The Joker Wins But at What Cost?
Posted on February 28, 2009 in Film Stigma Suicide
I wasn’t interested in watching The Dark Knight until Heath Ledger won the best supporting actor Oscar. I did not read any of the criticism by the mental health community until the film was about halfway over. By then I’d seen enough to entertain grave suspicions.
Watching Ledger play the Joker must be for me akin to what it is like for a black person to watch Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. You can credit the performance, but at the same time detest the things being said about you and your kind by the larger context.
The Dark Knight said things about mental illness that were calculated to terrify. And the things they said — about most of us — were false. Mental illness is not a fall from grace as the fundamentalist ethos behind this opus contends. The mind of the paranoid, for example, is not drawn to join with senseless experiments in violence as the screenplay avers at one point. I’ve suffered paranoia and the impulse I felt was to hide from others, to distrust, to protect myself by evasion.
One cannot help but wonder what this role with its message of the evil of the mentally ill might have done to the Ledger’s fragile mind. As the two sides of his brain wrestled with each other, did one shout to the other that there was no hope for him, that he was doomed to violent psychosis?
Go tell Hollywood that The Dark Knight is more than a fiction — it is a malignant lie.
Dream
Posted on February 25, 2009 in Dreams
I’m working in a corporation. Seems that things have gotten a lot better in that workplace. For a several years, things went quite poorly for the company — the furniture was falling apart, everything was dirty — but now it’s all squeaking clean and shiny. I say to others “Now it is like things were before the layoff. How I used to want to get laid off, too, but they kept me here and now it has all worked out for the better.” I have a drink at a water cooler, then walk through several hallways to another part of the company. After I reach my destination, I turn around, passing through a shopping mall which, apparently, was on my route. I see a woman climbing a ramp. I assume this leads to a moving walkway, an opportunity which I seize because it will help me return more quickly. I ascend the ramp, but when I reach the top, it just slopes down. At the bottom, I find myself on another side of the island where my company is based. It’s miles to the office and I have only a few minutes before my break is over. I rush through streets past children playing and a man riding a lawn mower. (It does not occur to me to just backtrack.) I end up in a blue-shadowed alley. A man working at a drafting desk laughs at me because I am going to lose my job.
Twitter and Brightkite
Posted on February 24, 2009 in Micro-blogging
Twitter is most famous as a “micro-blogging” platform. I can’t tell you exactly what that means, but it seems to me that Twitter operates at times like a bulletin board, at others like a comments thread, and still at others like a chat room. This blog article will appear within the half hour as a link on Twitter and you can find me there under the name of EmperorNorton sputtering my point of view and exchanging pleasantries. The ambiguity of Twitter cements its appeal for me and for many others.
Brightkite operates on a different principle. You mark where you are in the world ((Some people are scared about using Brightkite because they fear stalkers. You don’t have to indicate your exact place — you can broaden it to town, state, or even nation. You can set varying levels of trust so that those who are friends can see an exact address if you wish to offer one and everyone else only sees your city. There are many ways to ensure privacy in Brightkite and still enjoy the sense of locale that it offers.)) and report on what is happening in your location through notes and photographs. A few Brightkite users, however, don’t get the concept of reporting from place. They treat it as another Twitter, filling it with miscellaneous news articles, funny stories, political comments, and the like that have nothing to do with where they are. I think this marks a weakness in understanding that clutters a good idea.
Brightkite is not another Twitter. You’re called upon to give a sense of where you are, what you are doing. I’ve seen people post photos of the meals they are having. Such stuff would be tedious on Twitter, but on Brightkite it shows you a little bit of the world beyond you. If you use Brightkite, accept its challenge: look around you with your camera or with your mind. Report on what is around you, within arm’s reach, around your house, in the sky above you. Leave the punditry and the article links for Twitter because that is what Twitter is made for ((You can always set Brightkite so that your notes and photo links appear on Twitter)) . Let Brightkite be a place where people can look in on the various corners of the planet, not just another open-ended micro-blogging spew ((I do wish to register one complaint: the coders of Brightkite have been promising the ability to edit location information and notes as a soon-to-be-implemented-coming-feature for the last nine months. OK, “very soon” needs to be NOW, guys.)) .
Bland Therapy and a Bird of Paradise
Posted on February 24, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Journals & Notebooks Originality & Creativity Reflections
Last night I wrote about a practice of happiness, that I rejected the idea of writing as bland therapy – as a theme paper about my daily struggles. But that isn’t such a bad idea on reevaluation in the morning. What was I getting at? I want to work at something that is hard. Writing about the disease fits this criterium. I want to write on it until it becomes easy, until the edginess goes away. I want it to bring me there without being told how to do it by anyone else. I want the right to compose beautiful things that have nothing to do with the illness that I bear. It should be fun, for example, to write about the pines surrounding the fountain while keeping bipolar disorder there but in the background. The disease can inform my perspective but curing it need not be the reason.
Therapists argue for a utilitarian approach which wearies me. Yes, at times it is a chore that I must make myself do, but it always angers me when I hear the same old advice about writing every day at the same time for the same amount of time. I know that is reasonable, but am I a child, an ignorant who just started this yesterday? When I want writing counsel I want to begin at a place beyond where I have been before. I have been places in my discussions of the illness that many have been. I want to see new things about it. That, oddly, may entail writing about the same things over and over again. Yea, it may be painful to write about some things. I don’t look forward to the ache, but getting through it is part of the happiness. Right now the irritation is central. I don’t want to turn into anyone who is a mere drudge at it.
The [[Strelitzia_reginae|bird of paradise]] ((A type of flower native to Hawaii and well-loved here in California)) must bloom. The hummingbird must whirr. The wheels of the train must turn and its whistle blow. If there be a track, let me find it. The image of a wandering locomotive delights me. Where are my rails and what is my ultimate destination? Do I find myself on a rock-strewn plain, in a forest, or mired in a marsh? I want to see a portrait of the moment.
So what am I feeling now? Strangely, a sluggishness or a heaviness along the top of my head. One of the reference librarians talks about schedules. Kids laugh loud. A little girl keeps checking her cell phone to see if it has received any calls. A woman with a long dark ponytails probes the fiction stacks. There’s a lot of noise around me. Now a sports car goes by outside beyond the trees of the patio and the fountain. What is that boy wearing blue doing with that long piece of string? What is his mother telling him?
I have a fear of answering these questions because I do not want to bestow my own thoughts on the scene. Who am I to dare? And what would it do to me to invent fictions to exist in the bodies of the people out there? The beyond ((Look at how I characterize this element. There used to be a television series called “[[Alcoa_Presents:_One_Step_Beyond|One Step Beyond]]” in the spirit of [[The Twilight Zone]] and [[The Outer Limits]]. Terror. My social anxiety crops up even when I try to imagine how others are thinking. Very interesting! But this is one thing that I am investigating in my writing now.)) is a wicked thing that takes me out of the immediate. The right here. I’ve lightened up listening and looking at the beyond, though. It’s made me feel better. It beats being in the middle of my own nothingness. Reaching out to touch makes me feel better about living with this disease, whose warps make things interesting. I want to recover those feelings without succumbing to them. I need not return to being a psycho to know how I once felt. Recovery means many things to me: it means both not being bound by the disease and also having the memory of the world seen through the disease in me, twisted but understood.
The Chocolate of Creativity
Posted on February 23, 2009 in Originality & Creativity
I should prescribe for Mr Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don’t let him think he is taking them medicinally….
Samuel Butler, [amazonify]1434617106::text::::The Way of All Flesh[/amazonify]
Good writing is something to reach for. The pleasure cannot be had by merely doing the job at the same time every day according to the same laws, but by having healthy bites of the chocolate of creativity. If composition is merely a task, merely diary, then what joy can it bring? By the mere blunder of a puttering b where there is the eternal question — “y” — a mere job ensues.
Every person who urges me to write as “therapy” wants to put me on a banal diet of ponderousness. I write best when I write as a practice of happiness.
Pogo Dog
Posted on February 22, 2009 in Dogs Video
This is my first video using footage shot with my Flip Cam. The star, of course, is my Boston Terrier Drake. He was also my Best Boy.
Socks, the Ultimate Democat, Passes
Posted on February 20, 2009 in Cats Milestones
Former First Cat Socks is dead.
Monkey in Mid-Pacific
Posted on February 19, 2009 in ADD Originality & Creativity Therapy Writing/Darkness
I’m working through things here, as always.
The best part of writing for me has always been the revision, the changing of sentences, the putting of words into new spots and choosing what really said that I wanted to say. In mania, I could do this quickly and the task could draw me out of a depression.
Quite separate from this was the task of developing the ideas. As a high school student, I could pull it all together only once in a while which is why I often earned only a B average until late in my high school career when I had a steady streak of stability ending in hypomania. I was in English AP, so I was not seen as stupid. One of my teachers, at least, seemed to understand the cyclical nature of my abilities and gave me leeway. There were times when faced with a topic that I couldn’t pull it together. I waved my hands in the air, trying to slap from a line of Dylan Thomas the deep meaning that I knew to be in there. I didn’t love Dylan Thomas much, though some of his poems such as “Do not go gently” spoke to me. I felt the nighness of a good night and I raged against it whenever I felt I was beginning to slip. But my efforts were futile, the splashing about of a monkey who cannot swim in the middle of the Pacific. I could never rage hard enough when these episodes came over me and they still catch me now and then.
The difference is that I don’t panic when they occur: I float.
* * * * *
It’s hard for me to write much when I have the wrong kind of therapist, the one who thinks that writing is nothing more than a tool for therapy, who tells you that it doesn’t have to be good or detailed, just “done”. The ants in [amazonify]0441003834::text::::The Once and Future King[/amazonify] divided the world into done and not done. In that pismire language, the kind of writing I could forsee was always “not done”, not worth doing because it wasn’t a journal anymore but a repetitive task of therapeutics.
Inviting my therapist to look over my shoulder, to inspect my work stifled the essence. I never felt that I could bring my work in to Lorraine, never wanted to because she had this way of questioning assumptions and getting on me in her emotional correctness. You find in writing not so much by answering questions as you do by blundering around and looking at the thing from many different angles.
I felt I couldn’t kvetch, I couldn’t swing that kvetching to clever heights of ridicule if the moment seized me. I always dreaded writing the truth in my journals lest they be discovered, read aloud, discussed, and mocked. My private world was meant to be private and I hated those people who, instead of championing that right, said “You just have to be careful what you write.” A journal, I hold, is a private place and no one has the right to go there uninvited until after you die.
This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]
The Volcano
Posted on February 17, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Journals & Notebooks Silicon Valley Stigma
Even before I was diagnosed or had a thought of going in for treatment of any kind, I caught it for suffering from a mood disorder. Back at Jupiter, the last real job I held before I went mad. I already was mad. Deeply mad, but mostly in the depressed range. They didn’t like that I dragged myself to work, ashamed of and annoyed with the filthy plastic injection molding factory. Before me there had been a man who committed suicide. The foremen spoke of his still haunting the plant. From time to time, controls on the machines would mysteriously turn and they would say that he did it. They never thought to accuse their own busy-ness, their rush to get from one place to the next. No, this ghost did it. They feared its presence just as they feared the phantom that I became because of my exhausted sensitivity. I wanted more than anything to get out. But being depressed I could see no way out of it.
I had to put in at least three years, I would tell myself, at least three years because I needed to have a position that lasted longer than the temporaries and summer jobs that I had held down over the years. I needed to show that I could hang on.
So I put up with my fellow employees’ imaginings and belligerance, losing not only my mind but also my self-respect. I tried to do too much: I held down volunteer jobs that ate up most of my evening as well as the phony but paying job that occupied me during the day. I exhausted myself, but it didn’t help that my boss occasionally yelled at me or dumped me from my chair or brought me into his office where I would have to sit while he placed telephone calls, ordering plastic pellets and the tiny metal parts we needed to impress in some of the parts. I hated the man with all my heart and prayed for the day when he would fire me.
It never occurred to me to just drop out, to get on disability though I did dream of suing the company so that I owned it all. If I made a mistake on my spreadsheets or got a little excited, the chief of operations would say “You’re losing it”. He lost it quite a bit – another yeller. And I was losing it, losing the integrity of mind that I needed to resist their assaults on my equanimity.
The boss I had at another company previous to this had hinted that she thought I had a problem. Her heart, I realize, though frustrated with me wanted the best of me. I should have taken her hints and got on the meds. In an office where everyone shouted their opinions at one another and blamed one another, it wasn’t a good place to face the facts. After all, the last guy who have crumbled under their care offed himself. They were sorry for his passing, but could in no way fathom that they had worn him down.
So I lived on the brink with a massive depression that I dragged around with me everywhere, a magma blob that burned while never glowing. Just heat of the worst kind, burning my rib cage and making me feel as if death was in the next eruption.
This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]
Therapists & The Word “Bipolar”
Posted on February 17, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Journals & Notebooks Medical Ethics Writing/Darkness
There’s a stigma for you: therapists who try to separate me out from the disease. What do they know of living in it? “I don’t want you calling yourself the illness” Lorraine would say to me over and over again. I know I am not the illness, but it is no worse to call myself bipolar than to call myself a diabetic. I know that I am more and besides it is infernally clumsy to call myself “a person with [[bipolar disorder]]”. Clumsy in the extreme. Therapists have no sense of the compactness necessary to write. They should be made to talk about being a sufferer of bipolar disorder on Twitter and watch their character limits waste away as they do.
My disease is inside my skull lodged deep inside the crevices of the brain where the neurons and the ganglions play. That makes it part and parcel of me. We don’t fret when diabetes sufferers call themselves diabetics or those with asthma call themselves asthmatic. Bipolar is a neat word, a convenient shortening of “bipolar disorder” indicating a difference between the disease and the sufferer. They want something else? Bipolaric? Could work.
The root of their dislike is that it leaves them out. There are the patients and there are the therapists. The patients like to get together, talk about the times their paranoia got the better of them or the hallucinations they’ve seen. The “war stories” leave the therapists out. So they try to drag us back into the mainstream by forbidding to us what distinguishes us. They see that as their job: to make us forget the past so they can control our futures.
I don’t want to go back to the kaleidoscope days — which is why I take my meds — but it is good to know that I have overcome all that, to know that against the odds I have survived. I suffer from bipolar disorder. I am bipolar. I stand smart and proud.
This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]
My Family’s Kitchen
Posted on February 13, 2009 in Childhood Journals & Notebooks Writing/Darkness
The refrigerator was coffee brown until late in my adolescence when my mother had it changed to the usual white. Cartoons hung by tiny fruit-shaped magnets. One of them showed a man sneaking oh so quietly down the stairs to the kitchen and then, suddenly, being intercepted by the dog who appeared out of nowhere.
I remember those little fruits well – there was a banana, an apple, and a sprig of cherries. I often salivated for the cherries but this was a fruit that seldom came into our house because of the expense. My mother bought the smallest, meanest apples she could by the dozen – Red Delicious which I never liked to eat because of their mushiness and lack of flavor. Despite her failure at getting me to eat them, she bought them time and again, scolding me for wasting good food. She was likewise frugal with our bread which was always the cheapest 29 cent loaves of white she could find. We kept the bread in a drawer. Now and again, she would pull out of the stale pieces to grind into bread crumbs. No slice went unused in our house unless it happened to grow moldy in the bag. Despite the starvation rations I managed to grow to more than six feet. I ate ample amounts of oatmeal in the morning which we kept in a cabinet over the stove. I liked it on the dry side so I added just a little water and milk.
My father did not approve of my drinking milk: this was his strange frugality. “Are you a baby cow?” he’d demand when he saw me having a glass or pouring it on my cereal. Milk was always skim. I seldom drank it, but put it on cereal so there was some flavor.
My mother hated fat and fat people. I think she thought the Great Depression was the best years of her life because after I moved out and she had some money she bought everything she could find that had the Campbells Kids on them. She liked to tell me stories about how, when she was a child, she ate pasta with only butter on it. (Recently she cooked me a dinner of gnocchi that had no sauce, no butter. She obsesses about my weight.)
Her stories about how hard she had had it indicated to me that she expected that I starve myself and be poor. “Suffer“, I used to mutter, the word full of breathiness. When I was having a hard time with my depression, she would tell me to “offer it up to God”. I didn’t find that much of a solution. But I could not escape the Sax household, so I ate meager portions of the “snacks” she bought, endured her over-boiled vegetables and burnt pork chops, and listened to her sanctimonious stories of her life in Omaha and the trek she once made with her family to Buffalo so that her father could find work ((It’s clear that she needed to bring herself up to the decade she was living in. I get a little peeved with often female therapists who tell me on one hand to understand why my mother was as she was and then in the next breath telling me that I have to forget the past. Why did she get to have the past molding her and I have to pretend as if mine never existed? The double standard is infuriating now as it was then.)) .
* * * * *
The sink smelled of Ajax. The silverware all matched, and the plates were plastic just in case I dropped one of them. I had the job of unloading the dish washer during commercial breaks. If the break was short, I was expected to keep working until I finished, but then I caught flack for making noise while everyone else was watching television.
The worst thing when I was young was having to take the trash out. Mother would save the grocery bags for this chore. I had to take them out every night, out the back door of the garage and into the very dark area between the garage and the neighbor’s fence. Night and I were not friends: where today I look up to see the silver clouds and the reach of the universe with its stars and nebulas, then I saw skeletons, boogiemen, and black-skinned predators waiting in the shadows. Sometimes my family of bullies sneaked out behind me and scared me. One time I reacted by hitting my mother who had waited at the door to cackle and hiss at me after I had run out and run back in. For this I received a beating.
This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]
