The Wake Up
Day two. Day two of what? You might be asking yourself this. Just don't get you're knickers in a bind there, Janie, I'll get there, one way or another. Freedom kids, freedom. Not that boring old kind of shit that the damn hippy generation used to wax poetic about, but the real thing. No more locked doors, heavy metal mesh screens, time to eat, sleep etc. This is an infinite goodness that I can't describe to anyone who's not been under an institutional thumb. Not to say that I don't appreciate the hospitality and all, but the sunshines a little different on you when you can actually smell the exhaust in the air, and not just watch the world through a window. A small piece of the world at that.
Let's get it straight here, I wasn't in the hoosegaw or any such nonsense. I'm not out there robbing liqour stores with a "Born To Lose" tattoo on my arm or some bullshit even remotely in that realm. It's been a good while since I committed a bonafide, criminal act, and by God, I hope it stays that way. My friends, your darling narrator was in the puzzle factory, the nut house, crazy town, the cuckoo's nest, yes, the psychiatric ward. Although, I must say it was the finest institution the city of Richmond has to offer, or so I've heard. If you're going to go batshit, at least do it in style. I've not had the opportunity to sample the hospitality of any of the other establishments in the area. Say a prayer for me children, so that I don't have to.
Anyway, let me dispense with some of the bullshit here, and get down to the nitty gritty, or the tough titty, depending on your prevalence for the unseemly. I leave that distinction completely up to you, most loved reader. All of this may be a startling admission to you, but I guess if it is, you need to get out more, and you need to find more interesting people to hang around. Life's too short for it to be boring, this I've realized recently. The past few months have been rather rough on your old pal here and my mental facilities had once again taken a sharp decline. I was both taking and creating disasters in just about every area of my life that one can possibly come up with. I have not been very much in the winners circle, of late, as I'm sure you can probably guess.
My lease mate and I were having some real difficulties about the state of things. Despite my best efforts and protestations, "get up and keep going" seemed to be the only thing she had for ideas in the way of things getting any better. This had become a herculean task on my part, and also included a ten day vacation to my bed. Let me tell you what, for one reason or another the demons in my bed have the strongest grip I've ever come across, and without the help of some trusted cohorts, I'd probably still be there now. Eating, sleeping and showering had become long missed after thoughts by that point. My own humanity seemed to be slipping away into that three a.m. "dark midnight of the soul" that a brilliant man once commented on, not to mention my sanity. Not to say that she was wrong in any way, she was just a little off the mark. I was off the planet.
I rallied my strength and got up and out every day and went about the tedious process of filling out job applications and begging for a paycheck at every stop on the highway and finally landed something. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't fun, but it was good work and it was some money coming in. Unfortunately, the demons inside my swiss cheese brain were having none of it, and my visits to two, three and four a.m. didn't care about any job status one bit. After a few months of an unholy inability to get a full nights sleep, I finally got in a good six hours. Six hour from six in the morning, leaving me more than three hours late for that new paycheck producing employment. The brain that I thought could torture me no more than it already was went into a maddening kind of over drive.
In the weeks previous to all of this, I'd been experiencing a degree of anxiety and paranoia that were completely unnatural to me. Anxiety's normal for me to one degree or another, but this was like putting a jet engine on a motor scooter, and paranoia like that hasn't been in my realm for a good while. That is indeed why I stopped playing with that White Lady from Columbia or Peru a good while back. To be sober as a judge, able to realize that what was going on in my head was not necessarily real, and still have it constantly overwhelming all of my other thought processes, was the most exhausting thing I've come across yet. Let me tell you what, your friendly narrator has been a construction laborer, landscape grunt, and low level laborer in a thousand other jobs, none of them wore my ass out like trying to keep track of the idea that my closest friends in the world, and for that matter no one else was plotting my downfall in one way or another. As the great Jubal Harshaw commented, "Sometimes, the weight is just too much for people to carry, but they keep trying." It seems that my mistake was to keep trying, without any help, and breaking my own will in the process.
Kids, this had been some months in the coming. It had been coming so gradually though that until my sanity meter was in the red, I hadn't much noticed that it was getting worse. But the day inevitably came when the thought of continuing on was more painful and frightening than the thought of trying to toil on, and I knew that come that three a.m. hour, I was not going to be safe for myself or for anyone else for that matter. The telephone (no matter who invented the damn thing, for Christs sake) is a saving grace. I picked that thing up and dialed the one person that my possessed Indy car of a brain would still agree to trust and dialed him up. After a few hours of my ranting and bawling (God, I must have looked quite the pathetic mess, and sounded it too) the conclusion that was reached that I should go talk to some of those there shrink doctors and see what they thought. They thought they wanted to keep an eye on me for a while.
Now this too might be a big shocker to ya, but it's not the first time I've been in the nut ward, so I knew the rules right off. But, I'll tell you this, it's never an uplifting feeling to know that you're going to spend some time with a bunch of people who are as crazy as you are. Forgive me all, but some that were even crazier than I was too. I at least knew that I was crazy and that my brain was feeding me more bullshit than a beef packaging plant. Not everyone was that lucky. My friends schizophrenia is one of the saddest things I've ever seen, and I will pray for everyone of those folks until the day my life does actually end. And I don't mean that damned Hollywood kind of crap, but the real thing because it can absolutely cut anyone off from the outside world, and that must be one of the loneliest things a human being can experience. Being alone no matter who you're with, where you are or go, because of something in your brain that isn't working right is something that none of us would want to have everyday of our lives.
Well, to get on with things, it seems that I am also someone with a mental illness, luckily though it has a high recovery rate with treatment. This is a fact that I've been told before, but like so many other things, I was less than willing to accept. Who wants to be bodily and mentally different from his fellows? Not me for certain. Though I'd been pressed into a corner because I'd done all I knew to correct things, and they weren't getting correct, no matter what I did. It was eighteen days for me, in a hospital that usually only keeps people for five days at the max and tries to get them out of there faster. It was dark days there for a while, really damn dark. But my sleep started to look something like normal, and there's definitely a change for the positive in my state of mind (though still probably not yet 100%), and I put back on the weight that I'd lost in the last couple of months. I at least feel at this point that with some help and a lot of effort and patience, things could brighten up some, and that's a good change.
I have learned a few things along this part of my jagged journey too. Hopefully, I'll be able to learn even more as time passes. This though is the big one for me. Human beings really love to spend a whole lot of time figuring out how different they are from one and other, laying down all kinds of lines of distinction, boxes to fit ourselves and others in, and a bunch of bullshit that is about as real as the voices in the head of a schizophrenic. The only thing that makes them real is that he believes that they are. For my money, I'm done with all that. I'm no better than any of you fools out there who would believe I was, and no less than any of you arrogant sons of bitches who'd believe that either. The lesson for me here is that we're all swimming around the same cesspool, and if we don't start scooping the shit out, none of us is going to be able to keep our heads above it.