doctor, no one responded to this, me raising a concern about a possibly severe interaction between two of my medications. ### 217 And once my mania started to die down, my mom hit me with a new piece of information. "I need you to find a new place to live.." Assisted living? Group home? None of us knows but it becomes important to get me out of the apartment shared with my mother because she can't be my primary caretaker, can't stomach watching me deteriorate, is interrupted in her job functions by driving me to the doctor, etcete*fucking*ra. > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > **Cc:** Lea > > **Subject:** Very worried about this plan > > Will there be a pharmacy within walking distance? If I'm still dependent on Mom to get to my doctor, then why live in Nashville at all? Better for me to just move on my own to a pedestrian-friendly city and get doctors within walking distance. This just does not seem completely thought out to me. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > **Cc:** Lea > > **Subject:** Very worried about this plan > > For now I'm trusting you and, at 37, I'm doing what you say—so please don't call the police or anything—I'm just raising some concerns. If this move means I'm unable to get my medicine, then there's no point, as without it I can't operate at all. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea, Sharon > > **Subject:** Very worried about this plan > > I'm at my most optimistic before noon..I should leave questions like these to the morning. But as I read over the actual concerns expressed in my previous quick notes, I believe they're valid. I'm not going to live in fear, so I'll stick with the plan you all have developed, but I think the question of how/if I'm going to be able to get around is a relevant one. I will live this one day at a time, figure it out one day at a time, but if I have to switch doctors and psychiatrists to be closer to this "group home," that's another set of changes, in addition to having to move again so soon, that is intrinsically stressful. Deal-with-able, but intrinsically stressful nonetheless. No doubt any mentally well person will think I'm worrying too much—and perhaps I am. But for me, if this move to a group home or monitored apartment or whatever leaves me *more* isolated, I think *for me* it will not have been an improvement. I trust you two women, older, wiser than me, and I'm going along with your plan because I believe you have my best interests at heart and better vantage points from which to see my problems (which is difficult to admit) but I am asking you to see that this is something I have never done before and I am having some fear reaction to it. What if Mom, who is mobile under her own power, moves out of Nashville for another church somewhere else? Then I'll be living in a city with no local family supports. I know I'd survive, I might even thrive, but it's not a city our family is committed to as strongly as we are Portland. I'm not so bad at looking ahead to what might be happening in the future—I've been applying to low-income housing in Brattleboro, Vermont as early as a few weeks ago, knowing this shift was likely, and what seems like it has a great chance of happening is that after this church, Mom will go to Portland, but due to the nature of group homes, I won't be able to just pick up and go. I might be able to find a similar situation there or I might not. Or maybe it would be better for me not to live in the same city as the majority of my family. I don't know. I know I'm jumping ahead, worrying about and trying to plan tomorrow, which makes no sense. I'll try to stop that here, but will you please take into account, with me, as we move forward day to day, my specific concerns about transportation, access to a pharmacy, and whether I'd have to switch doctors/therapist as part of this move to a group home or monitored apartment? > > Thanks, > > Matthew > > ---- > > **From:** Sharon > **To:** Matthew > **Cc:** Lea > > **Subject:** Very worried about this plan > > You raise very valid concerns, and those concerns surely need to be addressed as plans are made. > > What I have in mind for you is a long-term sustainable living arrangement that meets as many of your needs, and satisfies as many of your desires, as possible. > > You are right to think beyond me being in Nashville. My contract is for 2 years. It may go longer, and it's possible it could end sooner. It *is* certain that I will be moving again. How often, and to where, is unknown. Even more uncertain is whether that next place will be good for your life, and if the move itself would hurt you. > > (That said, I do like Nashville and the church I'm serving. If it works out for me to stay here for a while, I would be happy with that. If it works out that you and I are in the same city, I will be delighted! If it works out that you are somewhere else. we will stay connected in every possible way.) > > I have thought that I would end up in Portland at some point, but I don't really know when or if that will actually happen. Leona & James are most likely going to stay there. Long-term family support will come from those who are in your generation, or younger. > > My suggestion would be to think in terms of making one move to where *you* see yourself for the long term—either in Nashville or to your more ideal setting—and putting everything in place there. > > Would it be good to put your concerns in the form of a list of wants and needs that can be a guiding reference? > > Love, > > MOM > > ---- > > **From:** Lea > **To:** Sharon, Matthew > > **Subject:** Very worried about this plan > > Yes all are very good points. Thank you Sharon for your input very well said. To my knowledge with group homes, unless things have changed, they are not prisons. So you have a choice to end your contract and move. These are all questions though to ask when you interview with the group home people when you decide where you want to live. And if you read all the links on the "about them" sections from the link I sent you, it clearly states they have transportation to and from doctors appointments. So, you will get your medication. I don't know about Portland, but from my understanding Oregon, especially the Portland area, is more advanced than Tennessee, so I would gather they would have more than ample resources. :) > > As far as changing providers. More than likely you will have to change your PCP and psychiatrist. You pay me out of pocket now, so that's not a change but your frequency wouldn't be as much the more settled. Also some group homes have counselors already so you may get the services already there. If decide to stay ask your psychiatrist if he takes Tenncare, but if you move out of state, that would be a change anyway and a given adjustment. I hope this helps and eases some fears. > > ---- > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Lea, Sharon > > **Subject:** Very worried about this plan > > It does help, yes. Thank you. I'll try to keep my potential fears as questions and not worry about the future. That's hard, but possible. Thank you both, > > Matthew > > —— > > **From:** Matthew > **To:** Sharon > > **Cc:** Lea > > > My suggestion would be to think in terms of making one move to where you see yourself for the long term—either in Nashville or to your more ideal setting—and putting everything in place there.* > > With you not committed to staying in Nashville, no offense to Nashville, but the only reason I came to Nashville was to be with you. So Nashville is a city that I know nothing about where at some point I will have *no* family. I like it here so far, but TBQH me being on my own again, in some city where I have no family, seems like a very bad idea. I love Brattleboro, Vermont, but feeling like I was "out there" with no family "support" is part of why I felt so alone preceding my suicide attempt. Ditto LA—had lots of fun but felt very alone. > > My ideal city is Tucson but since I don't have family there that's probably not the best idea—though I do have tons of NA people there who would love to see me back and support me. And Tucson is the right size city for me to make friends in. I always make friends when I'm there. Back on an antipsychotic, I could probably ride a bike soon—making all of Tucson accessible. Rent is cheap. The NA community is *sublime*—tons of meetings, very spiritual. I love the weather. Etc Etc. I see myself there eventually. Part of me thinks I should just move there, live on my own, find doctors, use NA as support, and live in a city and geography and climate that really suits me. There's a hostel where I could stay while looking for a place. I know it well. A lot of me wants to do this. > > I guess we're all thinking Portland is the best bet for family "supports". I'm not sure how supportive Leona and James have energy to be..to Joanne..to me..to anyone..you know? They love us, but frankly "supportive" is not how I would describe the two of them. Like most of our family, they/we are very self-absorbed and don't even hear each other when the other one is talking half the time. But for family *company*, I think Portland is the best bet. *[I am a little snit.]* > > We have all discussed how it adds some meaning to my life to function as an uncle—that is truly joyful for me and I plan to do my part to be loving towards those kids and parents and my sister for the rest of my life, wherever we all are. But that's a plus for Portland. > > Cousin Kristi is in Portland. Kristi is a writer, we talk about writing a lot. Kristi is also the only living family member I know who could probably drink me under the table. (Not literally, as she weighs 90 lbs, but you get my point.) I love relating to Kristi at a distance. I believe I have had (with a light touch) some positive effect on her lessening her drinking (though that's of course not my primary focus). I do not think Kristi is a significant threat to my sobriety, but I think we need to meet in public or always have a third non-drinker around. Specifically, if Evan (her fiancé) goes away on business, the answer to an invitation to spend time just me and Kristi (whether out and about or at their house) needs to be a strict *no*. If I follow that rule, I don't expect Kristi's drinking will be anywhere near sufficient to affect a relapse for me. When I lived in Portland before, she was drinking, I was sober, we hung out in coffeehouses (with her drunk) and it was not a problem. > > My main trigger to drink is not other people drinking—though if they're close friends or family *and true alcoholics*, that's an extremely dangerous situation for me. My main trigger to drink is my housing situation being in jeopardy. We have the fortune to be observing me under this condition right now. Not tonight, but the previous two nights, I had cravings to drink as a reaction to my stress about not knowing where I'll be living soon, and I had the means to cab it to a store and buy alcohol, but very quickly decided not to because I know that is not going to help my situation—I know it would make it worse. So, as always I am on the just-for-today sobriety program and as such will not make any promises about what I'm going to do tomorrow, but I have recently survived two nights of the first real alcohol (drug) cravings I've felt during this one-year, four-month period of cleanliness and sobriety. Tonight the same conditions for stress exist, and I have decided not to consider those conditions a problem, and I have no urge to drink (drug). > > Everyone I've ever met (except me) thinks Portland is the bee's knees. I really don't think it's that special—it's hipster and pretentious and expensive and very spread out. It's touted as bicycle friendly yet it's very dangerous to ride your bike there (I know from experience). But some of the most important people in my life are there right now—the greatest concentration of family is there, including Baton Rouge, as far as I know—so my thinking mind meekly gives a vote for Portland as the best location for me, though I smh at leaving Nashville so quickly, and wonder why I don't just thank you all for your offers of help and move back to Tucson. > > > Would it be good to put your concerns in the form of a list of wants and needs that can be a guiding reference? > > Sure. I'm going to do this very quickly and put this email thread out of my head for a while because while these are important things for us all to figure out, I'm finding that having an email thread with the words "very worried" in my inbox is not helping me to create the kind of emotion I want to be feeling on a moment-to-moment basis! (My bad!) > > This is what I'm looking for, based on our talks: I want to feel physically safe with the neighborhood and my fellow residents. I've lived in some tough neighborhoods so you'll find I'm not a finicky customer in this department. I want my things to be safe. I have one important possession: my laptop. That's what I use to write. I absolutely have to live in a place where every time I go home, my laptop is still there. I have to have a way to get to a PCP, therapist, psychiatrist, and neurologist. It can't be a ridiculous amount of travel time. I'm not going to take a one-hour bus ride to get to a ten-minute psychiatrist's appointment. This might sound picky but I just need my time to be well spent, not wasted. If this is not possible in Nashville then maybe we do need to look at other cities. Idk. Maybe these days I can find a psychiatrist online, who meets over video chat? That might open up our options. It can't be in the middle of nowhere. It needs to be in a walkable neighborhood or city center. It has to have internet. I'm a writer, a thinker. I need internet in order to be a productive member of society. Perhaps this is obvious, but I want either a support person on site or a help number I can call—otherwise what's the point of me living in this type of arrangement? The reason we're doing this is I need more supervision, right? (Is that right? Is that the reason we are doing this? Can you two confirm this for me?) So then I guess there needs to be this supervision or else we are doing something that makes no sense. > That's it. I'm flexible in every other way. I'll even flex on the things above if it helps solve whatever problem we are trying to solve—please be very honest with me: what problem are we trying to solve?. I am a trooper. I'm adaptable. I'm long-winded. ;-) > > Matthew ### 218 Paranoia: And perhaps, when Mom finally tells me we need to have a plan for me to live somewhere else, and she and I and Lea discuss it, I mention that I already applied for low-income housing in Vermont three weeks ago—the situation was obvious to me *waaay* before it "happened"..but it had happened for me a long time ago. Mom was waiting for me to do something really crazy so she could blame the move-out on me. I waited her out—I didn't do anything really crazy. I was never deemed a danger to myself or others. And once I got the right medicine in me, I calmed down. It was two weeks later that she told me she wanted me to find another place to live. She still blamed it on me and my bipolar, even though bipolar episodes are rare and during this one, I never even raised my voice at her—the one who suffered most was *me*. My mother is the most intuitive person I know. But I am my mother's son. And in business situations, and in relationships, and even between me and her, I know the score long before anyone ever puts any words on the table. The trick is to say nothing about what you know—if you say what's going to happen in the future and you turn out to be right, people don't interpret that as *predicting* the future..they interpret it as *you made this happen. You wanted this to happen three weeks ago and you did whatever actions were necessary to make it happen*—they even accuse you of doing it subconsciously. So you have to wait till *after* the thing has happened, then take out your sealed envelope containing your prediction—your letter from the Brattleboro, Vermont Department of Housing, for example, showing that you already started what they're suggesting we start doing tomorrow..three weeks ago. Or better yet, never say a word. I can't predict the future. But an event extends beyond the borders we normally delineate it with. You know how like birds and deer and stuff will run out of a forest before there's a fire, or how animals act differently before a storm or volcano? That's not them predicting the future—they are part of the edges of the event. When the birds start leaving the forest, even before there's a single flame, *that's* part of the forest fire. I can feel things like that so intuitively—my intuition is built so strong—that I can tell what people are planning to do before *they* know what they're planning to do. On my Myers-Briggs profile, which is ENFP, every letter is close to the center. So for my E, I'm not a strong extrovert. I'm an extrovert who's close to the line—not that far from being an introvert. Three of my letters are like that. I always test as an ENFP—have every single time I've taken the test. But one of my letters—the N (iNtuition)—is not near the center, it's not near the line. My N is so far N it can't get any farther away from the opposite end of the spectrum: S (or Sensing). You could say that S's like details and N's look at the forest instead of the trees. Well, I see the details. Oh yeah. You see, I don't believe that intuition is mystical magical mumbo jumbo. I believe it's our short name for someone who takes in so many details and can process so much more data that the average person, that they know something in a way that *seems* mystical to those who can't process at that level. Intuition isn't opaque to me—it's built on details. It's a brain that can integrate so many data streams at once that it starts to know things that it doesn't know how it knows. But that doesn't mean they have ESP. It means they crunch more numbers than anybody else—automatically—that when someone tells me that she thinks I need to find a place to live that isn't here, I was already on the internet looking at affordable housing and group homes twenty-one days ago. I didn't read your mind—I read the details of our interaction that you weren't even aware were there. ### 219 I knew something was missing in me, for the longest time. And I knew what it was, too—it was compassion. And I remembered that sometime while I was in Brattleboro, I had figured out a way for me to feel compassion—some thought, some cognitive method, that would enable to me to feel compassion for everyone in the world, from my closest lover to my uncle Perish. But I had forgotten. How could I have forgotten something so important? And I felt, in these years in between, that since I had forgotten my *method* for feeling compassion, that I had lost my *ability* to feel compassion—and that might have been true. Compassion is such an attractive trait to me. I believe compassion has a magnifying resonance. It was lost to me, though, I forgot how to feel it—but then I remembered. Somewhere in a Tweet, last August: > When I think, everyone is doing the best they can do, that is one way that I start to feel compassion. And do you believe I forgot it again? This time two months went by and I was without my fundamental reason for compassion and my belief that I could feel and act compassionately. The next time I remembered it, I wrote a post. It was crucial to me. I couldn't afford to forget it again, so I wrote it down in a way that I would never forget. > The only thing I know about compassion > > I'm not a mean person—never have been. Most people probably think I already *am* a compassionate person. I don't usually do things to hurt people—sometimes I strike back when someone hurts me..I'm doing that less and less. So when I say I only know one thing about compassion, I don't mean I was the kid on the playground picking fights. I wasn't. In fact my mom likes to tell a story where she goes to pick me up from kindergarten and my teacher runs up to my mom and says, "Guess what! You won't believe it! I had to make Matthew sit on the sidewalk for a time out because he pushed someone!!" My kindergarten teacher was glowing because I was always so well behaved—like *perfectly* well behaved—that she considered me pushing another student a sign of growth, somehow, like I was getting outside of my shell. > > I don't remember this event at all. The details may be inaccurate. I might have *said something mean* instead of *pushing someone*—who knows. My mom and I have always considered my teacher's framing of the incident to be..odd. > > And there are ways in which my actions are undeniably compassionate. I am an empathetic person—of course I make a *faux pas* from time to time, but I've never worried that I might fundamentally lack empathy. I naturally feel other people's feelings and care about them—deeply—sometimes so much that I take on their feelings as my own. I'm learning to do that less as well. > > But there's a difference between *empathy* and *compassion*. > > Empathy, accrding to WIkipedia is the "capacity to understand another person's point of view". > > Compassion is much more. > > The *New Oxford American Dictionary* says compassion is "sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others". Etymologically, that same dictionary says that compassion comes from the Latin word "compati" which means "suffer with". > > I pretty much hate that definition of compassion because it includes the word *pity* and I don't ever want to be on either side of that concept. Pitying someone else implies superiority—if I pity your life, it implies my life is better than yours. Who am I to pity you? And I don't want *your* pity, because it implies that my life would be better if it didn't contain the particular sufferings that I endure. Maybe I have enough love and pride for my life that I don't think it's logical for anyone to pity me. I wouldn't trade my life for another's—so I must not think my life is worse than any other's, or that any other's life is better than mine. To me, pity is an insult—and it's an insult that doesn't make any logical sense because you can't trade lives with another. > > Wiktionary says compassion is a "deep awareness of the suffering of another, coupled with the wish to relieve it". I like that definition more. But it doesn't include a couple of aspects that I consider essential to compassion. > > It doesn't say that compassion is *love*, which my vague mental definition of compassion has always encompassed. If you have compassion for someone, don't you *love* them too? I think you do. > > My vague mental definition of compassion has also always included the concept of *universality*—I think that compassion is a quality of the beholder that necessarily applies to all people, all beings, all things..*everything* the beholder interacts with..everything the beholder is aware of. How can you be compassionate toward one person but not toward another? I think if my so-called compassion only applies to some, then I'm not really a fully compassionate person. > > And that last, self-imposed requirement in my own definition of compassion has led me to believe that I lacked compassion, that my selective compassion didn't fulfill my own definition of compassion, and that therefore I was not capable of compassion as I defined the term. > > That was a problem for me. > > I don't like to feel hate—me hating someone else. It doesn't take much experience as a human being to learn that when you hate someone else, you're the one that hate is tearing down. Hate can hurt the other person—but it always hurts you more. > > I found myself, for so long, loving some and hating others. Having compassion for some but not for others. And I didn't see a way out of this because the people I hated (or didn't like) were people who were—either in friendships or coworker situations, or family relationships—these people I hated were people who were treating me or my other friends disrespectfully and disloyally; they were people who were afraid that my competency would make them look bad to the boss, and who *actively worked against me* to discount my contributions to the companies I worked for; they were family members who because of their own mental illness were *fucking with my psyche* from the moment I was born. > > I felt that, by my universality requirement for compassion, I, in order to be fully compassionate, had to love these people instead of hate them. And I didn't know how I could authentically love someone who (to me) seemed unquestionably not to have my best interests at heart. > > My therapists encouraged me to drop the universality condition of my definition of compassion. They said I did not have to love everyone, especially people who were hurting me, that in fact the best thing to do was to exit those people from my life as soon as possible and never look back. > > But I don't always do what my therapists tell me. I take from them the wisdom that I like and I use my own devices to come up with my own ways to live my life. Hate carries weight. And for me, even my lack of universal compassion carried weight. I like the way love feels. I spend as much time around people I love and who love me back because, basically, I think that's the point of life—to love. I want to have the strength (or whatever is necessary) to feel compassion for everyone I've met, even the backstabbing friends and the corrupt bosses and the abusive father. Without that universal compassion, even if I'm not actively hating my corrupt boss, for example, there is still the weight of not being able to feel *love* for him. That might sound crazy, but it's true for me. I know I can't and won't connect with and deeply love everyone I meet, but when I sit in a conference room with someone who is actively fucking me over, I might not feel hate but I certainly don't feel love and that lack of love taxes me. > > This is why my therapists suggested exiting all haters from my life and never looking back. That works for some people—I did that with my dad and it has been one of the most surprising and magical actions I have ever taken. I released myself from the internalized, culturally inspired requirement that I was obligated to be in a relationship with my dad. It took years of negotiating with myself and giving my dad chances to step up and show some love. To stop trying went against my instinct—but my instinct was wrong. When I try in vain to relate to a dad who, by his actions, clearly doesn't want to relate to me, it creates emotional turmoil. When I filter his email and refrain from contacting him or giving him much thought, it creates emotional peace. So there's a case where I could do what my therapists suggested and exit a hurtful person from my life—and it worked like a charm. > > But that's harder to do with other people—like your boss, when you need the job. The guy is going to be in my face every day, working against me because he perceives me as a threat to his position and his fragile ego. I don't want to spend the years I work at that company feeling low-level hatred toward someone I work closely with, even though maybe it's justified 'cause he's hurting me. > > I'm not looking to become Jesus. I'm not looking to become Mother Teresa either. I'm also not looking to become Gandhi. But I do want their compassion. Not to save the world, or even part of it—as each of them did—but to save myself from the burden of hate, low-level hate, dislike, or anything of the sort. > > It's about the experience *I* want to have, each day that I live this life. I want to feel amiability, like, love, companionship—all of those with some people—and I want to feel universal, loving compassion for everyone who takes up space in my mind. > > Yes, that is what I want—and nothing less. > > Now let me humbly refer you to the title of this post, which is "The only thing I know about compassion". > > I only know one thing about compassion. > > I struggled for years to figure out what was missing in me that made it so I did not or could not feel this universal, loving compassion for everyone I knew. > > One thing I knew, that became crystal clear in therapy, is that I didn't have compassion for myself. And, from there, it didn't take any therapist to tell me that until I found a way to feel compassion for myself, I would be unable to feel it for anyone else. > > Still I had the same problem, just now aimed at me instead of others: What qualities are lacking in me that make me not feel compassion for myself?—that in fact make me not only often dislike myself but sometimes hate myself. I looked at the things I had done, focusing mostly on the selfish, ignorant, careless, destructive things, and I hated myself because I imagined *I could have done better* and yet *I hadn't*. I saw myself as a creature of wasted potential, someone who had been *gifted* extraordinarily—by genetics or upbringing or god or however you think that happens—and who had wasted those gifts and become nothing. That was my evaluation. Most people who knew me—friends, coworkers, and family—had a higher estimation of me than I did. I have hated myself my whole life and most of the time I didn't even know why. > > (That was part one—*the problem*. Stick with me. Next is part two—*a solution*:) Better stick to a glass of water for this one. Go ahead. I'll wait. ### 220 *[Clears throat]* > To me, one of the greatest pieces of wisdom comes from the sage: Maya Angelou: > > I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better. —Maya_Angelou). > > I'd heard this quote many times, in many forms. And none of those times that I heard it or read it or thought through it did I learn the only thing I know about compassion. But this simple-seeming piece of knowledge seeded itself in my brain and then was activated by other simple phrases that people often speak, and that I often heard, and that I finally listened to. > > People often say, "You did the best you could," to make you feel better after a failure or a loss in a competitive match or at the end of a relationship. When we fuck up, kind people often let us off the hook and say: "Well, she did the best she could." > > I don't remember specifically when this clicked together for me with my search for the feeling of universal, loving compassion, but it finally did. > > If I look at myself, and I say: "I'm doing the best I can" then I have no reason to hate myself. *Everyone* is doing the best they can. People do not say, well, I could do this best action I can think of, or I can do this piece-of-shit action that perversely popped into my head. Maybe a person has an evil set of values, like Hitler—but even Hitler was doing the best that he could. That was just the best that a very, very sick person could do. He was *striving to do the best he could!* > > And so am I. And so are my friends. And so are my coworkers. And so is my dad. And our best sometimes *sucks*. I violate my own morals from time to time, when I am tempted, but I have the choice of holding myself to an impossible standard, or assessing my imperfect self realistically and saying—declaring, admitting—that I am doing the best that I can. How can I hate someone who is doing the best that they can? It would make no sense. The best we can is the best we can—by definition we can do no better. > > Now let me re-evaluate the case of my rotten coworker. He is lying to the boss about my performance, withholding information essential for me to do my job, and generally being a jackass. What I assumed before is that he was *choosing* to fuck with me: that he had two choices: stop feeling threatened by me and function cooperatively as a member of a team, or protect his fragile sense of self by proactively, daily, using any means necessary to make me look bad to the boss. What I assumed was wrong. He didn't have a choice. *He was doing the best he could—like everyone.* > > If I look at it that way, it's no longer rational for me to be mad at him—or anyone. My friends are doing the best they can. My family is doing the best they can. I am doing the best that I can. > > Let's go back to that Wiktionary definition of compassion. It says that compassion is a "deep awareness of the suffering of another, coupled with the wish to relieve it". > > My dad's decision to abandon me psychologically as an adult, his mental sicknesses, his humiliating treatment of me as a child..are the best that he can do. With this new tool of understanding people not as intentionally evil or intentionally boring or intentionally unsatisfying in whatever way, I can feel compassion, in all the senses that I require, even for someone who is actively trying to hurt me. Now, what my therapists said is true, and I'll rephrase it: *If there's a snake in the grass, go play in another yard.* No, I won't allow disrespectful, hurtful people to interact with me. Those people must be kept at a distance, evicted from the apartments of my consciousness, kept in cages, locked in imaginary chests and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. > > But I can feel compassion for them—universal, loving compassion. > > Do I have a "deep awareness of the suffering of" my dad? Yes I do—he wouldn't behave the way he does if he wasn't suffering terribly. Is it "coupled with the wish to relieve [that suffering]"? Absolutely. I have no *capability* to relieve my dad's suffering (or almost anyone's) but I would if I could, and I wish I could. Those two features satisfy Wiktionary's definition of compassion. > > How about my two additional features? > > Love. Do I feel love for my dad? Yes. > > Universality. Can I feel this type of compassion for everyone I meet, regardless of their actions, traits, character, or any aspect of them? Yes, I can. > > And that is all I have to say. That is the only thing I know about compassion: that *everyone is doing the best they can*, and that simple fact is reason enough for everyone to *deserve* compassion, because it paints the picture of a person as someone limited, someone always striving, and someone always falling short of every expectation levied on them, by themself or others. That predicament *invites* empathy from anyone who is capable of feeling it, because we see that *we* are in the same predicament. That Latin root, "compati", meaning "suffer with" starts to make a whole lot of sense. > > And perhaps that is the ultimate root of compassion: seeing that everyone else is in the same mess I'm in..the mess of falling short, the mess of missing the mark..we're all suffering through the same predicament. It's easy to feel compassion for those who heal us and help us. It's easy to feel compassion for the benign and the weak. But it is difficult for the rich to feel compassion for the poor, and it is difficult for the poor to feel compassion for the rich. It tests the limits of human capacity to feel compassion for those who hurt us. But, for me, getting past the illusion that someone has *chosen* to do their worst, and realizing that *everyone is choosing to do their best*, and that everyone falls short of their best *most of the time*—that is the key that is allowing me to set aside all of my anger and all of my hatred for everyone I've ever known, and instead walk a simple path upon which I am learning to feel universal, loving compassion. > > I'm not doing this for anyone else. I'm doing it for me—because it gives me joy. It lightens my load. It's just the new way I *do business*. > > It turns out that I *did* have a lack of compassion. But it wasn't a character flaw. It wasn't a moral failing. I was just missing a simple piece of information, which is that this whole array of behavior, from Gandhi to Hitler to a lion catching an antelope..is just everyone doing the best that they can. ### 221 As they say, *sometimes giving up is essential to carrying on*. I had to give up my idea that people are out to get me in order to carry on just one tiny step closer to compassion. When I flip through my notebooks from Brattleboro, I find all sorts of interesting things. Like this little idea: > power is the method > > by which you rise from the ashes > > and so the only ones who have it > > are those who come from ash Or the idea that instead of being the child of Hannibal Lecter and Björk, I'm what would result if Lindsay Lohan and Bobby Fischer had a baby. I know I wrote that while I was inside the Refuge. Later I would consider that I was the offspring of Buddha and Eminem. On November 9, 2011, I wrote: > I feel better today, and after the meeting with Dr. Meggs just now, than I have in a while. I wonder what we talked about in that meeting! There's a note I guess I took from some class. It talks about *power* versus *control*: > A boat on the ocean has power > > But it is not in control What genius thought of that? There are all sorts of inspirational sayings that I copied from the social workers' door, which was just plastered with the stuff. Even the best of it seems trite to me now. But my own notes still make sense to me, all these years later: > To forget how I remember feeling and feel exactly how I feel now—that is the ticket; that is the joy. Or: > See myself in the purest, greatest, most enlightened, most developed light—see everyone that way. That's what I was writing when I was in the mental institution. Some of the stuff in that notebook is me eternally rehashing my relationship with my dad—a relationship that should be exceedingly clear to me by now, but isn't! This is from November 11: > I'm upset with my family for not being more active with me. I feel like after a suicide attempt, that I need and want more care. Kristi's dad drove across the country to get her, when she was forty years old—and I feel slighted, jilted, that my dad is so hands off. I feel like he doesn't care. Some of what's in that notebook is scary: > WRite A progRam > > thAt reprogrAms my BrAin > > WRite A progrAm that > > reprogrAms my BrAiN > > WRite A progrAm thAt reprogrAms my BrAiN That, written over and over, page after page. My own name, written twenty times in a row, as if I was trying to remind myself of who I was. Maybe this excerpt will give you some idea of mania: > Stressmajor stress of lateAnd cracks at the seams3 days into rising energythat kind of manic LOVE I know so wellcoming from behind my sleep and my eyesand curling my bloodcurdling the blood in my motherfucking veinsAnd maybe getting me mad enough to writewhich should always be done from angerAnd fireAnd a need to destroy It's a crazy notebook. Ideas for a screenplay that is so sick that *no one* would ever produce it. My design for a program that simulated manic depression in four states—the *same* four states that my latest doctor mentioned to me *a week ago* when describing *his* theory of bipolar disorder. The mental health techs, when they saw me working on that notebook, called it my "plans for a nuclear submarine." It has ideas for creating conscious computers, it contains philosophical adages, notes of hope for the future, book ideas, journal entries, fragments of conversation (ME: When I love something, I *love* it—Stripes: I know, I've read your books). There are conversations challenging the devil ("I'm gonna *make* this the greatest thing that ever happened to me. *You're* gonna take me down??? With *what*?"). And some pages just look like the neatest scrawls ever, combined alien script and jibberish. But that's not what I went looking for. I went looking for something very specific. Here it is, near the end of my journal: > reaching, as I've wanted to for a while, some compassionA key thought therein beingeveryone is doing their bestbecause even when people are being vicious or offensive, we are still doing our best—or else we would be doing better—and so everyone deserves compassioneven when—or especially when—we fall shortI'm thankful for the gift of feeling this wayit's good for me I wrote that on my last night at the Brattleboro Refuge—December 14, 2011. Maybe I had to make seven trips into that psych hospital to come out with this one piece of wisdom. I think if that's the only thing I had found in my seven trips, it would have been worth it. *It used to be my job to come to you*—*I needed you more. Now it is your job to come to me.* See? All the way back in 2011, when I was 33 years old, on my 12,389th day of life, I finally figured out for myself that the root of compassion is understanding that everyone is doing their best, that we all fall short of perfection, and that we're all in this together. It took me a billion seconds of living to figure that out. ### 222 Sometimes Mom and I have fights, and I can't tell who's helping who, who needs who more, and I don't want to figure it out. I don't want to deal with the psychology of someone who's endured decades of parental neglect and an abusive husband who just happens to be my dad. I feel, at 38, exactly the way I felt when I was 15—I don't want to be part of this family. We don't love each other—we're just sick. I want to walk away from it all—just disappear into the night. I have enough in my bank account to get a cab to the airport and a flight to Tucson or Brattleboro—two of the only places I *might* be able to live on my own with my disabilities. If I went to Brattleboro, I could go back to the Refuge, tell them I'm suicidal, or maybe create a diabolical asymmetry and kill myself in the same place I tried to kill myself before—the Refuge lawn—but this time I'll succeed. I don't really want to go back to the hospital. But there's a tree there I'd like to kiss before I die. Mom and I argue..even if I say something nice to her she gets mad. Basically if I upset the caretaker/invalid model with anyone, they get upset. Hard to believe that a sick person has something to offer *you* from time to time! But there is one thing I kept from the Refuge that contains a miracle, and I look at it when I feel like I've accomplished nothing. My Refuge crisis plan..I found it while looking for my pill splitter in my moving boxes and I sat down and read it and remembered these feelings and how it was when I first began to feel them. > **What are some affirmations you can use to feel better about yourself and the world.** > > It's important that I'm alive. It's meaningful that I'm alive. I deserve goodness in my life. I deserve a place to live. I deserve to live easily. I deserve to live peacefully. I deserve meaningful work. I deserve to love and be loved. My consciousness, my experience, is valuable and meaningful for its own sake. > > I am amazing. My brow makes little lines. My eyes water. I bite the inside of my lips. Reading this makes me realize that something *has* changed from the night I attempted suicide to now..that night I didn't care about losing the awareness in my head. What awareness I had was all pain and I wanted it to end. And now, most of the time, I carry around with me a delicate bubble of consciousness which I like—actually, *love*—I love being me, I love this incredible experience of being..of watching a movie..of talking to another human..of walking to get the mail. I want it to keep going. I want to see *what happens next* even if it's something I don't like. That's the opposite of being suicidal—not being able to stand being in the current moment or one moment more. Seeing my Refuge Crisis Plan, I realize that somehow, over the last five years, I learned to do the most important thing I had written on that plan: feel that my own consciousness was of value. - - - - I fold the crisis plan gently and put it back in my treasure box. But my good feelings don't last long. No amount of erudition, no body of knowledge, is ever going to change the fact that my mind goes to the highest places imaginable, flies me around, then drops me without warning. > **ME:** I hate myself so much. > > **Mom:** I'm sorry. Is there anything that will help you feel better right now. > > **ME:** Decapitation. > > **Mom:** OK this is concerning me very much. > > **ME:** Why? I'm fine I just need to listen to music and calm down. > > **Mom:** Talking about hurting yourself. Sounds like a good plan. > > **ME:** I wasn't talking about hurting myself! Be accurate. I can't decapitate myself. People are very lazy readers. > > **Mom:** OK. > > **ME:** I'm sorry for concerning you. I forget you might actually care. > > **Mom:** Are you able to do the good things you can for yourself now? > > **ME:** Mom that's so general I can't respond to it but don't worry about me I'm fine. > > **Mom:** OK. After that, to everything I said, no matter what I said, Mom just said, "OK." But you can't blame her, I mean, when I read a couple of things I wrote in that text exchange I come to the quick conclusion that the person called "ME" is off his head and I am not proud to be him. > **ME:** If I was you, I would want to get rid of me too. Why don't you just drop me at a hospital tonight and be done with it? You don't ever have to have me back. > > **Mom:** Because I still think there are better alternatives. > > **ME:** Ok. Well, for me, I don't need to go to the hospital, I just didn't know if we needed to do that for you. I'll leave you alone. I'm sorry. > > **Mom:** OK. > > **ME:** I'm sorry for being so negative the second half of the day. I am truly sorry. I deserve the lowest of the low. You deserve the best of the best. > > **Mom:** I understand. I think you deserve a break. I hope you can relax and rest. > > **ME:** You don't understand. Be well advised of that. You have no idea what is inside my mind. No idea. Never have. Don't expect you to. *[Tough customer]* And while I'm at it, I might as well mark the end one of the closest relationships I have had in this life, that with Joanne, my sister closest in age. Five months ago, when she moved from NYC to Portland, she became unresponsive to texts, emails, phone calls. She responds to Mom and Leona's texts but not mine—Suzy, that stings. One of my favorite people basically cut our ties without ever even telling me why. I text her: > **ME:** Joanne, this is unfortunate, but you have essentially ended our communication since you moved to Portland. This has hurt my feelings very deeply. I wish I knew why. But in lieu of any reaching out or explanation from you (which there has been none) I am concluding our conversation with this message. Part of being a rent-paying tenant with me is regular conversation. When that disappears, then the relationship is over. Goodbye and good luck. ### 223 I take the trash out and see Ida sitting on her porch. We walk for a while. Ida always tries to hide her cigarettes and the fact that she's been smoking. When she sees me coming, she puts out her cigarette and stows it behind her. She thinks she'll corrupt me. I lean over her railing. "My mom and I had a fight last night." "What was you fighting about?" "I don't even know, but before this we didn't fight for a *year*, and I'll tell you, Ida, I was *this* close to waiting till she went to bed, calling a cab to the airport, flying somewhere with a decent mental hospital, and checking myself in." Ida looks, listens, waits. "Ok, you know what, that's not the truth. I never lied to you before and I'm not gonna lie to you now. I wasn't going to check myself into a mental hospital. I was gonna go there and kill myself." I single tear drops from Ida's eye, and I feel really bad I told her. This woman shouldn't have to put up with my shit. She's got enough shit of her own. But Ida nods—she knew I was going to say that. She goes ahead and pulls out her cig and re-lights it. It's too much to handle without a cigarette. She breathes in and her cigarette crackles. She ashes over the railing. "But you didn't do it. You had the *impulse* but *you didn't do it*. That's the important thing." "The only reason I didn't do it is I don't want to screw my mom over financially on this lease." And I think a while, and Ida smokes. "But that's not actually true. I want a *home*. This place—that little room I have—is my home. I don't want to be forced to leave my home just because my mom doesn't like me." "Of *course* she likes you. She's just stressed because of her new job. In fact, you're probably your mother's best friend." I think about how unrealistic my plan is. And some story slips in there about my cousin Kristi ending up at an airport in Nashville with a ticket to Australia. She had a husband. She had a job. She was just going to walk away from it all. I don't even know if this story's true—it's just the one I heard. And while, yes, right now, I have enough money in my account to get me to Tucson or Brattleboro, the only places I think I might be able to live alone, that's not true. Once I got there, my disability isn't enough for me to live alone. With just that income, I'll be living with somebody for the rest of my life. And how would I get to the grocery store? With my clenching, I can't drive a car. I can't even ride a bike. And Brattleboro, oh Brattleboro, I couldn't live there—the sidewalk ice would kill me, I have so little balance. For a second I think of Faith, listening to the ward radio, singing, and I wonder where she is today. "I don't know, Ida, I don't know. I know my mother loves me but I get the feeling at the same time that she *detests* me, that I *disgust* her. We were in the store and I was picking out juice and I looked up and she had this look on her face like *What the hell are you doing?* I don't know if she was upset because I was putting something in the cart that she didn't expect, but she gave me a definite look—a look you don't give to your child. And *I* was paying for the groceries, so what does she care?" "Now hold on Matthew—" "She wants—also—she *wants*, she *needs* for there to be an emotional power difference between us." "She'll always be your mom." "That's exactly what she said. But why does a grown woman *not hug me*, not accept compliments or encouragement from me—*she's* allowed to encourage *me*, but every nice thing I say to *her*, she ignores. Blank face. No response. If I say, *Mom, I need help with my medication*, she jumps to the alarm. If I say, *I'm glad you had a good day today* or *You seem happy*..nothing. She stares at her iPad. Will not respond. It's like she can't handle the fact that *I* could help her just as *she* helps me. I think that's abuse, in a relationship, to hold someone at a distance like that. She's comfortable with being the caretaker of a sick son, but *every offer I make* to do something to help *her*, she ignores, declines, gets offended by—" "Matthew—" "To me it's a world with no conscience, no grit—" "Matthew, stop. You're taking something simple and turning it into something complicated. Your mother loves you, ok—I know that because I've been a mother. She's just *worried* about you." "Well I don't mean to worry her." "But you can't help it. With your condition. Hell, you worry me." I laugh. I learned recently of a suicide, and while we chalk it up to "depression" and wash our hands of it, I find that it's some of our best people who kill themselves, and I feel that that is partially biological, yes, but also partly because of the way the world is..because there isn't room for odd people and sensitive people and beautiful people. I think that we need cures for biological depression, but I also think that it is all of our responsibility to make the world less hostile, and make more room for everybody, psychologically, economically, academically, socially. It is all of our responsibility to do this, so that the world (and life) can be great for all of us, not just some of us. Forgive my typos. It's not that I'm lazy it's just that I'm crying so hard, writing you, that I cannot see the screen. "Did you go to college?" Ida asks me. "Uh..a little," I laugh. "I went to film school." "So you got your education." "I guess. But. My real education is all the stupid things I've ever done." "You a smart man, Matthew." I sit down on the porch chair next to Ida. I think about me. I think about bipolar disorder. I think about Stripes and I imagine her mom killing herself. I imagine Stripes dead somewhere already—! I grip the porch railing and hope that girl is off living the life somewhere: I revise my earlier position..I don't care who's fucking her as long as she's forgettin' about the past and enjoying the *hell* out of this moment. And yes my selfish self reviews every image I can find of her, especially the one of her at the pottery wheel, but I move on. And I think about myself in the back of an ambulance with a significant amount of Vistaril in my system, and my life intentionally threatened by me whether I did it right or not! And I say *Why would I do that?!* I could have lost my life in the back of an ambulance in a tiny town in southern Vermont. And Ida's tiny porch. And Ida'a cigarette smoke. And just these gorgeous sunset clouds and the two of us sitting there watching the show. I think of Ida telling me—she lost a daughter to bipolar—she committed suicide. Ida can tell what I'm thinking and she reaches her frail shaky arm out and I grab her arm with my strong shaky young arm and we grab each other's arms and when I grip that old woman she grips me just as strongly back. "You know when they down, they down," Ida says. "And when they up, they up!" We both laughing and crying at the same time. Ida's shaking her head. "She used to run naked down the street. Caught the attention of the police." "Yeah I bet." "Then ended up in the mental institution. Then she killed herself." I look Ida in the face. "There's nothing you can say," she says, letting me off the hook. "There ain't nothing you can say to that. When your time comes, your time comes." I think the event of Rebecca dying kindled my bipolar once, and then the event of my suicide attempt kindled it a second time. Now I'm fully crazy, and I need to avoid like the plague any traumatic event that would kindle me a third time. (And there have probably been many mini kindling events all throughout: hospital stays, medical detoxes, work firings and quittings, drug experiences, major hallucinations on crystal meth, jumping off my balcony and hurting my wrist..though according to the doctors it's just fine..but to me it hurts like hell!) From the beginning of this story to the end, my major psych diagnosis will have changed three times, I will have moved four times, I'll end up writing this text in Nashville, Tennessee—unable to type sitting up, I will lie on the floor to write each day, and I will be the happiest man in the world. Ida and I sit there like that, holding each other's forearms. We sit on her porch watching a Tennessee storm roll in. The clouds are so dark blue they're almost black. And by turns, we tell each other stories of the people we've lost—of her *other* child she lost, of my girlfriend, of my friends. She offers me a cigarette—I realize it's been over a year and a half since I drank or smoked, and five years since I smoked that crack in Vermont. Ida smokes and I think through all the mortality statistics I know about bipolar. Bottom line: bipolar kills through suicide, and people who have bipolar disorder are way more likely to kill themselves than people who don't. There are situational suicides, but the current research shows that 90% of suicides involve people with a major mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression. As I look at the clouds coming toward us, knowing it's about to rain, I'm glad that the paradigm around suicide has moved from blaming the victim to treating potential victims, since most of them have one of a very small set of mental illnesses. I feel good lately, not depressed. But I know it's possible that a time will come again when I believe things like: *My family would be better off without me.* That's a killer, right there—that belief has almost killed me several times. And I know that the next time I believe that idea, I won't have the perspective I have now—I won't be able to see that the belief is false. That is the hell of psychosis, whether it occurs in depression or mania—like Praga Khan sang: *My mind is my enemy.* You don't know what's true or false. You think you're Jesus. You take off your clothes. People around you get scared when you say things you think are funny! The storm comes in on me and Ida. We move our chairs back as far as possible but our feet are still getting drenched. "We're both wearing sandals," Ida says. She sees I'm deep in thought. "What you thinkin' bout? Bipolar stuff?" "Yeah." She takes my hand and puts it on the arm of her plastic chair. She puts her arm on top of mine. "Don't you worry about that stuff for now, ya hear? Just sit back and watch this storm with an old woman. I don't know how many more of these I'm gonna get to see before I pass." So that's what we do, me and Ida, we watch the storm come and drench us while we hold hands and I can see Ida leaning into the storm, like she's going somewhere, like in our own ways we've each come face to face with the storm that is finally going to kill us. I lean in with her, and grip her hand, and I feel like we're two travelers who have decided not to be afraid of the floods and the rain, or of the blistering sun..who have decided not to safely shelter in, but to live outside (at least for a moment on her porch) and let the acid in the rain touch our skin and wear it away a little bitty bit every time a drop hits us. And with what Ida said about watching as many storms as she can before she goes, I feel like we're stealing time from the gods—or from the devils—taking what we can from the now before it all goes away. And I should tell you something about my theory of mass media. I don't believe mass-media is aimed the masses, but is actually a one-to-one message, across the universe, from one ideal writer of a particular story to one ideal reader of that particular story..so you see..this book is aimed..at you. Strength flows through our arms, then we both grip the porch railing. Rain is drenching me and my friend. "I'm trying to explain the whole scope of everything in the book, you see, from growing up to never knowing what was wrong with me to being diagnosed to losing my job to getting unemployment to moving to Vermont and then never being able to get my life together in my early thirties, just like I could never get it together in my early twenties *with* money and *with* jobs, it's like I was destined not to be able to get it together, ever, and then there were all the hospitals and I tried to kill myself—no, I tried to kill myself, *then* there were all the hospitals. Fuck, Ida, I try and I try and I still can't explain it." A gravelly, old woman, cigarette voice tells me: "You don't need to, Matthew—I understand." Then Ida takes my hand. - - - - And that, dear friends, concludes what in my mind I call the *Brattleboro Stories*. You might think I have not made good on my promise implicit in using Tarantino's quote from *True Romance* that *\\that's the way things go, but remember, sometimes they go the other way, too\* But I will point out that in the depths of this story I was willing to take my life—that's the way things go—and by its end, yes, it may not be the case that my fortunes had improved..in fact my financial situation, my mental diagnoses, my physical state, are much worse at the end of this story than its beginning. But one thing is better: my fire. My fire has returned from that suicidal night, and it makes an unbearable prospect like being homeless, bearable, for instead of saying: here, I cannot handle being unable to sit, to stand, to walk, to not convulse, and yet also be offered the prospect of homelessness..so I will kill myself. Or I need help so bad from this hospital that I will kill myself to get in it. No. My mom has just had a conversation with me reminding me I need to leave this apartment as soon as possible. I don't feel despair. I'm on Google searching for assisted living places across the country. I have hope I'll find one that works. And if I don't, fuck it. I have paid for enough time in this room—and stolen enough *now* from the universe—to write this book ;-) I will never fold as easily as I once did. If it comes to it, I'll live outside. I've done it before and I'll do it again. I feel a spark inside me that wants to live. Even if it hurts from here to the end. I won't fall over like a house of cards. I will be a thorn in the side of life until it finally has enough of my pricking and reaches down and pulls me out and thumps me away for good. So have things gone one way and then, for once, gone the other way for me? I'll say they have. - - - - One last thing. You should never bargain with the devil. But the thing is, she seems to be bargaining with me. So I say to you, Little Miss Trouble: I'm gonna keep doing my thing as long as I'm breathing. And you—Little Miss—can bring it on.