Clyde Dee's Blog, page 18

Joes Deli

There is a quiet stillness every night

After dishes have been washed in the sink,

Surfaces wiped down, the floor moped, the grill

Scraped clean, and utensils like the spatula

Placed neatly on aluminum foil. The day’s work

Is over and Joe can go home to rest.

 

Joe’s intrinsic sense of order does rests

In his kitchen when he leaves for the night.

Usually he gets so backed up with work

That dirty dishes pile high in the sink,

Food debris covers the metal spatula,

And black grease cakes the surface of the grill.

During the lunch and dinner rush, the grill

Is full of cheesesteaks and orders from the rest

Of the menu. Like lightening, Joe’s spatula

Streams chopping, maneuvering the black night

Of the grill’s caked grease. His mood sinks

With incoming orders from those off work

 

Who are grumpy and angry that he can’t work

Faster to feed their hunger. They just grill

Him with demands like water drains in a sink

Channeling their troubles onto he who cannot rest.

Joe works to stay cheerful but by end of night

He’s ready to attack with spatula.

 

Watching Joe maneuver the spatula

One wouldn’t guess that his marriage doesn’t work,

That he sleeps on the sofa at night

His brain a’frying on a buttered grill;

That he dreads being alone for the rest

Of his life, just a drain to the world’s sink.

 

At night leaking pipes under kitchen sink

Spew puddles over the floor. The spatula

Collects dust on its foil with the rest

Of the utensils. When Joe comes to work

In the morning, he heats up his clean grill

And looks across the wrecked stillness of night.

 

Day after day, the sun sinks into night

While Joe stands over grill with spatuala

At work in dysfunction, waiting to rest

The Love She Keeps

But what is this I am seeing in her:

Scraggle screaming its way out of her head?

Bleach stains on her shirt where colors have bled?

If not her stout torso top maimed femurs

That wheel-chairs homeless through jungle plunder

Living the life that mother proclaimed dead,

When mother did lie to asylum heads;

Than what is this I am seeing in her

Fifty years later while daughter dismisses

The existence that rolls in antithesis

Through districts where violence and junkies creep

Starved, beat down; defamed and maimed by street disses?

So what do I see in her, through all this?

 

I see enduring eyes that love themselves deep.

I see enduring eyes that love themselves deep.

 

That there dadeo is the love that she keeps!

Living with Schizophrenia in Oakland: Esteban Santiago-Ruiz

January 7, 2017: I sit stunned in the wake of the tragedy of yesterday’s Fort Lauderdale shooting. As statements appear in the press that insinuate that these evil acts need to be avenged, I grieve for the senseless loss of life.  I grieve and I also wonder if anyone cares to understand the dilemmas that people like Esteban Santiago-Ruiz face. Having just endured another holiday season as a mad person, I am reminded of the importance of giving social scapegoats a space to celebrate their otherness. As a licensed psychotherapist, I create safe places where the untold story can be heard. I know that a state of victimhood can be transformed to a celebration. I see it happen every day. It helps me exponentially.

Having caught a fever, I spent Christmas day in bed in victim mode, reflecting on the way I feel scapegoated. Instead of working through the pain like usual, I lay incapacitated, overcome. I thought of my project design that could bring specialized groups into the county service system. Turns out eighteen months of pro bono work only further smeared my reputation. I not only am left unnoticed, I know there are rumors based on past politics and current ones that I can do nothing about. I reflected how, when I recently shared these ideas in a survivor work group, I only felt further marginalized. This hurt, as did the fact that my award winning memoir isn’t selling.

Reaching out to family on Christmas Day conjured that same sense of invisibility: I was reminded that most family members look away from me when they talk to each other. I reflected on how I stooped with my bad back under a tarp in a rain storm barbecuing for everyone at the family reunion and how disrespected I felt when not a single relative stopped by to check in with me. I reflected further about a recent interaction with a chronically normal co-worker that turned bully in nature. And somehow as I traipsed off to sleep, my dreams revealed that I am still afraid of losing everything. This overwhelming sense of hurt could easily be a daily state for me if I was locked up.

Maybe what was going on during this fever was that I was transported back to Montana State Hospital, to a fever I had there. There had been ice growing on the inside of my window just above the cot where I stacked wet wool blankets. Two months into my stay, I still had not met with my psychiatrist. I had already been told there was no need to take my temperature, because aspirin relief was not legal for me. Orders had not been written and it was Friday. When somehow I got myself up and out to the front, I begged for aspirin anyway. It annoyed the old hen at the nursing station to the point where she accused me of being sexually inappropriate with her. I had my hand sitting on my hip tucked inside the elastic of the sweatpants I had been given. Jolted out of my misery by the accusation, I tried to tell myself I was just being paranoid. It wasn’t fair to judge the old hen. She probably would not write me up. But the next time I could manage to get myself out of bed, a conscientious staff person who I had built a relationship with leaked the reality of the note to me. It really did happen.

As a master’s level social worker devoted to going where others wouldn’t and as the survivor of multiple molestations, I was deeply impacted. Immediately, I was afraid that my three month stint on that old dank frozen, dirty unit would be extended. I was there because they said I was paranoid. And now it was possible that I could be held an additional nine months. This is exactly what my family was advocating for.

But when mad people let themselves feel victimized and hurt by such circumstances, not only do they hurt, they may also harm their loved ones who helped put them there. Suddenly, everyone else looks like perpetrators. This does not help us in the least. When mad people act like victims and point their fingers at perpetrators, they may find dozens of irrational fingers back at them criticizing their every move. This is what Schizophrenia means to me.

It takes a while to learn, but there are ways to avoid this. There are ways to achieve mental health recovery. Instead, I have learned that we who experience “psychosis” of any form need to celebrate our otherness, our neurodivergence, our madness. We need the space to tell our untold stories. We need to learn from and support each other. This is what mental health recovery helps us do.

Of course, over the holidays, seasonal stories I endure as a licensed psychotherapist in Oakland have added to my sense of hurt on Christmas. I primarily serve individuals who are marginalized in board and care circumstances. I constantly hear reports that end up being very similar to the warehousing I endured on Unit C in Montana. And particularly around Christmas when people are desperate to give others Christmas gifts, there is a lot of theft, or flim flam. As a staff we do our best to undermine the spank of the poverty over the season, but I always find myself paying attention to the individuals who lose during the Christmas raffle. I give those who won’t even take the risk of playing a knowing look.

But because as a staff person, I believe the horror stories and inquire deeper into them; because I share my own lived experience, I have developed a host of techniques and ways to be helpful to individuals who are suffering from “psychotic episodes” or recovering from them.

And suddenly the person who is down because his Christmas gifts were stolen at his board and care can talk about how the voices respond by telling he is going to go to jail. Then I can tell him about how that’s what I believed was going to happen to me when I ran away from my job at a notorious section 8 housing authority and tried to escape to Canada to seek asylum. That is what landed me in Montana State Hospital. Then, someone else can relate similar experiences. Suddenly this person who has never admitted he hears voices in ten years of treatment doesn’t feel so alone. Perhaps, a few stories later he can celebrate his otherness. Now he and I are no longer marginalized victims. We become proud others. And we prevent the whole system that for years has suppressed and ignored from being attacked as perpetrators.

In Oakland, the more we dig, the more stories of real gang, and police harassment surface. At times we uncover never before told experience of police beatings. I find I no longer feel alone in those instances I bumped heads with the police in the days that led up to my hospitalization. In fact, I don’t feel so bad because I was not nearly killed the way my fellow victimized friend was. And together we become able to accept the tragedies that have held us down and heal. While there are ways we’ve had it worse, there are always ways we’ve had it better. I believe we can all walk away with a sense of better understanding the world.  We can be proud of being others. Now we have mad brothers and sisters.

A few days ago, I was presenting to one of our senior Ivy League psychiatrists. I tried to explain what it is like for a paranoid person who objects to the life of crime to be followed for real and what they have to learn to do to avoid being hurt by real crime rings. The psychiatrist who I have always felt snickers about my street informed content, got confronted by one of my peers, an ex-con who has endured brutal police beatings and been tortured to the point where he lost an eye. This co-worker, and age cohort to the psychiatrist, lifted his head and explained that that is what happens to squares on the street for real.  They often get set up and victimized. This is part of how prisons become so filled with mentally ill. This was such an enormous moment for me. I have been working on the unit for fourteen years and I am grateful to have some back up. While these dilemmas do not afflict everyone in the mad community, it is a very common reality for many of us.

This is another example of what happens when silenced stories get revealed, there is such a sense of relief, comradery and connection. Suddenly the recipient feels like less schizophrenic and more like the subjugated person that they really are.

And then, to learn about the fate of Esteban Santiago-Ruiz, an Iraq war veteran, who had become lost to contact from his family as he cycled through a system that tries to forcefully suppress his trauma and experiences. I spend my livelihood forging a way for people like Esteban to rise up and experience recovery. I see it work time and time again. I have never had a person who revealed the truth about their suffering go postal. But when Esteban contacted the FBI, and cycled through the system in Anchorage, it didn’t help. He boarded a plane and flew home. At the airport he killed at least five innocent people.

Now many outraged individuals will believe mad people need to be locked up and go directly into marginal poverty in order to be controlled. Will my right to prevent these occurrences come under further attack and marginalization? Will I lose my wife and my house and end up in a FEMA camp bearing a microchip that says I am autistic?

Though I never came close to shooting, I can relate to Esteban because I too at one point reached out to the FBI in desperation.

It happened a year after I was released from Montana State Hospital. The only job I could find was at an Italian Delicatessen. My delusion was that my family was a mob family and that the mob was picking on me. In spite of hundreds of resumes and job applications, the only job I could find was at an Italian Deli. My aunt, the rare relative who seemed willing to support me, got me the job. Every day I encountered individuals during my two hour commute (ten miles on a bike, one hour on BART) to the wealthy suburb where I worked. Everyday there was an individual who I believed to be following me. Some were real out-of-state gangsters I recognized from my job at the section 8 housing program. Some appeared just to be purposely dawdling, trying to get my attention in effort to mock me. I ignored them entirely and chose to keep my job and risked the uncertainty.

I ignored them, that is, until the day after 9-1-1. On that day a Muslim man was taunting me in a crowd of people in a festival. Thinking it might be a test to see if I would turn a blind eye to terrorism, I called the FBI and left a very careful short and discreet report.  I was afraid of failing the test, but I was also afraid of being taken back to the hospital.

My therapist was appalled. She always sided with the poor kids who were loved had automobiles, and sold drugs. They spent eight hours a day carving me up, and she always took up for them and my family, though she said she didn’t. She judged me for being a drain and a drag to sit with. Paid 250$ per week by my family while I could barely afford food, I couldn’t share with her what was really happening. I learned time and time again that she wouldn’t believe or care about what I was going through. All she did when I called the FBI was, without an ounce of curiosity, threaten me. I would get in real trouble if I ever did that again.

A day later I saw the Muslim man again by chance and went up and talked to him. He said he washed dishes at a restaurant around the corner from where I worked.

I looked at him. We both knew there was no restaurant around the corner. I apologized to him anyway.

I never saw him again. Strange?

I do not think it is okay to randomly shoot people. But so rarely is there consideration that the media response might escalate the occurrences. It is not fair to use this kind of tragedies to spread hatred and ignorance about what so many individuals go through.

It’s true my beloved co-worker, the ex-con, does fly through that same Fort Lauderdale airport several times a year. It terrifies me to think that for all he does as an elder in the community, for all the family he looks after, for the support he has given me, that he too could fall victim to such a desperate and random tragedy. But I am also not going to judge Esteban until I know all the gory details of the trauma he endured in Iraq and elsewhere. I believe he and many like him do not have insurance that covers treatment that helps humanize what they go through. In many places, treatment doesn’t even exist. They most certainly didn’t in Montana. And the program I have built in the outpatient hospital clinic is the only of its kind. I believe it has had quite a profound effect. I believe it helps individuals get what their insurance pays for, treatment.

While I am grateful for having enough at my disposal so I do not, as a scapegoat, have to live in a state of victimhood, judgments about Esteban are a threat to my very existence. It does make me worry about returning to the torture of the incarcerated state of victimhood. Even with all I have learned and created, incarceration pains me so bad. It set me back two and a half years in the past. It remains to be seen what my future will hold as the reality of my existence remains distorted in the public.

Social Sanctions (excerpted)

Jargonizing the Social Sanctions Construct:

Consider this construct a commentary on the ineffectiveness of punishing retaliation reactions with irrational and endless social sanctions. In jargonizing this construct, I have had a lot of success in uniting message receivers behind the idea that their history of treatment experiences basically feel like punishment. Sure some can evade it. Too often this takes privilege or gifted abilities. But those of us who have made it to social rehabilitation might need to acknowledge the advantages we had, advantages that we may have taken for granted during the process due to our intense suffering. And additionally it can help to know ways that you are gifted. Doing this helps one be helpful to others.

Whether primarily appearing to be paranoid, grandiose, somatic, spiritual, religious, catatonic, disassociated or other the tendency of the mainstream to disagree and reject divergent views hurts message receivers in a way that may even open old wounds. And the goal of getting the person into a hospital or a jail and medicated feels initially like suppressive cruel and unusual punishment.

In my experience many in the group will have an acceptance of these suppressive realities have learned that they improve with them. Often they may be homeless or institutionalized in circumstances that are worse, or find their message experience itself so unbearable they already feel a strong sense of deprivation or dehumanization. But still they can relate to feeling punished in some way. Usually, if a person says that a hospital or medication is not so bad they have a much deeper story of feeling punished to tell. All the helper has to do is inquire and learn.

The argument here is that if treatment were to be defined as ongoing efforts to social control and punish people who are different, it would be not only more transparent, but help people successfully adjust to without getting hurt and causing further brain damage. After all, punishment is a message that says: don’t do that or else . . . For message receivers already inundated with messages from varying origins, it is unreasonable to presume that they will take the punishment message the way it is intended.

Perhaps, the inherent flaw in the system of treatment is that special messages aren’t voluntary and that there is no way out but be punished when you are a message receiver.  The famous work of Gregory Bateson and the double bind, the idea that there is no direction the subject can go without feeling punished, emphasizes this point. I believe that it takes a markedly different culture to create no-way-out but win situations for a long time to counter the damage that the mainstream one does.

Special message groups are the effort to create such an environment. In being prepared to review this construct the group needs to have enough strength to hold and manage trauma. Stories of feeling punished and othered for having these experiences may go back a long way for group members.  Simply put, it takes a group that distinguishes itself from others to bring many people out of their shells. Historically I come equipped to distinguish every group I do by normalizing divergent views, asking questions that inquire about message experience, the sharing of my own lived experience, the ability to define associated constructs like sleuthing, theories, and tricksters, and by tolerating the confusion and tangents of those who act out retaliation reactions. Once these processes are reinforced people start to open up about things they’ve kept silent. When we discuss the reason many are so initially silent about their experiences social sanctions naturally social sanctions come up as an explanation.

I believe that in so many cases, being unjustly punished results in a decrease in trust for the establishment, in society and in our loved ones leading to a greater dependence on ourselves against everyone and a stronger faith in our special messages. In other words, message receivers become more committed to their message experiences. It becomes part of the experience of the altered state. As the diagram below depicts, once retaliation reactions get unjustly punished they are most likely to accelerate the message experience

[image error]

 

 

Getting Punished Outside of Institutions:

Social sanctions may go back a lot farther in a message receiver’s consciousness than the first run in in the system and are vastly different for different individuals. I will trace an evolution of social sanctions as they follow a very general pattern involving: 1) early impressions; 2) observing social norms develop; and 3) relationship with first responders. I will start by openly using my own frame of reference, but I will also consider alternate cultural considerations as the experience and views of message receivers is in fact extremely diverse.

Early impressions are the foundation around which social sanctions take root. For me, it was the librarian in my third grade who first introduced me to the concept of Schizophrenia in a pamphlet. I have come to best see those early impressions as lies regarding incurable brain disorder that is very rare. At the time subsequent interfacing did a lot to diminish my sense of humanity for those who suffer with this. It was somehow okay to throw them away because there was nothing that could be done. Oh, for sure it was sad, kind of like when someone dies in an earthquake.

But having this early impression reinforced persistently through early experiences in hospitals for eating disorders, in Abnormal Psychology text books in college, and as a young professional in the mental health field did a lot to make me feel punished when I received the diagnosis. None of the trauma that I had been through mattered, only that early impression of what the “disease” was.

Early impressions of “psychosis” for those who have parents who struggle from it are going to be very different. Targeted abuse from symptoms or the outside world may result in innocent suffering and form a starkly different impression. Likewise, individuals who grow up in rural, urban, or differently zoned areas than I, where mentally ill people are housed or warehoused, are likely to develop very differing impressions of mental health in very different sets of circumstances. They may not be so book focused.  They may have more or less humanity in them. Nevertheless, I would argue that early impressions start a process of hurt and misunderstanding in many individuals’ experience.

The second part of social sanctions is the development of a social sense of what normal is. Though there are a great many ways people are different, children norm up and develop different perceptions on issues such as popularity, conformity, and authority. Bullying starts to happen and directs children in very different directions. But early impressions of what it feels like to be part of a group and what it feels like to be hurt by others along with senses of dominance and submission, have a lot to do in developing what it feels like to be socially sanctioned.

I myself quickly found myself not fitting in when I was not allowed to wear popular clothing. Perhaps my parents wanted me to go through this as they had and develop a sense of character. But I quickly found myself not fitting in and was easily hurt by the exclusion, not having the same skills to build my sense of character. I responded with hatred and isolation and lacked a place where I had a sense of belonging. This was the times when I first experienced issues such as abandonment, rejection, failure to be acknowledged, slander ridicule, intense criticism, issues that would become part of my experience with messages. While it is clear that not everyone with messages experiences this kind of early sense of bullying or feeling unaccepted, they may develop impressions about these kinds of issues that will affect them when they run into being different later on.

The third part of social sanctions are the quality of the support they receive from first-responder people who intervene when they are different. Do those people staunchly defend the norms as they guide the message receiver towards them? Do these people respect and honor the individual’s strengths when they show sign of having message experiences?

Not everyone is so lucky as to have a headshrinker help them along on this path. Early responders can be parents, outside family members, spiritual affiliates, teachers, coaches. I personally had a series of therapists who did not have a track record for accepting who I was and the gifts that I presented with. Yes, I did what they said and I became more normal, but as they noticed that I wasn’t willing or able to norm up and they recognized my message tendencies, the forecast became negative and the support was very poor.

I feel this is largely reflective of society’s vision of Schizophrenia and brain disorder. There was no one teaching me that there were mentors and people who I could relate to who had the same sense of things that I did.  Even though I maintained a career and got an advanced degree education, my headshrinker, unbeknownst to me, did not think I could do it repeatedly. I have been through training in psychotherapy and the standard of care that was taught to me was, to get the message receiver into the hospital and medicated, that therapy is not the place for them. Programs, institutions, and warehousing appear to be the only options to many first responders.

 

 

This Effort to Depict Punishment in Institutions

It is true institutions vary a great deal, state to state, county to county, private to public, and jail to prison. As a result, it is very hard to characterize what punishment is like across the board. Again, I will limit what I say throughout to my own frame of reference that spans different states, three decades, and experience both as staff and as patient. As I do this I will do my best to allude to and consider what other people from different backgrounds may go through.  Sure, what follows is limited and generalized. However, as a group leader, I argue that the leader needs to be prepared to explore social sanctions in distant epochs and across distinctive locales and institutions. Thus, as I have practiced in California, I have been called on to bear witness to stories about jail and prison and will make an effort to depict them as they do impact public mental health facilities in significant ways.

The Evolution of the Fish in a Tank

A silk swim swish slides through water

Settling to a sit still for a momentary sigh

Till tail then thrusts inching forward

Flaunting beauty through water

With an unacknowledged triumphant cry.

As the fish meanders, does it find

Aquatic objects

Dancing in pirouettes as they wind

Dizzy in their swirls of activity

That exists and so aptly reflects

The complexity of simplicity’s relativity

Do the colored stone

Produces patterns to be known

And reflected upon with revelation

And induce further observation?

Knocking a plastic weed

Already observed from many perspectives

Is its poor memory in a state of recede?

Reveling in stimuli devoured?

Contrast this stillness with the crazy outside

Projected in all of its valor

Amidst the peripheral proceeds.

Are observations selective?

Does the fish snatch serenity out of the incoming hail?

Shadows objects and colors, in grand stampede.

Or is the fish’s peace subjective

Defying the scientific objective

Filtering into its mind

The meaning of life unveiled,

Enhancing its perspective on power?

I pray the fish find’s its navigational extravaganza interesting

Twisting, turning, answering to its own requesting

Tolerating tank’s bubbles that are infesting

The water—bubbles sacrificed for the air’s ingesting

The result of human technological investing

In accordance with habitat evolutionary testing

As time goes on never resting

Dispersing thumping bubbles manifesting

A gurgling tickle in the fishes heart, jesting

In much the same way rhyme can be molesting.

The prime

Experience

Of time

Is intense

By design.

As intelligence

Sells time’s

Great essence

(which is Divine)

Humans dispense

Sad whines

Used to finance

The time’s

Disappearance

Into caged confines

Twenty-four hours a day the fish faces time’s insistence.

If it gets tired it will face the next seconds’ crime

Without the ability to murmur defiance

In mime

Spoken silence

Fish chimes:

“I know I’m

No influence

Enzyme,

Can’t sense

Time’s occurrence

I’m resigned

In truancy

To find

Future persistence

With time’s

Insistence,

Benign.

My credence

Is my spine’s

Indifference.”

And so does time ticks on

Not getting the fish anywhere

With the absence of change’s dare?

Occurrences have lulled around in quietness;

But then stop. Nose nubs against glass. The edge.

There sits a judging human bearing witness

To the fishes nothingness and dredge,

The production-less-ness of its existence,

The meaninglessness of mere subsistence

The fish stares back at this human desire

A flame of possessive fire

And so the fish is overwhelmed as it nears

The bottomless pit of the human eye

That bears the selfishness of death to fear

Greedy, heartbroken and dire– that eye

Of dreams dispersed like water into the wind

Bearing the rage of needs within

Salty, spiteful, smacking with grinning sneer.

At this moment, the fish seizes its immortal right

It thinks about craziness at drunken parties,

About promiscuous sprees and marriage decrees

And the baby that it observed appeared one night.

The fish perceives the human’s eternal plight

With tears that if uttered could fill the seas

The inevitability of loneliness summoning their pleas

That are extended to soften life’s bitter bite.

Human freedom—both material and intellectual

Might be beyond the realm of the fish’s captivity;

But human imprisonment is architectural,

Constructed of obligatory conformity and emotions

That are multi-wired tangles of electrical activity

All based on the premise of monetary devotion.

The potency of a prison will never be deluded,

A psychiatry reserved for the destituted.

Now, in the moment when the fish in the tank

Knows that humans and fish do not differ

It ponders the cage descending from God-given life, a miffer,

Until  human takes a net an scoops up the fish’s good soul

And fucking swallows the fish whole

Deeper into the reality we will call human skank!

A Fish in an Aquarium

A silk swim swish slides through water

Settling to a sit still for a momentary sigh

Till tail then thrusts inching forward

Flaunting beauty through water

With an unacknowledged triumphant cry.

 

As the fish meanders, does it find

Aquatic objects

Dancing in pirouettes as they wind

Dizzy in their swirls of activity

That exists and so aptly reflects

The complexity of simplicity’s relativity

Do the colored stone

Produces patterns to be known

And reflected upon with revelation

And induce further observation?

Knocking a plastic weed

Already observed from many perspectives

Is its poor memory in a state of recede?

Reveling in stimuli devoured?

 

Contrast this stillness with the crazy outside

Projected in all of its valor

Amidst the peripheral proceeds.

Are observations selective?

Does the fish snatch serenity out of the incoming hail?

Shadows objects and colors, in grand stampede.

Or is the fish’s peace subjective

Defying the scientific objective

Filtering into its mind

The meaning of life unveiled,

Enhancing its perspective on power?

 

I pray the fish find’s its navigational extravaganza interesting

Twisting, turning, answering to its own requesting

Tolerating tank’s bubbles that are infesting

The water—bubbles sacrificed for the air’s ingesting

The result of human technological investing

In accordance with habitat evolutionary testing

As time goes on never resting

Dispersing thumping bubbles manifesting

A gurgling tickle in the fishes heart, jesting

In much the same way rhyme can be molesting.

 

The prime

Experience

Of time

Is intense

By design.

As intelligence

Sells time’s

Great essence

(which is Divine)

Humans dispense

Sad whines

Used to finance

The time’s

Disappearance

Into caged confines

 

Twenty-four hours a day the fish faces time’s insistence.

If it gets tired it will face the next seconds’ crime

Without the ability to murmur defiance

 

In mime

Spoken silence

Fish chimes:

“I know I’m

No influence

Enzyme,

Can’t sense

Time’s occurrence

I’m resigned

In truancy

To find

Future persistence

With time’s

Insistence,

Benign.

My credence

Is my spine’s

Indifference.”

 

And so does time ticks on

Not getting the fish anywhere

With the absence of change’s dare?

 

Occurrences have lulled around in quietness;

But then stop. Nose nubs against glass. The edge.

There sits a judging human face bearing witness

To the fishes nothingness and dredge,

The production-less-ness of its existence,

The meaninglessness of mere subsistence

 

The fish stares back at this human desire

A flame of possessive fire

And so the fish is overwhelmed as it nears

The bottomless pit of the human eye

That bears the selfishness of death to fear.

That human eye of dreams dispersed like water into the wind

Bearing the rage of needs within

Salty, spiteful, smacking with grinning sneer.

 

At this moment, the fish seizes its immortal right

It thinks about craziness at drunken parties,

About promiscuous sprees and marriage decrees

And the baby that it observed appeared one night.

The fish perceives the human’s eternal plight

With tears that if uttered could fill the seas

The inevitability of loneliness summoning their pleas

That are extended to soften life’s bitter bite

 

Human freedom—both material and intellectual

Might be beyond the realm of the fish’s captivity;

But human imprisonment is architectural,

Constructed of obligatory conformity and emotions

That are multi-wired tangles of electrical activity

All based on the premise of monetary devotion.

The potency of a prison will never be deluded,

A psychiatry reserved for the destituted.

 

Now, in the moment when the fish in the tank

Knows that humans and fish do not differ

It ponders the cage descending from God-given life, a miffer,

Then, the human takes a spoon and swallows the fish whole.

This is the reality of human skank!

Male Love Unleashed

That a love could be totally true

Was a repressed concept within me

When apathy was what my heart knew.

 

Many infatuations did ensue

Until the painful day came to be

When apathy was what my heart knew.

 

I had come to scorn the romantic who

Passionately from their heart did believe

That a love could be totally true;

 

However, moved by bewilderment with you

I let your character infiltrate me

When apathy was what my heart knew.

 

So I chose to put my faith in you

And believed your heart as it stated sweetly

That a love can be totally true.

 

When you jaded me and left me blue

I regret having come to decree

That a love can be totally true

When apathy was what my heart knew.

2016 Human Relations Indie Book Awards

Winner of four categories!!!

 Director’s Choice Award for Outstanding Human Relations Life Adjustment Indie Book.
Gold Winner, Inspirational Human Relations Indie Book
Silver Winner Problem Solving Human Relations Indie Book
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The Longings of Lonliness: Published on bayart.org

 

Working against the constant spank of summer,

Loneliness negotiated a groove into the hard rock

Although it seemed so pointless.

I do not know how this project was initiated.

Nor do I know how he came to inhabit this mountain top;

But I did watch him grind skull against earth’s flesh

The nose hoeing, the teeth raking

Digging himself a trench

All the while wondering if dust would dissipate.

He gathered me in the well of his eyes

And carried me in his knapsack

Through the monotony of the years

Thirsting for company beneath the Sun

And my infinite potential for evaporation.

Loneliness ate stone to stave off thirst,

And fueled his weary body with aspirations

Dreaming of mountain meadows, of pine groves,

Of honey suckle that hearkens the buzz of bees

Honing in on the hive of the sweetest fruit—

Dreaming dreams that could even saturate me

As he set me into this trench.

Indeed, time had tackled Loneliness

Leaving his mountaintop to rot.

So the mountain folk flocked to his hillside

Sobbing and moaning and beating back midnight

With a bonfire that could burn the desert.

Now sitting in this trench,

I know it is time to bring Loneliness home

So down the mountainside I flow, an incision,

Grass and brush gathering around my bank

As I beckon the dear, the bear, the fowl.

And this is where I’ve come to flow past you, my love,

Where I have witnessed your garden

Where your soil holds me like a sponge

While you sit sniffing lilacs and lilies.

Here you walk through the rhododendron and dogwood

And I beckon perpetually against your door,

Presenting myself to you, lapping

With all the longings of Loneliness

 

 

 

Living with Schizophrenia in Oakland: Posted on bayart.org, December 10, 2016

Through a sea of tissues and a hacking cough, I scan Netflix pressing that stubborn button on my Roku remote multiple times. I read the summations of shows for several minutes until I come across a documentary called, the 13th. Finally, I settle in. Resting is not an easy thing to do with that constant sense of urgency I live with.

I don’t know what’s worse these days: dragging through a pre-holiday week on the outpatient psychiatric unit on Dayquil; or listening to the radio talk about impending loss as the new cabinet of Trump supporters get selected.

A cross town slog into East Oakland after work on the unit one night last week revealed once again that the streets are ever-burgeoning with homeless, some of whom I know intimately. In each car encampment, I saw a distinctive cultural story that needs to be heard.

Living with “Schizophrenia” is not all that hard of a thing to do when you have a warm bed and a Roku machine. Sure there are memories of your brothers and sisters you left behind in the barracks of State Hospitals. Sure, there are people you work with who are still in such grave poverty. But when you have a happy marriage, gainful employment, and a meaningful pastime, it isn’t really all that difficult. Isn’t difficult, that is, except for the fact that you have to stay silent about a world unobserved by most; except for the guilt you have for having survived atrocity when others still haven’t gotten to the other side yet.

Out walking with my wife, earlier in the day we discussed the value of protest, from the North Dakota Pipeline to Black Lives Matter. It is really uncanny these days how afraid I am to join something that I once felt was part of my democratic rights. It is not so much the teargas or the rubber bullets or the pepper spray in my eyes that hold me back. It is my job, my trauma history, my fear of sending the county that employs me the wrong message.

State surveillance is something that kept able-bodied me remarkably underemployed for several years. For those Americans who think this is not possible in our democracy, I have written a book for you. Perhaps, if I had known that I was wearing an ankle bracelet, it may have helped me accept the fact that I had only one job opportunity in spite of hundreds of resumes and applications. The irony that the job entailed work at an Italian Delicatessen when I believed the mob was following me just didn’t occur to anyone. It wasn’t the fact that with bike commute, I had to work twelve hours a day for nine thousand dollars a year that made it difficult. It was the cutting personal harassment and the fact that everyone thought I was just a schizophrenic and not worth seeing.

And to this day, it is striking what can be accomplished and just get swept under the rug. Since my recovery, my memoir has won awards in three contests. I have written and directed a program that brought specialized group treatment into hospitals, local agencies, and homeless shelters that was very successful. I maintained tenure at my job with my psychotherapy license during this time. All this and the county still does not interface with me as it strives to implement my program. Very few people have endeavored to read my book. I still battle with that same sense of invisibility.

But as the documentary the 13th proceeds in my weakened state, I see aspects of my experience unfold. I know what I went through and continue to fight doesn’t just happen to mad people who get subjected to the medical model. The realities of mass incarceration, which afflicts every person of color and immigrant person as well gives me new angles on accepting the shit that I went through. The fact is that what I went through seemed so unique, when it hits close to home for the broad majority.

Bigoted laws disproportionately target the majority. I have always known this, especially when I was in my altered state; but the documentary helps validate the effects of incarceration. Additionally seeing the visualizations of the numbers afflicted helps me feel glad that I have been targeted too.

Seeing the young African American man in the documentary get targeted for refusing to accept a guilty plea was something that I particularly related to. For a long time I refused to accept that I am “a schizophrenic” in a similar manner. I took me such a long time to accept that I could have three months taken from me and be reduced to the most ridiculous poverty and subsequent homelessness over nothing that would ever be explained to me. But though that refusal to accept injustice that I relate to so intimately, hurt me personally, it did not result in the death of me. The fact that I survived and the young African American man died, it just speaks to my own ongoing white privilege that exists with my bed and my Roku and my snot rags.

Of all the movies that touched me during the two and a half years I lived in an altered state, none did so as strongly as Chris Rock’s routine in the movie, Down to Earth. Watching Chris Rock fret about being caught with the rich, dead man tickled me to no end. There sat the murderous wife cool as a cucumber without a care in the world. It was exactly what it is like working at an Italian Deli when you think the mob (and the Feds) are following you. I laughed inappropriately for hours. It was about mass incarceration.

But what I find so hopeful watching this documentary, the 13th, is that against all the lies of power and stigma, the truth can be represented and told. I am grateful that the mainstream who endeavor to give it a chance might come to understand the effects of mass incarceration and how it too could happen to them.

These days perhaps I am not the only person lying sick in my bed waiting for things to get much worse. If there are others there with me, I would highly recommend watching this documentary. It is oh so good to know that ultimately the truth can prevail in our minds. It makes me proud that I broke my book contract because they wanted to edit away my commentary on racial disparity. It makes me proud that the county does not interface with me about my efforts. It makes me proud that I protested in the WTO protest and that I now can support protests which make 13th possible in a variety of meaningful ways. Simply put, the documentary, the 13th gives me a ray of hope that I am not all alone with “Schizophrenia” and suffering without purpose. It helps me prepare for what is to come for the multitudes in the bay area in the immediate future.