Visions without Hallucinations

Posted on June 18, 2006 in Hope and Joy Rage & Annoyance Stigma

Tonight I am treating myself to a rant

You know, I looked at the stuff I wrote back in the beginning of this blog (the anniversary is coming up — no congrats until then please) and I don’t think any of the commentators of the time are still reading me. I was so fucked up with this fucking illness and the people who gravitated to me were also fucked up.

The ranks have included lushes and jingoists who didn’t like that I refused to go along with the Iraq war even after just about everyone else just went along. Then I am sure that a few just ran because I was revealed to be bipolar and they didn’t want to be contaminated? I feel a softer version of this song from Hair:

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

Yes, it has never ceased to amaze me how people who want social reform can be so short on tenderness for the mentally ill. I suggest that learning to speak to bipolars and schizophrenics offers them a terrific opportunity to learn the practice of gentleness. And I daresay, the skill can be applied to others with good effect.

The lost friends are still saying pretty much the same stuff. Still preaching their esoteric doctrines. There’s the crowd from Ecotone, most of whom decided to stop talking to me because, God forbid, I had ideas and however badly, I stood up for myself. (Note: a couple of them still communicate with me — the words India and Texas should tell you who they are and I thank them for their friendship. It is appreciated.) One of them — a prominent ecological blogger– in particular badmouthed me for events from my time on PeaceNet which he had no clue about: it was even mentioned in a book about online conversation. The author thought I was put upon by this crowd and said so in the book.But where is she?

Needless to say prominent blog-ecologist and his pals are no longer here. I befriended a photographer who came out of the Ecotone experience as very hostile but became a friend. But she seems to have vanished.

One friend of mine got into gnosticism and seems to have chummed up with a Scientologist who came around for awhile. “Oh he’s a reasonable Scientologist.” That is an oxymoron, at least on the subject of organic brain dysfunction.

(It’s a hot night and I remember all the times that I have been fried. It’s darkness in June and soon the light will be back. I have a black mask waiting for that, but right now I am writing.)

I write poorly on the topics of politics and religion. That’s a field sown with stones for me. What explicable views I do have are based on compassion for all. I feel my compassion because I have suffered in a way that most of these people who fluttered into friendship and out again haven’t. Those who know me in person call me caring. I am learning that that word means something in context. I tried to care about people who didn’t have a clue what my perceptions were all about. I knew that my experiences were extraordinary and I knew them to be merely, joyously human. Finding the compatriots among the furrows and dirt clods proved to be the hardest march of my life and it has lasted until now.

Where the Others will continue to be pundits, I shall strive to be a watcher of the world, albeit a bipolar one, who sees visions without hallucinogenic overlays. Dammit, I am a person. Whether I am bipolar or not is not relevant. People who have been unkind towards me are doubtless unkind to others! I will continue to write in vignettes because my art is bas relief and it is folly to always attempt murals or holograms. And I hope you, my latest set of friends, will stay with me where the others have left me. My bipolar friends, we share the hardship and we share the hairstreak string of honey that is our gift to others and for ourselves.

And damn, I am like so many of you in being fucked over by the proud and the insensitive. You have given me the kindness that I have been giving to others for many years. Thank you.

Sorry, anniversaries are tough, but if you are reading this, chances are you are one of the good people.