My Success At Failure

Posted on | November 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

I fear a lot of things.

Some of them are obscure and weird. For example, I ate Lobster last night. I fear that one of you might want to shake my hand. Only trace remnants of the lobster remain but you might be deadly allergic. I think about what it would be like if I killed you. Then I think if I should have mentioned the lobster in this speech. It costs a lot. Maybe the Mental Health Commission will think I just ordered it because they were paying for it.

I fear that right now you aren’t going to pay attention. That you are going to be lost in sexual fantasies about your classmates or you are going to take down a lot of notes you’ll never look at and forget everything I have said.

I’m not here to talk to you about journalism.

This won’t be on a test.

(Apparently this will be on a test)

I figure most of you won’t become journalists. I figure now is my chance to talk to you while you are young and say somethings that people never said to me.

This is in the hopes that you all become adults. One out of five of you will deal with a serious mental illness this year. Two out of three won’t go forward to get help due to the idea that you failed at being a person and getting treatment would be admitting that failure.

I’m here to talk to you about my success at failure.

I’m not going to tell you about how I failed Grade 10 math because I was a puberty explosion and my teacher was hot and I spent my time thinking about things that would get poor Miss Delaney arrested. That’s irrelevant.

My greatest fear is that somehow I won’t become what I was supposed to be.

I’m sure you have felt it to. That somehow you could make your life exactly the way you want it to be. That you just weren’t trying hard enough.

At 25, I worried until I was worried about how much I worried.  I was so scared that I wouldn’t be able to sleep that I couldn’t sleep. I went for months on two hours of sleep a night. I wanted to be normal. Just normal, able to eat, sleep, work and love.  I prayed to lose this thing that was killing me even if it is the same thing that made me a good person. I wanted to be normal even if that mean I’d no longer be special.

I was stuck in a negative cycle where thinking became torture and all I could do was hope for an escape. I know what it is like when the pain was so bad that you forget the world. I understand what people who commit suicide are thinking.  Suicide is the failure of all language to reach you. It’s like selective deafness. Where you can only hear yourself and you don’t have any good things left to say. I never knew the world went away. I was lucky to have people in my life that reminded who I was when I forgot. I got to see the world return and nothing is more beautiful.

No one ever told me about mental illness, not in all my years of school.  I learned about it from watching my friends weep and hold each other in the King’s Chapel, when a brilliant boy named Jason Lionel Walsh didn’t get to grow up. Seeing how much one person could affect hundreds, living with his absence, as my friends used each other as crutches for fear we would become dominoes. I learned about it from Aaron when we did mushrooms in Middle Bay and he added mescaline and had a hallucination where he stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I watched him disappear behind pills and powders. And I was lucky enough to be there when he finally got the help needed. One of my best friends got returned to me.  I learned about mental illness from watching my friends commit suicide and become addicted to drugs.

I have to believe there is a better way.

I think a lot of us believe that we aren’t what we should be. That we live each day mourning the fact that we didn’t grow up to become the people we thought we would.  You know that inner child that keeps bothering you. Kick his ass. He is just a kid and he doesn’t know any better plus he’s small. You can’t learn without making mistakes.

On the topic of making mistakes, a week ago I was hanging out with a friend of mine. The mistake wasn’t hanging out with my friend.  We used to go to karaoke together but my rendition of Hulk Hogan’s “I’m real a American” involved tearing off my shirt and has led to us no longer being welcome at said karaoke.

She was telling me about how she read an article about how our memory is changed each time we recall it. To her the horror was the idea that every single moment of your life changes your past, that the twisted little monkey that exists in your brain, fucks with the works and changes Mona Lisa’s into monsters. Part of me, being an optimist, saw something hopeful in this. That the meaning of the past can be rewritten. We are not bound by the past, the past is bound to us. It’s a fiction that suits whatever you believe at the time. And oftentimes it’s full of shit.  It means that you don’t ever truly know what your life is, that your brain is too flawed an instrument to measure your own worth.

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Monsters Don’t Hit Women, Our Friends Do

Posted on | November 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

I’m at an art gallery, drinking before I have eaten, trying my best to look sophisticated. I see pictures of Bill Clinton tenderly kissing Hilary on the lips, love in his eyes, staring at a woman he will disgrace and throw into the upper echelons of American politics. I see Michael Jackson on a swing set, looking like an abandoned child. I see police officers holding hands as Bobby Kennedy makes his way through Chicago.

But mostly I hear about Mel Gibson.

“So you are Jewish and like Mel Gibson?” I say, hoping to point out the obvious contradiction.

“What does that have to do with anything?” asks Nero, my friend I met while ordering a drink.

“Well he said some very anti-semitic things to that police officer,” I reply.

“Was he drunk?” asks my new friend Nero .

“Yeah.”

“And you never made off color remarks when you were drunk?” asks Nero.

“I think there is a difference between making off color remarks when you are drunk once and doing it constantly. He said that the Jews started all the major wars,” I say. “There is also the making of the Passion of the Christ.”

“What was wrong with that movie?” asks Nero.

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“It was long. Very long,” I reply.

“Lot of movies are long,” offers Nero. “The Godfather was long.”

“The Godfather didn’t feature Jesus saying that the Jews were to blame for his crucifixion and would suffer until the end of time for their sin,” I reply.

“That would be sort of off topic for the Godfather. Was it good?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Why?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“So you don’t like him because of something you haven’t seen?”

“It’s more than that.  I mean there is a ten-minute whipping scene. Graphic pointless stuff just to mock the Jews. The whole thing puts the blame for Jesus’s death on the Jews instead of the Romans.”

“I have seen ten minutes of whipping and rather enjoyed it,” says Nero.

“Different type of whipping I think.”

“What about his wife?”

“His wife?”

“He punched her in the mouth while she was holding her baby,” I say.

“How do you know this?” he asks.

“The recordings. The ones they put online.”

“You think she didn’t set him up?” he asks.

“She did ask him if he remembered when he punched her while she was holding the baby. He seemed to have no trouble recollecting it.”

“He punched her?”

“Yes.”

“Did he break her teeth?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then he didn’t punch her. A man of his build would break teeth. He is quite a good fighter.”  Nero shrugs his shoulders like he has proven his point.  “William Wallace would have broken her teeth.”

“He slapped her then…”

“There is a big difference between punching and slapping.”

“He hit his wife.”

“So did Gandhi. Hit his wife, hated black people and hung out with naked 11 year olds. People like him.”

“Gibson isn’t Gandhi.”

Why do people like Gandhi? I think about this often.  I should probably stop referring to myself as the Gandhi of Mental Health. People might start assuming these sorts of implications.

“He has a very serious drinking problem.  90% of people in prison commit their crimes when they are either drunk or on drugs.”

“He is a shitty drunk who hit his wife.”

I have a lot of compassion when I drink and don’t eat.

“A lot of people want to hit her their wife. They aren’t necessarily bad people,” says Nero.

“He is.”

“Have you met him?”

“No.”

“Did you like Mad Max?” he asks.

I nod.

“You like Braveheart?”  he asks.

“Yup.”

“The rest is just fucking conjecture.”

This article is not in defense of Mel Gibson and his drunken slandering of my people.

It is about something significantly more awkward.

We are sitting in a Starbucks and I’m assuming a reasonable explanation will be forthcoming.

“Nelson” got in touch with me on Facebook to inform me that he would be in my neighbourhood soon. Having not heard from him for quite sometime I assumed we would be talking about Jesus as recently this had become his favorite topic.  It quickly became clear that was not the case.

I asked him how he was doing.

Nelson said he was going to jail for hitting his wife.  That he was in Ontario because he wasn’t allowed to be anywhere near her. I asked if he was guilty. He said he was.  I asked why. He provided short hand of mental illness and a significant drug and alcohol problem. He also wondered if I still wanted to go grab some coffee.

There is something about the way he volunteered the information that made me curious. I have known other people who have hit their spouses, including a few women in the practice of hitting men you’d never suspect they’d be able to. This was the first I have ever heard someone admit it. What’s more it was Nelson.

So I am ordering an Avanti sized green tea and trying to put things into some sort of perspective. I am contemplating Gandhi as I often do. Trying to make sense of the idea of a leader in non-violence hitting his wife.  You figure someone like that would take their work home with them.

Within a minute he arrives breaking me from my reverie.

I like punctual people.

Nelson isn’t Gandhi and is no longer well liked. This is not helped by his honest desire to tell everyone about what he did.

“Hey man,” I say.

We hug for a moment.

We sit down in the plus leather Starbucks seats and look for an opening line.

“So….how you been?” I ask.

He shrugs and we begin talking.

When I first met him he wrote poetry like Kerouac and had a drinking habit I assumed would be the death of him. He dressed in hipster hats and denim jackets. It was rare to see Nelson without a half empty 26er of rye and a handful of magic mushrooms.  He was one of those people you wouldn’t assume actually exist outside of movies and good literature.  He was Hunter S Thompson without the politics and his stories involved debauchery and the type of shit you don’t believe happens in real life. He did poetry that pissed people off and he shouted it like we were all going deaf and he had something important to say.

See Nelson had an obsession with farming and digging a hole that he couldn’t dig himself out of.  Before I met him, he was slowly dying on that farm, as a lack of feed back, left him alone with his delusions, without a world to bring him back to sanity.  Somehow he dug through the center of the earth and found himself in China, or rather, my hometown of Halifax. He sold the farm and was living a rather confusing life in the big city

When he offered fresh milk to a female friend of mine I wasn’t sure if he was offering sexual favors until he pulled out a gigantic container of cows milk from his backpack. He has the type of passion for life that was like a firecracker, half lit ready to explode in everyone’s face.

He started filming my freestyles and captured a lot of strange things on tape.  Including a five-minute film of my very determined attempts to sleep with a rather horrible girl.  This passion for film led to a short and unfulfilled dream to make porno movies with couples that care for each other.

I remember when the experiment collapsed.

“The whole porn thing was a test from the lord,” explained Nelson.  “The whole idea was a test of my spiritual beliefs, my book of Job.  I could turn to the Lord or turn away.  I was really lucky that I didn’t end up filming anything. I would have shamed my family.”

Next he was sober seeing signs of Jesus, dressing like a 1920s businessman in suits with tails and falling in love shortly after. He didn’t drink, do drugs and every conversation became about the Lord. In the IMF, my rap crew that included mostly atheists and poets, he tried to make us see the face of God.  From most it would be incredibly obnoxious and hard to deal with. In this Nelson was not an exception.

Soon finding God led him to finding her. She was also very into the Lord and him.  Suddenly they were married and he couldn’t stop smiling or sermonizing. He had a strange sense of stability that seemed like he had stepped out of his past into a future he could live with.  We didn’t see him very much and it didn’t matter because he was happy.

Unfortunately his greatest addiction called him away from his happy life.  He went back to the country to start a new farm with his new wife. With trademark obsession he ripped life from the earth and himself. Gradually all human contact ceased except for his wife.  His life became fishing and planting, growing beneath the earth and withering above it.

It was his Noah’s arc and the world he escaped lead to the edge of himself.

When love begins you shut out the world to experience it in its totality, and to protect the people in your life from the absolute nature of your addiction. For a while you survive, like man walking on the moon with one last hit of oxygen as you hold your breath and hope the asphyxiation lasts forever. Eventually you need the world again. Because bullshit is the foundation of every relationship and without other people to make fun of, world events to mock and stories to share, you become Romeo and Juliet stuck in hell, proclaiming your love with nothing left to say but beautiful soliloquy’s, trading a perfect script for the world. Without bullshit we die.

It was Nelson, his wife and his farm and the Shining effect started to kick in.

Booze and drugs entered the mix. He turned against himself and he gradually turned against the only person who had ever brought sense to his life. He has always been imaginative in regards to his sanity.  Nelson is the sort of guy who has visions of God and you wonder if he might be schizophrenic. He certainly had a bad case of depression and an extreme sense of reality.

It’s not easy being with a person when they totally and completely lose their mind.

On the farm, there was no one else to lean on. Things started to go bad with her and there wasn’t anyone else. No one should ever become your world. The world is a horrible place.

I always thought he would kill himself. I never thought he would hurt her.

It could have gone the other direction fairly easily. When you are young your stories aren’t set in stone.  A few small coincidences and you die before anyone gets to know who are you. A few small steps in the other direction and you ruin your life and have to live with the shame.

He spent the afternoon in his barn with his neck in the noose shortly before the incident that would lose him a wife and most of the friends he had.  When she found him, hysterical, she didn’t know what to say to bring him back to himself.  In an argument without sanity to govern its border, he beat her.

I can’t say what he was thinking during those moments.

I know that when I was on the furthest edges of my own process of falling down it was hurting the woman I loved that brought me back. Instead of violence, I acted with extreme jealousy and made someone who walked me through hell feel unloved. It was seeing her tears that led me back to myself. Showing me that I had a choose in how I lived.

Hurting her is the moment he relives a thousand times a day. A completely stupid irrational moment where he lost control of himself and lost the one person who was important to him.

Nelson tried to get help and was told he had to wait between six months and a year. He was told that he wasn’t sick enough.  He tried to get himself institutionalized and they wouldn’t let him stay. When his wife pressed charges he was relieved that his actions would have consequences. He believes that God wants to help other people before they reach the same place. That maybe some good would come out of the hate that lived inside of him.

He hasn’t talked to her since the charges have been laid and hasn’t been able to say sorry. Most of the people in his life have given up on him. One by one he has lost most of his connections that keep him in the world.

He might have expected to lose me as well.

Hypothetical Michael Kimber wouldn’t be a friend with anyone who could hit a woman. However my logic for my friends is not the same I apply to Mel Gibson. It’s hard to hate someone for a principal when you look them in the eye and they look exactly like someone you love.

To hurt the person you love most is the most horrible thing a human can do.  Something we all do to greater and lesser degrees in the relationships that are most important to us. I don’t think I have that sort of hate in me.  Neither did he.

There is a desire to demonize people who show us what we are all capable of.  To rid ourselves of reminders of the incredibly fragile nature of our existence as the people we would like to be, we decide what actions can come from people we love and what actions must engender a holy form of judgment. There is this sense that if we acknowledge the humanity of an abuser, we take away the humanity of the abused. I think that we do as much harm to the victims by denying the humanity of their attackers. We make it a game of good and evil and it doesn’t happen in real life. This is not a problem the victims can solve. This is not a problem we can solve by giving up on people like Nelson. We all wish we lived in a world where it was stupid to love someone who would hurt us. Where it was easily predictable and you could divide the good from the bad and walk in a straight line from birth to love to death to heaven.  Unfortunately a lot of people who lived fucked up lives passed that onto other people. Broken begat broken until our history was a fist that moved like an arrow through time.  Most of us have some sort of scar that we pass onto the next person we love.

I have to believe there is a way back, even from this.  I have seen drug addicts whose lives became lies, fight their way back and become people I deeply respect. Self-destructive people live until that part of themselves that try to kill them dies and they get a moment of crushing calm. I have seen people get help and come back from extremely dark places.  They needed help and the system isn’t set up to help people like Nelson.

I am not trying to justify his actions.  Mental illness isn’t an excuse. Nor is booze and drugs.  There is little he can do to get back the love that meant so much to him. I think you have to take responsibility for your actions. Nelson hasn’t run away from that. He wants to do his time. I know he means it because he doesn’t hesitate to tell you what he has done. He doesn’t try to justify it. He wants to change himself and the first step in doing so is acknowledging his problem.

I know we can get better. I also know that we need people in our lives to do so.  That we need a reminder that someone who remembers the best parts of us.

1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime. We can’t deal with it by pretending that it’s one guy named Tregar who is doing it. They aren’t hit by monsters. They are hit by people we know.  I have known a lot of people who have been crushed by their demons. Done things they never thought they were capable of doing. When we saying that a terrible action is inhumane, we deny our own human possibilities.  By restricting domestic abuse to evil people, we stop ourselves from doing anything to improve the situation in the future.

I don’t know Mel Gibson. I do know Nelson.

He isn’t a monster.

He is my friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book of Job Chapter 1: Loving Kindness Meditation for Motherfuckers

Posted on | November 7, 2011 | No Comments

Free at 23

It was the summer of Arab Spring where a few thousand Western Jerk offs claimed responsibility for changing the world with their twitter accounts. Where Arabs fought and died for a dream of a democracy we’d long since abandoned. Where a famine struck Africa and a few people wondered why there wasn’t a dislike button on Facebook.

Where for a moment the mind blowing apathy of my generation ended and we took to the streets to see if we too could grasp that dream of democracy and tear it out of the hands of corporate fat cats and unreliable government bureaucrats. It was a time of fires, floods, plagues and apocalypses predicted that came and went with little lamentation. The economy had AIDS and rock and roll had Justin Bieber.

My barber gave me a fade and I was feeling bad to the bone.

I was currently living the dream of my generation, working at a job that allows me to get by, pay for rent, food and some drinks with my friends, so that I could forget about my future for a while.

It’s April, 2011,  a few days after my 27^th birthday and everything I’ve built for myself is about to fall apart.

I’m sitting in my underwear staring at the wall, with my legs crossed, my back straight and my mind focused on the misery of others.

I’m determined to become a better man and I have been told that compassion for others will turn into compassion for myself. Technically I only need to focus on wishing people well. I find that compassion works better when there is a little sympathy involved.

It’s called the Loving Kindness Meditation and it involves four steps.  The first is calling to mind a teacher, someone you love that has guided you along the way and you wish that they don’t suffer. Take into account their life and what they have had to go through to inspire you.  The second involves an acquaintance, someone you barely know who has little effect on your life and you try to get a sense of what makes them tick, what problems they have overcome and you wish them well. Many find the third stage as the most difficult and it’s finding compassion for the people you have the most conflict with.  The fourth is the most difficult for me and involves finding compassion for myself.

For the last two week step 3 has been the most important.

But let’s start at the beginning so you can breath deeply and feel your pulse slow with mine.

I strip out of my clothes.

Too tight, too binding.

Gaze in awe at my finely toned muscles and abs of steel.  When you dream, reach out and grab a hold of my pelt of chest hair and know that you are loved. Smell the old Spice that reminds every girl of the last dude they fucked.

I tightly close the door, which the cat somehow manages to open more regularly than I would like him too. Thankfully this hasn’t happened after I freshly emerged from the shower or during the portions of my day when I violently praise the beauty of naked women on the Internet.

I grab two pillows and plant my ass on them.

I stare at the wall and let the flurry of thoughts and tension pass into the stillness of my body. Some people close their eyes when they meditate but I have too active an imagination.  So I stare at the little dots on my wall until they form some sort of meaningful pattern. I focus on my breath without doing anything to change it. Just paying attention to the feel of hot air escaping my nostrils and the cool air as it runs down my throat, into my lungs and makes me live.  Someone once told me that when you hold your body still enough, your mind has to follow.

I’m not thinking about my future. I’m just letting all thought slide across the screen, making no effort to catch and hold, words of a script I don’t need to act out.  Each time I grab onto a thought, I let myself ride for a moment or two and then casually disengage.  Thoughts are like astrology, little tidbits that only change your life if you let them. Not a secret code to unlock your existence. Just a bunch of neurons firing out a game you make deadly serious.

I’m there. In the quiet that’s peaceful enough that I can begin to care.

Step one involves thinking of my teachers. It’s my parents. I contemplate my dad’s calm and my mother’s courage.  My dad is the relaxed voice that talks me through my problems. Both sides of my family tree have dealt with crippling anxiety disorders and he sits apart as the calmest person I have ever met in my life. I think of him driving me to the hospital the first time I ever had a panic attack, which at the time seemed like a heart problem. How he pushed so hard on the gas that we were driving 150 kilometers an hour down Robie Street, until my mother had to tell him to slow down. I remember thinking about how love can break down any wall if it pushes hard enough.

And I wish him well.

My mother is the shotgun of heart that lies beyond the chaos, that desire to care for her people and destroy any world that would threaten their happiness. She is the woman who came to my high school graduation and asked for me to point out the kid who bullied me in junior high school so she could finally have her chance to beat the shit out of him.  She is the woman who dealt with the issues that left me paralyzed in an age before they knew how to help someone with anxiety. She is the voice of Aslan, reading me bedtime stories when I first dealt with insomnia as a small boy.

I wish her well.

My acquaintance is the woman who makes me two for one falafels every Tuesday. The hippies turned me onto it.  She is a beautiful brown woman with expressive eyes who no longer asks me what I want and simply begins constructing me a falafel with extra hot sauce and no taboulei. I imagine the first Falafel she made. How she struggle to get it just right. Then the thousandth Falafel with extra hot sauce.  Then the ten thousandth. What her feet must feel like after a full day standing up.  Just the idea of her arms performing those same mechanical actions over and over, each time with a different thought, each time she makes the falafel it isn’t the same. How the sound of the falafel being deep-fried must become a song that she can’t get out of her head. I wonder what worlds she thinks about when she creates the meal that nourishes me throughout my day. I imagine sick relatives back in wherever she is from and how she works at the Falafel joint to support her little cousin who’s too young to work and how leftovers must taste like champagne and caviar on New Year’s eve.  And I understand this is all make believe but there is more to her than I can see. The meaning of her life isn’t 2 for 1 Tuesday. That’s just the meaning of her life to me.

I wish her well.

We’ve arrived at the toughest part.  Part Number 3, where I to find compassion for someone I intensely dislike.

Her name is Samantha and she works with me at “Fantastic World Books”.

All physical descriptions of her must be entirely fake as I must make it clear that I never talk about the people I work with. So I will try to paint a picture of her that is as inaccurate as possible. Her smile lights up the room.  She looks like a 1970s Pornstar that became a single mom and still dresses like Kelly Kapowski.  She has gigantic horn rimmed glasses and resembles a librarian with hipster children.

When not thinking about her during moments of meditation, I might be drawn to describing the way she speaks to everyone as if they were five years old, her rigorous sense of right and wrong which comes down to she’s right and you’re wrong. I might even mention that she constantly mutters to herself as she works.  But those aren’t the right thoughts to be focusing on while thinking compassionately about her existence. I think about her laugh. It has that same manic energy that draws you to look back at the Movie Theatre and wonder how you can get that good shit she’s on.  You can forget all her neurosis while you listen to her laugh.  It’s so unabashedly unashamedly her, neurotic, frenetic and honest.  Whatever else you can say about Samantha, she doesn’t lie.

One could describe her as murderously OCD.  I’ll go with particular. I try to imagine myself through her eyes, doing things outside of the righteous order that brings sense to the bookstore and to her life.

I try to put myself in her brain where everything is going too fast and life won’t fit into the proper order.  I can feel that twittery anxiety where you think people are watching you and you have no control over what they think. That sliding hot wave of lava that comes every time you make a comment and people aren’t sure how to react.  I can imagine how someone becomes socially awkward to the point they appear abrasive. Trying to carefully package your words and finding they always jump out of your hands and down the throat of others.  I also know that she has no bad intentions. She just can’t quite figure out how to connect.  I know what it’s like to say the wrong thing, to be impulsive and reactionary and have to apologize,

I can feel the love flooding my brain.

I can care about her. I can train this rage to compassion. I can smile when she follows me around the bookstore, correcting each thing I do, I can nod my head when she talks to me like a child. She just wants to do her best.

I don’t have to hate her.

I’m so filled with empathy that I let my imagination run wild. I’m twirling above the ground, dancing past homeless people, taking them into my heart. Seeing visions of their lives of abuse and the system that holds them down. I care. Watching Japanese Doctors with radiation victims, feeling the pain in their throats as they lean in and wonder how long they can stay in the field before they become infected.

Seeing how small my own problems are compared to those that crush these strangers. I can feel my own place in this world. A foolish 27 year old with a shitty dead end job and no real problems.

I get up and stumble around trying to get feeling back to my legs.

Ending meditation is like looking like down at the toilet and realizing how much shit just came out of you. Only it’s from your head.

Where are my pants?

I just have to get to work.  And find my pants.

Yes!

I found my pants.

Unfortunately today was going to be a bad day. I hadn’t solved the problem of Samantha. Read more

The Anniversary of My Mental Breakdown and the things we can’t replace

Posted on | November 2, 2011 | 4 Comments

You ever wonder where you are going to be in five years?

If you are like me you don’t have the slightest clue.

That idea used to scare me.

My friend told me that my nervous breakdown baffled him because it was  not about who I was but who I would become and my fear that I wouldn’t like the answer.

He told me I didn’t need to worry about it. No one could predict the future but he guaranteed it would be a surprise.

November 3^rd, 2011 is the two-year anniversary of that breakdown and he is right.

I never could have predicted I would be here.

Last year at this time I was celebrating signing with a literary agent, sure that I would be able to cash in the worst moments of my life for my dream of becoming a published author.

I was living in the basement of a neurotic Jewish author who I would soon get into a life and death confrontation over Internet bills. Where she would decide that my overuse of her limited Internet plan was a nefarious plot to destroy her.  Our relationship would dissolve over my refusal to pay for the Internet since it was covered in our lease.  She would stomp above my room and lose her hair over little more than a hundred dollars.  Eventually she would forbid me from having overnight guests in an effort to get me out of her house. She would succeed and I would move in with a couple of eccentric hippies with a chore wheel and I would leave after setting the house on fire and flooding the basement. Now I live with five wonderful people who came to Canada to learn English. I have learned of the wonders of Lollipop Land, gotten soused with a German who knows how to use a grenade launcher and learned that French men liked to have couples sleep over in their rooms.

Things change rapidly and new joys and pain enter your life and change you without asking permission.

During that year many of my friends from Halifax would come to Toronto try to find a new life and end up becoming my tequila heroes in an orgy of karaoke songs. Where at the zenith of this era, I would tear off my shirt in a room full of karaoke freaks and salute my new life with a spirited rendition of Hulk Hogan’s “I’m a real American” shortly before we were banned from ever coming back to a shitty little bar known as the Abbey.

Things have changed a lot in a year, even more in two.

At this time, two years ago, blue and purple wigs littered my circus red room; I was deeply in love and on the verge of losing my mind. I was fresh from University and had finally finished the book it took me eight years to write. I had no idea how I was going to grow up.

But let’s not go back that far back.

This is about the difference five years can make and the moment of weakness where I derailed my happy train of positive karma and brought about the shit summer that followed.

Come with me into the land of accidental arson and chore wheels.

It’s the middle of March 2011.

I live with hippies and have yet to become the worst roommate they have ever known.  A day or two earlier I lit the kitchen on fire. They aren’t sure if they can trust me but decide to give me another chance, which they certainly will live to regret.  The explanation of this fire is simple.

There was no salt for the ice on our front lawn and the mailmen wouldn’t deliver much needed checks.  So I decided to boil water in a nearby kettle, pour it on the ice and use a shovel to remove it.  No…please don’t bother explaining that even if this plan had worked it wouldn’t have been particularly well thought out.  Let me continue.

The kettle had no cord and I assumed it belonged on the stove. To my surprise the plastic base burst into flames. The clean up took several days of scrapping with a razor to get the plastic off the element.

As a result I was at the library so as to not smell the stink of burnt rubber that Febreeze was not qualified to eliminate.

This was the day that my music video was to be released.

This was the day that all of the work was supposed to pay off.

This was when I made mistake I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

In the span of two hours I had sent hundreds of emails, private messages via Facebook and alerted my whole network to share Cure A Visual Poem and spread my message. Hundreds of people were sharing the video on their Facebook walls and twitter let loose an orgasmic wail of support. Ideas of hundreds of thousands of views danced through my head. Book deals I would sign.  This was going to be the thing that made my name known.

Yes I wanted to get people to come out and share their stories of mental illness. Yes, I think the system is horrible and worth fighting against.  Was it mostly about me?  Of course it was.  I was high on visions of becoming the Gandhi of the mental health world.

Only…

I watched the video again all the way through to revel at my acting talent, the fact that somehow I taught myself how to be rhythmic and the strange vertigo you get from seeing your most fucked up moments cued to music.  I marveled in the he utter weirdness of seeing the love of my young life portrayed by someone who is absolutely nothing like her. Laughing to myself a little bit at the fact that the girl who was declared best Halifax actress by Faces Magazine would play my girlfriend. Remembering how they smeared fake sweat on my face to create the imagined tension, to pretend that the worst moments of my life were captured by the amazing camera work of one of Halifax’s best DOPS.  And then I see it.

At the very end of the video there is a glaring mistake. The video is dedicated to the memory of a friend of mine named Jason Lionel Walsh who lost his life to mental illness in 2005.  The inscription was supposed to read In Memory of Jason Lionel Walsh 1985-2005. Unfortunately it reads In Memory of Jason Lionel Walsh 1985-2010.

“What the fucking fuck fuck, fuck,” I shout at the library.

It’s dedicated to his memory and we didn’t remember how long he was alive for?

Slowly heads turn in my direction. I was violating the unspoken rule that if you are going to be in a public library you are not going to freak out and start swearing at old people or waking up the homeless who came to sleep off a good drunk.

“Fuck….”

An old man leans over and gives me the shushing gesture.

I immediately begin firing off emails that echo the same sentiment of rage without necessarily the proper amount of respect for a man who had gone out of his way to create a beautiful video out of my poetry.

I was pissed.

This mistake had been discovered in an earlier draft of the video.  Apparently when I sent the dedication after three days of shooting, I had typed it in wrong.   My reaction had been of a similar but more subdued nature. The change had been made and the crisis averted.  Apparently in the rush to get the video out, the editor had made a mistake and included the old dedication in the final draft.

I flipped out on said editor and demanded his company post an apology.  He refused to do so.  After all the point of this video was to reach out to people who had mental illness and show them they weren’t alone and the dedication was something I forced at the last minute. It wasn’t the point and this was a small mistake.

I had made the original error and he was sorry that it hadn’t been corrected when he promised me it would be.   The video wasn’t about this small mistake and they didn’t want to spend their time apologizing when we should be celebrating what we accomplished.  After all they had gone out of their way to make this video happen on a shoestring budget and it had been accomplished with the love of thirty Halifax professionals giving away their labor for free.

Two hours later he sent me another email, aware from the tone of my previous messages (IE THE MANY EXPLETIVES) that I wasn’t happy about the situation. He offered to take the video down and put in a new dedication. He noted that this would make the 500 links that had been put up on Facebook utterly and totally useless.  Essentially everything we had already to launch the video would be wasted.

I saw the rising momentum and didn’t want all the work to be for nothing. I made a choice I will always regret. I let the video stay up and made a public apology for my mistake.

When I confessed my self loathing to my parents over this decision they told me that my gesture still had meaning.  Few would notice the mistake and those that did would understand.

The thing is I wish it hadn’t been a mistake. I wish we got those five years. See there is a big difference between going crazy at 20 and going crazy at 25.

When I was 20, my anxiety manifested itself as what seemed to be a heart problem.  As a result I was placed on atenolol and the seething pressure in my chest became a blank hole in between my impulses and my actions.  My anxiety disappeared and my issues lived only inside my head.

Jason had his breakdown when all of his friends were still children.

When he started talking about world changing philosophies and his concept of the Universe we were high and mumbling similar nonsense. We were taking philosophy at Kings College and such talk was normal.  Doing too much drugs wasn’t really much of a cause of concern either.  Many of us had spent a week straight on magic mushrooms, blabbering revelations and confessing our innermost feelings about a world that felt so close we could touch it, manipulate it and make it our own.

We didn’t know anything was wrong when he started wearing those shades that kept us from seeing his pupils.  Sure he smoked weed all the time and said things I had trouble understanding. I did the same.

He was Jason; he was a brilliant beautiful boy that I was just starting to know when he went away.

Jason was too young to know what suicide was.  I remember being inside the chapel of King’s College with my best friends weeping at my side. I can still remember that horrible keening sound where our posture of adulthood fell out from under us. When all we could is weep.  When life seems like a joke because you have no idea how it was possible to go from A to B and he doesn’t exist anymore.  When we were children who needed to lean on each other for any hope of standing up again.  He had no idea how large his life was even in its infancy.

I remember seeing pictures of him when he was a kid and he had ridiculous haircuts. I remember thinking how young he looked.

How young we all were in our black suits and white shirts.

I remembered thinking how strange it was that we were only a hundred feet from where I got to know him.  On the third floor of Middle Bay when we had ciphers and he astounded us with his miraculous freestyle capability. I remembered the taste of the Fireball he gave me as it burned down my throat. How he performed the miracle of making Chris Rice break his silence and rap with us.

 

That funny day where Dave and Jason took an empty suitcase with them to talk to the Dean of Residence about setting up a rap show and somehow convinced her that rappers weren’t thugs and the wimpy intellectuals wouldn’t be beaten the piss out of by Jesse Dangerously.  It was here that my friend Hermitofthewoods rapped for the first time in front of a crowd and gained the confidence that would lead him to become Halifax’ s premier rap scholar.  I remember the way Jason smiled at me and called me Mr. Kimber instead of commenting on the heart monitor I rocked during my set during said show.

Years later I would be in that same chapel to see my sister married.

Just across the Quad, there had been another marriage between my friend Jennica and Dan that couldn’t have happened without Jason. Drunk mid afternoon, the wedding march came from a Fisher Price turntable. The idea was based on a simple joke. How funny would it be for one of us to be able call the other their first wife. How hilarious would it be if two of our friends got married. As always Jason provided the how to our crazy schemes.

I walked the Bride down the aisle of hastily collected flowers. Jason was the Priest. He found a Church on the Internet that would allow him to perform a perfectly legal marriage that could be annulled at our earliest convenience. He was the most memorable Priest at a wedding I have ever seen. He quoted hilarious portions of the bible as it described marriage in times far more brutal than our own.  He did it stone-faced, letting us do the laughing.

From this same location, a little north of the school’s sundial he led Middle Bay to a historic victory in the April Fools Water Fight.  He collected hundreds of water balloons and filled them in the secrecy of our residence, each of us eager soldiers ready to do his bidding. He sent our girls out to provide a bag of balloons to our enemies in the hopes they could be lured out into the slaughter. At midnight twenty boys took on a school of hundreds of children and subdued them. We conquered Alex Hall and Radical Bay, Cochrane and Chapel. You could hear the monstrous cheers of “Middle Bay, Middle Bay, Middle Bay” up and down Coburg Road as we bombarded our enemies and conquered King’s College. You could hear Jason leading the charge. We took no prisoners and had no mercy.  No one has ever won a war so decisively and with such joy.

I have a hundred memories and his friends and family have thousands.

At the age of 20, the King’s Chapel was packed to the rafters with his friends weeping. That night we held each other tight and stayed up late into the night.  He never would have imagined how many nights would be spent trying to survive his absence. How many drinks would be poured and how many times my friends would almost follow him. We were dominoes, stuck together by the idea that we couldn’t lose another person like him.

The thing is we didn’t get to experience the best of him.  20 years old is still a baby and I want a thousand more of those smiles that cracked the borders of his cheeks and seem to stretch on forever. I want to see more girls dance up on him and see him go completely still.  We never got to see him fall in love.

I have too few memories of him and all of them are as a boy.  He was 20 and he was talented as hell and made music that could bring tears to yours eyes.  After he died, we tried to find all the music he made. And we couldn’t find it. Little of it remains to this day.  He was going to produce an album for me. He was working on tracks with Dave, Jus and Cal and everyone was waiting for that moment when he’d take the Halifax Hip Hop scene by storm like he did the night he beat White Mic at the DJ Olympics, smashing the old champion no matter what biased judges would say.

When I lost my mind, my friends were able to help me find it. Most of them had gone through something similar and knew what it was like to fight with yourself and lose. They were with me when I went through therapy, when I entered the world of medication and found myself zombied out and when I started being myself again.   In February of 2010, I reached my lowest point where I didn’t know if I wanted to live or die.

I remembered Jason and the horrible winter of 2005 and knew what leaving would be like. I got to see the weight a single life could carry.

Suicide is isolation where you can’t feel the world and your delusions are louder than your reality. When all you can feel is your pain.  I was 25 years old and I was lucky enough to never be allowed to be so alone.

It wasn’t his fault.  He had a schizophrenic break and none of understood what that meant.

We were all just kids and it’s no one’s fault that he didn’t get to be an adult.

I wish we had those five years that exist only as an error at the end of a rap video. I wish I had five more minutes with him. Anyway to drag him out of there and back here with me.  I don’t want his picture at the end of that video. I wanted him to produce the beat that was on that video. I want an album of my poetry over his music.

Twenty years was nowhere near enough.

My life is strange and I have had to deal with a lot of suicidal people.  By confessing my struggles with mental illness, I encouraged hundreds of strangers to confess their own most fucked up moments to me.

Every couple of weeks someone I haven’t talked to in a while will hit me up on Facebook at 3 in the morning having a nervous breakdown.  Sometimes they are suicidal and have a plan.  Sometimes they just need someone to talk to. The last person wanted me to give them some reason not to cut their arm up with a big knife.

I told her that she didn’t need to be so scared.  I said that you’ve forgotten that you have been here before.  That as horrible as it is when you feel like it is all falling down, you got up again and you lived long enough that you forgot what this like. You don’t live here permanently and you’ll move on. Right now it’s up to you to suffer until you can stand up again. There’s nothing terrible or tragic about it. It’s just your life. Some people walk with a limp and you have a mental illness.

If it doesn’t feel like you can live with it, call the Emergency Room and tell them you are suicidal and have a plan. Works well. Promise you.

She could have responded that I’ve never had bipolar disorder. Anxiety is different and you don’t what I’m going through.  And she’d be right. But I saw Princess Leia onstage, drunk as shit in Toronto, telling me about all the weird and wild years she has had and how many times she wished she was dead and was glad that she didn’t give in.

Another friend of mine had a schizophrenic break around the same age as Jason. She was lucky enough to survive it even if she sometimes feels that medication killed the best parts of herself.  I don’t think people know the best parts of themselves. People have loved her since then and she’s written poetry that  made a palpable difference in the way thousands of people deal with their own schizophrenia and the way the world looks at people who live with it on a daily basis. Not to say she solved it but she made it better. I’m not trying to say that everyone with a mental illness will be inspiring, or will speak out and try to change the world one voice at a time. I’m saying that none of us have any idea of the good we do in this world. Of the people we help to live just by being ourselves. By making a joke and sharing a smile.

Jason was 20 and when he left us he shook our world to the core. Hundreds of people gathered in that chapel and wept like the world was ending. Because in a way it was. Something irreplaceable had been stolen from us. No one has that smile; no one else could have been our general in the April Fool’s Water Fight, no one else will make his music or tell his jokes in exactly the right way.

Whenever I see his sister Corinne I try to be like an older brother to her. Once I threatened a friend of mine with physical violence when he was talking smack to her and treating her like she wasn’t the amazing woman I know her to be.  Just like I know Jason would have done. I could never be one-tenth the brother to her that Jason was.  Somethings can’t be replaced.

We need to make sure that in the next five years we start teaching children what mental illness is.  Corinne is working on psych degree to help people like her brother.

I went through all of my years of schooling and never once was taught about the strange tricks your brain can play on you.  We were children and no one properly educated us on what can happen when you become an adult. I found out about mental illness by watching my friends kill themselves and lose themselves in drug addictions. There has to be a better way.

I wanted the video to be dedicated to Jason, because I wanted in some small way to make note of the most amazing person I’ve lost to mental illness.

I wanted to play some small part in a few people like Jason getting to live long enough to become an adult. Because five years is the difference between my living and his dying.

Time is the only thing that can save us and he didn’t get enough of it.

The error on the dedication wasn’t a small mistake.  I should have been better and gotten the video removed and put up with a new dedication.

It shouldn’t have been a mistake on the video, it’s a mistake that he didn’t get those years.  His friends and family should have been given five more years with him.

The world needed those five years, just as much as it needed every second of his young life.

November 3^rd is the second anniversary of my mental breakdown.

I want to take this opportunity to say thanks to my friends, my first love and my parents for keeping me alive when it was difficult for me to live.

I can’t wait to see what the next five years will hold.

 

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Waking Up And the Problems of Pregnant Pornography

Posted on | September 1, 2011 | 3 Comments

It’s been a long time since we last spoke.  My facial hair is deep and my voice crackles with my third round of puberty.  There are two reasons for this communication. One the infamous Pete Diamond has sent a flock of dolphins in searching of my recluse Toronto hideaway. Somewhere deep in the nuclear wastes of Austria he has been thinking of the Colony. Inspired by  yesterday’s ravings he has sent a boon meant to awaken the Colony from our sleep. So for the first time I will work to do justice to his art rather than sit in amazement at what he makes of my own.The second inspiration for this piece comes from an altogether different place.

Here goes:

Sometimes God sends you a sign and you can’t ignore it.

It’s arguable that God would never have sent me this sign.

That this sign violates a good many of God’s commandments and that by reading this post you may at some point be  sodomized by a red horned demon named Russell Trinitorius at an afterlife S and M afterhours club called Hell.

But I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes. No one is going to drag you up….

Moses saw a burning bush. Jonah had some dealings with a whale and Noah took up boating.

I saw a big-breasted woman seducing an amateur actor playing her husband’s stepson on the Internet and remembered a thousand things I had forgotten about love. To describe the scenario properly I feel I should explain that she was also quite pregnant and while they fucked she was smoking a cigarette and her moaning was interspersed with several short fits of coughing.  She took frequent breaks to light a fresh smoke when the old one had burned down to ash and gone out.  So adultery, not quite incest, pregnancy and the dangers of smoking while pregnant were rolled into one package. This quadruple layered cake of depravity lasted for nearly thirty minutes and has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

In my mind  porn is a narcotic that lets your dreams go to sleep. In porn there should be no connection to the reality you are craving. There is no sweaty sweet talk after where you laugh because you fucked your brains gone. There is rarely quality kissing. There is no link to the love and respect that superpower sex into soul shaking insanity. In good porn we can pretend for just a moment that only our bodies hunger. Where the perfect silicone bodies are there to distract us from the beautifully flawed women we love more than we can say. Like ballet we are chasing an aesthetic far distant from our own lives, a fantasy that never lets us look back.

The amazing ballet pirouettes are replaced by all dressed sex that fits into some formula that turns art into an exercise. The anorexic pre teen body is replaced by fullsome buxom bought breasts. In ballet everything can be resolved in the thrillingly explicit language of body. Porn is the same excepting that the training is slightly less rigorous and the language is less complicated.  Choreography involves two minutes of scenario, women going down on men for eight minutes and then sighing in ecstasy at the two minutes of cunningulus they receive in return, then proceed to have sex in at least four different camera friendly positions and scream for someone to cum on their face. So why was this cigarette smoking step son-seducing MILF my burning bush? What is different about her than the secretaries, babysitters, desperate housewives and schoolgirls that inhabit the Firefox fantasies of males of my generation and many others?

The answer is simple. I was stunned by how far hundreds of thousands of people felt they had to go to experience sex with the love removed.

I couldn’t believe how far they had dragged us into an appreciation of all that was wrong to escape the memory of those few moments when everything was right. Porn isn’t about replacing; it’s about totally and completely escaping. In this light, this porn was the best I had ever seen. All remnants of holding hands, cuddling and trading secrets in the dark had been wiped away.

I startled myself by realizing how deeply I’d fallen asleep and how long I had lost consciousness for. I’d spent months watching hundreds of hours of TV shows for the same effect. To replace the drama of my own existence with the drama scripted by writers making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. To dull the melancholy and fill the space with as much story as I possibly could.

I fell asleep. I forgot her. I forgot the panic. And I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night.

For anyone who has ever been an insomniac the clock becomes a means of weighing your existence. When you open your eyes every hour you know that you are losing the war with your own mind. That your admitting defeat because the anxiety that has taken over your own night has decided you can’t face your days without the peace you get from being brain-dead zombie sleepless. I remember the feeling of being blessed when I would look at the clock only once, as my eyes opened in the morning. I remember how she got me to stop covering up the clock. How she took away my sound machine. How I learned to be leave silence unfilled. I remember thinking that no matter what I’d be grateful for each and every day.

That isn’t the case.

You’ve probably been here before.

That place where you have no idea what your story is supposed to be. You’ve finished university and didn’t find a job. You are spending your time waiting for something and you have no idea what that is supposed to be.

Lately my problem hasn’t been getting to sleep but getting awake. Not that I can’t leave the bed. It’s more that I don’t feel things the way I know I’m capable of feeling them.

When I wasn’t able to get to sleep I was fighting for my sanity. I exercised until I was the skinniest Jew with wiry arms corded with muscle, I ate until my body was purified of the years of MacDonald’s abuse, quit dope, meditated and therapied myself until life and love made me okay.

There were walls I had to break down and build up.  I did the work.

Never waking up is different.

There is no crisis besides the ordinary day-to-day life questions and the knowledge that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you suffer for a while, move on and something else will fill the void inside. When you aren’t awake there is no need for therapy or desperate important conversations with friends.

This is the everyday life that repeats day in and day out, leaving you at the same place you started. This is the place you where you lose patience waiting for life to gain importance.

I’m waiting for that moment where everything makes sense. You know where the falling on your face leads you to something beautiful and amazing? Where you think to yourself could I really be this happy? Where you look back at the twisted path and know that it was leading you somewhere.

I feel stuck. Thankfully I’m stuck in a different place. Once again I am rereading the words I have written, look for a new meaning, analyzing the last moments when my heart was full in some hopes of putting myself back together again.

I feel like I spent too much of my last life in this same place.

I used to spend my time staring at page 38 and now it’s page 78.

Page 38 was about this constantly repeating thought that the most important events that ever happened to me occurred five years ago and I was still having my life dictated by those moments. You know the one where you fall in love with the wrong person and smash your head into a brick wall until you are so dizzy it feels like you are dancing?

I felt like that would be forever.  Like everything else, forever doesn’t last all that long.

Now I’m stuck in the significantly deeper muck that comes from true love and common everyday insanity. Page 78 is a good deal prettier than page 38 with more romantic gestures, a tornado of happy memories and the more epic melancholy that comes when you can’t have something that makes you incredibly happy, rather than the sadness of wanting something you know makes you miserable.

At first, this pain felt very similar to being awake.

Your brain has a habit of obscuring things so that the more you look at them the less you see them. After all if you had to tell your legs to take every single step, if you had to stop and think about every smell, if each and every moment was so full that the past died and the future waited, if life was confined to each footstep, inhalation and heartbeat, we wouldn’t create art, history or love.  Which is strange thing about falling in love. Everything else becomes those footsteps, breaths and heartbeats, something that occurs automatically and in the periphery of the jamboree of terror and bliss that your existence has become. But eventually you stop falling and start walking. You see less of those things that were your permanent unalterable focus. Love doesn’t end but the world returns and has to exist within its endless patterns of rise and fall, stagnation and revelation.

I have been assured that I’ll fall in love a hundred times and I’m sure that they are right even if evidence has yet to show that to be the case.  After all I was in love several times before I met her. Yet I can honestly say that thinking about those girls doesn’t cause me any pain. Falling in love is a natural chemical response to something new, exciting and attractive. Falling in love makes sense. Fucking and making love describing the same act shows how easy it can be.  So like the Raphael Saadiq song says…Falling in love is easy.  The desire to never stand up again is something entirely different.

Even page 38 feels like a total and utter child who thought being out of control wrote it and being in love was the same thing. When we subtract ho the people we loved made us feel, the fantasies we had about our future, we are often left with a web of lies we created with someone else and the end involves a lot of hatred, self recrimination and the erasure of the legend of who you were and what you could have been.  You go in search of the missing feeling and realize that the person had always been missing and the feeling mutated them to fit what you wanted.  It wasn’t like that for me. I don’t have a desire for love.

I have a desire for her.

Being open to life and breaking a thousand times was an accident. Love was just the necessary unthought byproduct of spending time with her. Of how nothing else seemed anywhere near as worthwhile.

Love can happen with anyone.

She only happens once.

My writing has never been so alive as when I lost her. Unfortunately I couldn’t hold onto that feeling of being awake and instead fell into a dream. Where I painted her picture on everything I did. From recovering from extreme anxiety to my attempts to become the Mahatma Gandhi of mental health. Everything was a love letter to what we had. And each time the picture got a little less clear, captured a little less of her until strangers felt they knew her and I stopped being able to hold onto the anguish of losing her.  I made her into a story.  I tried to limit what I was missing to the lack of a feeling instead of the irreplaceable lack of a person.

I refuse to wait until I stop missing her to find life.

This time it isn’t about love.  It’s about trying to wake up. This is for the colony of losers. For everyone who has lost something that is irreplaceable and continues to keep going. For the brave souls who’ve broken their hearts and have the ambition to keep going until they have more of their hearts to give away.

This is for you and whatever you are waiting for. To realize that everyone is waiting for something to make them who they think they should be and that whatever they’re waiting for won’t fill in the gap. So it’s time to start writing sloppily on these pages until we start saying something that makes some sort of sense.

This is a blabbering maddened call to some sort of action that I can’t begin to define. To make the time between the most important scenes in your life matter. To embrace the abundant melancholy that makes art instead of chasing the sugar scent of numbness. This is a call to use the insanity we batter ourselves with to make us something better.  To realize that we don’t know when those important moments are coming and that we can’t stop and hold our breath until that thing we think we need happens.

We don’t need to act in desperation after years of slowly waiting for ourselves to fall apart. We can use this time of pause and patience to act before we have no choice.

We are not defined by how we act in crisis. Mothers can lift cars that land on top of their children in a surge of heroic adrenaline but can we raise our children to feel loved day in and day out?  We can save our friends when they become suicidal but can we help them create a life that they want to live for? It’s the moments between laughter and tears, between kisses, poetry and pornography that we need to chase.

This idea of some great arc, of some moments that mean more, lessen the scale and enormity of every single second we live. We never have any idea of the scale of joy and sadness we create in this life.  We believe we are merely treading water, coasting along when we walk a trail of fire, smoke and thunder.

I’m a writer who for this brief moment has abandoned story and given into the horrible rambling passion of my thoughts. Just to surrender for a second and let my eyes open.  And feel something so much powerful than sense. To let something come out of me that isn’t easily decipherable, doesn’t fit into some simple message. To acknowledge the chaos that is my creation.

This for my friend who has decided to deal with his drug addiction before it brought him to a place where it could kill him. This is for another friend who disregarded common sense and chased love even if all the walls were destined to fall down. This is for my friends bravely screaming in the darkness of their own souls so that the agony wouldn’t consume and kill them but shake the very earth upon which they stand with their rage and hunger for happiness. This is for the couples that fight, scream and break shit in order to stay open. This is for all of you who battle the numbness that comes when we realize there isn’t something we are supposed to be.  This for those who make it up as we go along. This for those of you who refuse to wait until you are forced to change.

Most of us will struggle to survive when we feel like we have no other choice. The question is will we try to save ourselves before we have to.

I want to wake up and join you.

I’ll drink the shots of tequila and I’ll sing karaoke until they take the mic from my hands.   I’ll sing “Get Out Of My Head And Into My Car” until I stop being tone def and start being a rockstar.

I can’t wait for the dying of the light in a pregnant woman’s cigarette as her stepson fucks her to monotone moans in a world deranged on story.

I will wake up.

It’s been almost three months since we last spoke. A lot’s happened. I have something brewing called “The Book of Job” It’s a new long form narrative about the many fuck ups that happen between important moments. It’s pathetic, it’s interesting and it’s something completely unlike anything you have ever read before.  Be patient with me because I have a couple big things in the works and have to jump off a few cliffs before I can settle down and be with you the way you deserve to be. Know that I haven’t forgotten you and that the best is still to come.

Thanks for sticking with me.

 

 

 

 

 

Scared to Death of Cops and Other Terrible Headlines

Posted on | August 1, 2011 | 2 Comments

Correction: Apparently the man who died was in fact a 45 year old man who resembled an old man. Apparently he had suffered brain injuries previous to the encounter and was unable to communicate properly with the officers when they asked for his name.  However his mother who took care of him was apparently at the scene screaming for the police to stop. That he didn’t understand what was going on. And that they ignored her. For the full story check out: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/mans-death-following-interaction-with-toronto-police-under-investigation/article2118635/ and check Global News today at 6.

 

No Country for Old Men?

Nope.

That belongs in the Toronto Metro and reasons I’m going to hell. Last week they printed a headline that said, “Shooter Had Time To Kill” about the massacre in Norway.

I’m not good at headlines.

The important thing to realize is that this is not the important thing to realize.

A man’s died and I’m now racing home to Tweet about it. Somewhere in Toronto someone is picking up the phone and finding out a loved one is dead. Listening to some explanation that makes sense as to why an old man would get “roughed up” by the Toronto police until he was so scared that his heart failed. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to be so scared that you die from it. I’ve been really scared about things that didn’t matter. What did he see in their faces that made his body decide he had enough and would die on the street in front of them?

If I had been walking a little bit faster I might have seen it happen. I might be crying as I walked home, trying to figure out the words to explain what just happened to the first familiar people I saw to find some sort of semblance of reason and outrage.  I can weave heroic pictures of myself yelling at the cops as they roughed up the old man and somehow saving the day. Most likely I would be sitting there shocked and speechless, or strangely entertained like I stumbled into an episode of the Shield until he started going into cardiac arrest and reality began to sink in.

But I was a few minutes late so all I see are policeman erecting yellow tape in front of the Subway across the street from Christie Pits on Bloor.

“How much of a threat could he have been?” asks a skinny mid fifties Chinese man to someone else stopped and looking at the police tape.

“He was pretty old,” agrees the white haired man he’s talking to.

“And he wasn’t running that fast,” says the skinny balding Chinese man.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Old man. 60 or 70. Real old.  Ran from the cops. Think he might have been having a breakdown or something. They caught up to him and started roughing him up. Hurt him pretty bad. Then he started going into cardiac arrest. They put a sheet over his face before they put him in the ambulance.”

Inanely I think of how many mint chocolate chip ice creams I have had less than a hundred feet away at Baskin Robins.

“Do you know why?” I ask.

“Got here too late. Some people over there were there from the beginning.”

I walk across the street to see if I can find more people willing to talk. Most are exchanging rumours, stopped and staring at the yellow tape.  I’m pointed towards a man with long slick black hair, hands shaking a pack of cigarettes back and forth. Apparently he knows what happened.

“I heard you saw it. I was wondering if you could tell me about it,” I ask, putting on my best innocent boy face.  For some reason everyone is more willing to confess to me if I do my best Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone.

He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. He’s already told the story fifteen times and can’t think of anything else worth saying. He lights a cigarette and looks at the  yellow tape.

“It’s okay, man. I ain’t got nothing important to say.”

I’m walking home thinking of whom I should call.  Who needs to find out about this as soon as possible to put the pressure on? How do I make this into a media blitz that really changes things?

Also thinking about why a 70-year-old man would run from the police. And what reasonable reason could they have for chasing him and then roughing him up? Wondering if it were the elderly man I saw about 20 minutes earlier yelling “I’ have a secret” in that cartoonish voice that simultaneously demands attention and encourages you to ignore them. That voice that says homeless or so far out of their mind they forget where they live and that demands in polite society you frown at them for lack of manners, or mock them for not politely shutting the hell up when they feel like screaming. If people would forget about it because he was crazy. If some day my own mental illness might put me on a street corner where the same thing is happening to me. My orange juice is now gone and I’m stuck with dealing with that sucking sense you get when only the pulpy remains are left. Suckkkkkk. Suckkk. I should stop.  Suckkkk.

I find myself craving ice cream until I walk right into my neighbour and his new girlfriend.

Back in the dying sun of the street where I’m staying this summer relating the tragedy I walked past and felt like I should involve myself in.  Him touching his knee and showing where the rubber bullet hit him last summer when another group of Toronto cops had to quiet a disturbance. Asking if there was anything to take pictures of. And shaking my head. Knowing that the world has seen a good deal of police tape in the last few years and no well taken photograph will make the image shocking. The body was gone in a few minutes and so were most of the people. They put a sheet over his face, slid him into an ambulance and a life was over.

I can’t help wondering what the cops must have been thinking when he started having a heart attack.  The looks on their faces when they released he had pulled a joker from the deck and decided to die on them. That this wouldn’t simply be another crazy person they’d beat the shit out of and walk away from.  That by the strange coincidence of having a bad heart and bad luck he would become something the city might remember.

Maybe.

I don’t remember anyone yelling or throwing anything at the cops. Maybe they were too tired to scream slurs when protests and petitions didn’t have any effect the previous year. Maybe they didn’t know if they should.  Some of those protesters had rich parents and Youtube videos of everything that went down. This is just one moment in front of a few witnesses who don’t feel like telling their story again.

Will the city remember the death of an old man? Maybe it comes down to if the cops find his next of kin.  If he has people who care enough about him to fight against this day in day out barrage of shit our great city takes for granted. Or if the news week is slow.

If he dies lonely I’m guessing a couple Tweets, a few small stories, in and out and we are back to contemplating whether it’s in good taste to make fun of Mayor Ford for being fat instead of just because he’s a fucking moron and more complaints about transit and whatever the weather is.

Then I realize it. It’s mind numbingly obvious. It’s the first day in weeks you can’t complain about the weather.Something shitty had to happen. Toronto can’t be allowed a perfect day.

 

 

 

 

Family Portrait for the Nanster

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | No Comments

Marion Eva Kimber (1918-2011)

Family Portrait for the Nanster

This poem was originally titled poem for a beautiful midget

But that isn’t exactly accurate, is it

She was an artist

You couldn’t miss it

This is for my nanny and the millions times we use to visit

For your beautiful artwork and store bought pies

Original recipes and your beautiful blue eyes

My friend Verena met you and realized

The strong hands that made gift wrap bows out of our family ties

Looking at all these pictures I can still remember being in your arms

Glancing at your eyes with my childhood mind and knowing that I was safe

I remember the toy old man with the shotgun over the fireplace

Your porcelain kettles and life time of treasures collected behind glass

The sound of your ever present laugh

Your candy bowl I’d fill my pockets with

Your Christmas presents I’d give you chocolate with

Small gifts on the birthday of my bro and sis

Easter Egg bunnies, sweaters and avon gifts for Christmas

Sunday was Nanny’s day, walking into Union Street with my little feet

The smell of meat and mashed potatoes making me so hungry I could eat

And then that was a feat

Because I was a mini mini me who rarely eats

Unless it was peanut butter and jelly

But by god did I love the grease

Crazy for mashed potatoes with gravy, hamburger and onions, mouth watering sizzle

Masterworks on the walls, showing us Nova Scotia writ small

Wildness of mixed colours and the following of shades

Winter falls on these evergreen glades, brushwork with arthirtic fingers

Drawing beautiful landscapes made this woman’s handshake

Lifted the world so many times it takes a little bit more to do it now and she does it

Slightly odd that she asks for a paper shredder, Russian spy with a thousand baby pictures and when she drinks wine her cheeks get redder

Enquiring minds go through the inquirer to discuss royalty with our family Queen

She knows about Diana and all of Charles schemes

She was so happy on Emily’s Wedding, she looked like royalty

She’s got eyes for details and archives of memories in albums

Trying to memorize every part of our lives because she loved us too much to miss a moment, telling her that’s unrealistic, she flips a book of news clips and gives Dad back his life she gave him in the first place

Where is Matthew, if you want to know in a moment ask Nanny

Can’t stop laughing at what she said, “Matthew when you going to get rid of those dreads?

Making short jokes about my mom that were going over our heads

See the details of this 93 year old woman, master of email, an amazing portrait of this century’s female, proud and kind, honest, hilarious and tiny, this Nanster of mine

With her little mischievous grin, her internet transmission, her skill at Donkey Kong smashing Back in the day we had sleepovers with Kentucky Fried Chicken,

Endlessly curious to know what I was thinking

I guess I got a lot of thanking to do

For whatever it is that you do that gave me a great father who was always there

And for being like a second mother to mine when she’s needed you

And showing us the world of our cousins babies too

For always pushing for more from me, because you knew the best things weren’t easy

For how you always knew how to tease me

We are a family because of you

Thank you

For holding me when I couldn’t walk

For listening to me when I never shut up when I learned to talk

For when you had trouble walking up the stairs

And you fought because you had to be there

For Christmas and the cracker crowns

For holding us up even when you were falling down

For your multicolored neckless and the times you were the class clown

For making me unafraid to get old, because until the last day you were still around

Your artist’s eye gave detail to the people you love

This is a family portrait and without your arthirtis we wouldn’t have the paintbrush

Thank you for loving us so much

 

 

Flight of the Alacorn#2

Posted on | June 29, 2011 | No Comments

December 10th, 2009

“Ocean sounds?” asks my girlfriend, looking like a princess in her polar bear sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants. Her laptop sits on her knees as her legs dangle from her bed and don’t quite touch the ground.

“You don’t have to do this,” I say. “I can just go home.”

“No you are sleeping over,” she says. “I’m the boss. The one with the boobs. You are going to listen or you don’t get to touch them.”

“Gotcha.”

I’m a constant ball of butterflies and she has a talent for making the chaos into some lucid order. Making fun of me tends to make me aware of how ridiculous I’m being.

“So you are going to shut the fuck up, cuddle me and fall asleep to….waves?” she asks.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says.

For years I listened to a sound machine to block out external noise while I slept. This lasted approximately one week into our relationship. The calming oceans sound  made her wake up with the need  to go to the bathroom and reminded her of a constant white static alarm sounding. So I broke a life-long habit and got rid of it. Wasn’t hard. Nothing was in those days. Even now there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t give up for her. The list has gotten long. Weed, unhealthy food, exercise, cigarettes, booze and a life-long habit of ignoring my problems. The thing is she never asked me to give up any of these things. She never would. That’s just not who she is.

Monkeys and insects serenade us from her laptop computer. She has typed in relaxing sounds and this is what came up.

“You don’t find monkeys calming? Or how about one million insects screaming?”

“Too much respect for John Candy in Arachnophobia,” I say.  “No. I wouldn’t call this relaxing.”

A hippopotamus snorts out gushing pools of water from its snout.  She clicks on a different track labeled “Serenade to a young child.” A heart begins to beat in the background.

“Is this young child a psychopath?” she asks.

“His mother’s heartbeat in the womb. Babies sleep to that shit. They love it,” I say, a tad bit defensively. My sound machine use to have this exact feature and more than one person accused me of being a serial killer upon hearing it.

“Sounds of the ocean?” she asks. I nod. “Better not be any  seals getting clubbed to death.”

Waves splash against a shore over and over again. Almost identical to my sound machine that ruined her sleep.

“You see what I do for you?” she says.

I open my mouth and she stops me with a kiss.   Before I can begin the apology dance. She knows it’s not my fault. My problem is that I don’t know this yet.

She slides in and raises her arm so that I can place my own on her chest and pull her close. A tension in the center of my chest eases. I let the melatonin dissolve under my tongue.

The first time we had sex I kicked her out of my house at four in the morning and called her a taxi that took her back to her parent’s place.

The truth is that I had never slept in the same bed with a woman. I’m a person who lives and dies by routine. A lifetime of sleeping alone is a hard habit to break.

The next night she slept over, and despite the cramped bed, and the intense heat in my tiny closet-like room, I slept better than I ever thought possible. There is something about waking up holding a beautiful girl’s hand clutched in your own. The sensation that even in your dreams you didn’t want to let go.

And now I’m ready to sleep like a baby.

I can feel the snow-white cloud slowly taking hold of my tired brain. My doctor has agreed to get me off Trazadone and recommended melatonin as a possible replacement. Since medical school she had suffered from insomnia and found that melatonin and chamoille tea worked for her. Her life long insomnia may play some part in her belief that I have a sleep disorder rather than an anxiety problem.

Melatonin is excellent for resetting your cycadian rhythm, useful for jet lag and shift work. After a couple weeks my body will readjust its internal clock and I can be normal again.

Only life isn’t that simple.

“I am the fucking best at this,” says a deep bass voice through the walls. I can hear shotgun shells being discharged in the distance.

Herman and his girlfriend are playing Duck Hunt in the living room. They’ve had a couple drinks and his deep voice projects through walls even when he’s whispering. I tell myself to block them out which unfortunately makes me sniper scope focused on the sound of their voices.

I know that it isn’t fair to tell them to be quiet, as it is their home and I’m the guest.

Only I know that melatonin ceases to be of much use after a half hour. Past that point you lie awake in the white cloud, relaxed and unable to break through the static to the solace of sleep. Just relax. Telling myself that never works.

I focus on the feel of her body against my own and the sound of the waves. Tension easing. Nonsense thoughts entering my brain. Could Peter Parker pick a peck of pickled peppers? Spiderman wouldn’t like Pickles.

“Honestly I’m the Dirty Harry of this shit,” says Herman, interrupting my reverie.

“ I’m still beating you, buster,” his girlfriend replies.

The walls are thin and my time is running out.  The problem is that my doctor has set me a bedtime that is far too early for normal people, especially the people I hang out with. Midnight means everyone is still up and there will be several hours before they go to sleep.

I don’t have a chance.

“Highest score ever?” asks Herman. “That’s hard to beat.”

“Just watch me.”

The combative flirtation of a love that has taken years to blossom should be music to my ears. I know how much Herman loves her and the comedic and intelligent exchange between them has been the guiding inspiration behind his work for as long as I’ve known him. He’s happy. It’s not his fault that I have gone crazy.

I try to remind myself that the 30 minutes is just a guideline. However I don’t expect the laughter to end anytime soon.

The more sick I get the more I do to try to cure my disease.  I believe that if I just follow the instructions I will be able to beat it.

I exercise for an hour a day. I eat salad for lunch filled with fruit, vegetables and nuts for protein. I eat vegetarian dinners at the local vegetarian restaurant. I have cut out caffeine and chocolate. I set a bedtime and a waking time and follow all the instructions in the insomniac pamphlets. I use the bed for sleep and sex and won’t watch TV before we go to sleep.  The more I do to protect myself the more I rely on these protections.

Right now I need the waves.

I remember when the waves didn’t come from a machine. As I fall into the white cloud, I can feel the sunlight on my cheek.

She is in a yellow bikini and feels light as air in my arms as the waves crash and her feet glide across the tops of the cresting wave. The sun is so bright that I can barely keep my eyes open. I can’t believe I could ever be this happy. The sound of the waves dissolve into our laughter. The light welcomes me to that spot where consciousness becomes sleep. The land of the golden palace.

Only rushing waves, the feel of her body in my arms and the sunlight on my cheek.

The artificial waves skip as her computer loses its streams of consciousness.

The sun goes out and I’m in a dark room.

She sleeps.

While I lie awake dreaming in the dark of the beach and the sun on my face.

With metallic waves crashing on and on.

*****************************************************************************************************

I’m drowning in medication.

Elavil is my new poison.

The anxiety is gone.

So am I.

I went to the doctor’s office in the morning after melatonin and got a prescription for Elavil, a tricyclic antidepressant.

On this drug, I don’t dream and I don’t feel like I have woken up. The first night I slept for ten hours and could barely get out of bed. The second night I didn’t sleep at all. It’s a muscle relaxant and leaves me effectively crippled for most of the day. When I go swimming, it takes fifteen laps before I can feel my body again.

On the third night it worked at double the dosage.

Today is the morning of the fourth day.

I know the drug isn’t working. I don’t feel better. There is no Michael Kimber in this body left to feel anything.

I want to put on my normal face but don’t quite know what it looks like. Depression left me hollow, anxiously desiring my old self to fill all the holes left vacant by my departure. The longing was me. The smallest portion that remained of who I was. Elavil leaves me filled with a concrete nothing that permeates every particle of my being. I’m overflowing with nothing.

She is coming over and we are going to go shopping for Christmas presents.

Only there is a story to be written.

When my hands touch the dirty keyboard of my laptop I can feel the words appearing like behind the cloudy veil. The first sentence is hard to find. The second easier. Thinking about her. Numb but capable of feeling. Warming myself in the idea of the smile she’ll have when she sees this. The magic passing through my fingertips. Somehow love speaks when I can’t even hear myself.

She’ll know what she means to me. The person that exists in the tomorrow I can’t see yet. Keep typing.

I can remember.

I’m still here.

*********************************************************************

Chapter 2

For most she was merely an adorable girl with a remarkable talent for words and little skill at pottie training.  Hilarious to laugh with. Awkward to invite for a sleepover.

For her parents, Betty and Paul, she was one of the three lights that illuminated their world.  She had a brother and a sister and both were remarkable in ways that appeal to parents, friends and  strangers who look for different tales than this one.

But for you, my audience, this tale is of the Alacorn and not of her lovely family. So let us ignore her mother’s obsessive compulsive yet absolutely delightful cooking and let us look past her sister’s genius academic career and desire never to be told to shut up.  There was always something strange about little Stephanie and it was not merely the fact that she had taught herself to read at age three and wet the bed till she was much older than one would have assumed probable.

It was something more than that.

The family lived in a split level house, in a nice community, where there were trees you could climb and grass you could roll in.  The children’s elementary school was right next door. Stephanie, our heroine sleeps with the glasses she constantly loses now resting conveniently next on her bedside table.

While the whole house was asleep, she awoke, legs covered in a drizzle of yellow urine. She cringed when she noticed her ruined sheets and prepared herself for much gentle ribbing in the morning. Still she felt very out of the ordinary, her body felt as swollen as the girl who ate the forbidden candy in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory.

Squinting she looked in her mirror and noticed that everything was normal except for one thing: she had a gigantic horn peaking out of her forehead.

Actually two things: her silver blond hair was more like a mane belonging to a horse than the cute haircut she’d gotten a few weeks earlier from her mother. Looking down she was startled to see her dirt covered feet had somehow become hooves. Ok, three things.

She reached for her glasses but she could not seem to get a hold of them-she could only manage to slide them back and forth a bit and then—crush—they flattened instantly beneath her hoof. Hoof!  She was so alarmed that her wings began beating at the air behind her.

Wings?

She clapped her hooves together in joyous delight. She looked down at her bed, covered in urine. For the thousandth time she realized that the transformation was responsible for her bed-wetting.  She couldn’t wait to tell her sister that it wasn’t her fault, this time she peed the bed because she was an Alacorn not because she was an idiot.  As always she would forget this come morning and have to face awkward jokes from her family at Betty’s color-coded breakfasts.

Her eyes went back to her wings and she giggled when she heard them flapping together.

Alacorn’s wings are of a different variety than those of say a bird, or even the metal birds of the sky that humans call an “airplane”.  See, those wings move with locomotion, whether generated by biological or technological sources.  She moved with magic.  And move she did, down the stairs, past the smell of baking pies and her brother’s stinking feet, and out the door to the trees surrounding her house.

Her wings began to flap, creating powerful thrusts of wind that sounded like the laughter of a thousand innocent babes tickled by feathers.

The air began to blur, caught in the waves of wholesome laughter, so joyous that space and time could not stand in its wake any longer.  It was as if someone had laughed so hard that all reason had been shushed for good.

She smelled curry and saw beautiful brown people dancing to strange music created from flutes and tiny hand held drums.

A Greek historian named Ctesias drinks from a cup of what one day will be called tea. He looks down at the tea, wondering if it had hallucinogenic properties. He has seen horses before but none that laughed, nor had wings, and indeed he had never a horse that danced with such rhythm.  He was tempted to ask if anyone else could see this shit.

“Horsey?” asks Ctesias.

The girl responds with a gentle neigh. What she meant to say is no “I’m Stephanie.” Very few people speak Unicorn as it is a tongue she had recently made up.

He didn’t understand her words, but merely noticed her beautiful horn and the friendliness in her gray blues eyes. He has never seen such love in the eyes of either animal or man. He fell to his knees humbled before such a joyful sight.

The girl does not realize that in this moment she begins the legend of the Alacorn. That this Greek scribe will write a tale that will capture her own imagination millennia later and result in the purchase of thousands of dollars in related merchandise by friends, family and lovers for birthdays and holiday gift items.

“Are you god?” he asks.

She giggles and time disappears once more.

Suddenly she is back in her damp bed, ready to wake and  be mocked by her parents and siblings for her little accident.

Her father Paul comes into the room to wake her for breakfast. She can smell the sizzling bacon in the air. She notices her face has returned to its normal proportions.

Seems she just had that dream again.

“Always sleeping, little one. So lazy. Wonder where you get that from.”

During her next sleep she will first visit ancient Babylon, then save the life of the heroic knight Lancelot and finally journey to China to the most decorous of Opium dens and begin the legends she would become obsessed with. While others were sleeping and dreaming, she created what she dreamed about during the day.

The little girl has always had a habit of making dreams come true. But again more will be said of that a little later in the tale.

Flight of the Alacorn#1

Posted on | June 28, 2011 | No Comments

December 6th, 2009

The first thing I see when I wake up is my girlfriend in Unicorn form.  Mounted on her wall is the portrait in oil paints I commissioned for our two-month anniversary. The actual girl lies to the side of me lost in sleep.

She’s gotten used to sleeping with an insomniac. Has accomplished the miracle of getting me back to sleep when I wake up in the middle of the night. This time it wasn’t necessary.

8:00.

Shit. I wanted to sleep in.

Every morning I wake up at 8 no matter how much sleep I’ve had. According to my doctor it is important to establish a sleep routine. As such she has assigned me a bedtime.

Following my doctor’s advice I also doubled my dose of trazodone and managed to sleep all the way through.

Today I feel like I have woken up stuck in slow motion.

I often lie in bed longer than I should. Looking over at the blond hair covering her closed eyes, chest rising and falling with every relaxed breath I found myself unable to move. Stuck in that same feeling I got when I first met her. As if the rest of life was just a dream that I had when I wasn’t with her.

Only today I’m lying in bed and can’t seem to get up. I need to go to the bathroom but I lack the will to make my body move. Most people who go on medication will tell you that they don’t feel like themselves. This is especially true right now. The fast pace jump of my thoughts have slowed to a crippled crawl.

The first thing I lost to mental illness was the morning.

Whether I was too drugged to be myself or too anxious to be good company I had to leave her house almost immediately upon waking up. When I got sleep I woke up buzzing with anxiety, unable to calm myself.  In the beginning of our relationship we made miso soup, elaborate breakfasts constructed of meats from last night’s dinner and multiple different types of juice while she did the crossword and I taunted her by figuring out the nine letter word first.

Today I kissed her goodbye and made my way to my favorite greasy spoon. Sitting like a zombie with one of my best friends in the world.

The Spartan is my home away from home. I have gone for the same breakfast thousands of times with thousands of different people. I never place an order, I just come in and they know. The old ladies who run the joint call me their son.

They kiss me on the cheek and ask how I am. They have noticed the change in me and don’t quite know what to do.  The smallest of old ladies is like my second grandmother, practiced in getting orders wrong and being the most adorable old lady in the world.  Lately she hugs me a little longer than usual and doesn’t charge me full price.  My friend has become a regular and also orders the same thing every time. A year ago she changed her eggs from scrambled to fried. It was a big event and caused a lot of trouble.

My friend is a beautiful Indian girl named Kavita who for many years has been the first person I call when I feel fucked up.  Growing up in Halifax I have had next to no friends that weren’t white. She was my second friend of a different ethnicity. The first happened to be her Cousin who I used to play Axis and Allies with in junior high school. She doesn’t play Axis and Allies. She listens to Tupac and excels in school. She knows more about basketball and cars than I do. She is a pretty girl who would make a better guy than I do.

When my girlfriend went to Victoria to compete in the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and I spent the week watching movies with Kavita. Saying nothing and not needing to.

She once put a female crack head into a chokehold to stop her from hitting me.  That story is long and will be told at a later date. But we have something special. Complete honesty with the knowledge that whatever we say the other person won’t get up and leave.  The rare exception to the rule that says men cannot be close to women without wanting to fuck them.

“You look fucked,” she says.

“Accurate.”

“You weren’t even paying attention,” she says.  “You didn’t laugh once during my story.”

“Was it funny?” I ask.

“Hilarious,” she says. “Plus I’m wearing a low cut shirt and you aren’t even awkwardly trying not to look. What does a Hindu have to do to get attention?  Anything wrong?”

“Drugs, drugs, drugs,” I say.

“What are you on now?” she asks.

“Trazadone.”

She takes psychology and this isn’t an idle question. She’ll spend some time after breakfast looking up my meds to see if the doctor knew their shit.

“They use that on senior citizens to get them to go to sleep.”

“I’m an old man,” I say.

“Yeah you look haggard.”

“Baby face is going,” I say.

“Replaced with a bitter old man without an attention span.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“I’ll still love you,” she says.

“Yeah I’d love you if you constantly shat yourself,” I say. “Still it sucks shitting yourself.”

“You don’t seem like yourself,” she says.

“My attention span is gone,” I say.

“You been writing?”

“No,” I reply.

“You really should start doing something.”

“I can’t concentrate.”

“Maybe you need some different meds,” she says.

“Probably.”

“Try something else then,” she says.  “And start writing.”

“I can’t.”

I’ve been stuck on the first page of the screenplay for a month. Weed used to punch through writers block and withdrawal has gotten me ADD and scared of empty pages.

“I can’t think of anything outside of this and I can’t give this anymore time,” I say.

“Not true,” she says.

“And what else is there?” I ask.

“Her,” she says. “You still look like a love struck retard when you talk about her. Christmas is almost here. Why don’t you write her some sappy poem? Prolly get you laid.”

“I’m sick of writing poetry,” I say. “I want to write a story.”

“Write a story about happy shit?”

“It ain’t easy to think of,” I say.

“If it’s easy it probably isn’t worth saying,” she replies.

Inspiration comes to my slow as shit mind.  The Unicorn staring at me on the wall. A story about that. I’ve done poems, a rap album but never a book. Something more about her than about how I feel. Her life as a Unicorn.

“Alright.”

“Alright, what?” she asks.

“I’ll do it,” I say. “I am going to write something and it’s going to be about happy shit.”

“Good.”

“For her Christmas present.”

“Aren’t you Jewish?”

The empty pages haunt me. Seems like I can fill my whole life with the space between inspiration and action.

My attention span goes in and out. Writing involves losing my self and letting words pour out. I’m hard to lose these days.

I tell myself not to get up from the keyboard. Write the first thing that comes to my mind.

You can do this. I pick a title.  The Last Unicorn. Just for now. I’ll change it later to avoid copyright infringement.

I can write it if I just think about her. In a very real way she has been the greatest muse in my entire life. First she took words away from me. I couldn’t write because I was too happy to want to escape my life.

Ultimately thinking about her reminds me that my worries over my life are baseless. I don’t know what I’m capable of. What I thought was impossible slept me next to me every night, choosing to be with me even when I couldn’t sleep and sometimes made it impossible for her to do so.

I would write her a dream. Suddenly words started to come. Somehow loves exists even in the most horrifying depths of myself. The words weren’t easy and I wrote them when I could barely think. But I think they are beautiful.

Because they’re about her.

*******************************************************************************************************************

“The Alacorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. Since the earliest references she has been portrayed as fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but her mysterious beauty remains unchanging.”

The Beginning

There are very few moments where God looks upon the world and concentrate exclusively on just one thing, just one time, just one space.

After all, with the zillions of prayers uttered toward his many names he has a very difficult time of paying attention to anything at all.

It is no surprise that God, like Stephen Hawking, has a blinding case of ADD. But one day something came forth that had, in the entirety of time,  never existed before. More impressive than any star, sonata or sorrow, came this bliss completely foreign.

It was November 6^th, 1984 and a very special thing was about to unfold.

On this day he needed all the background noise to cease for one moment so he could focus.

Wars stopped in mid-massacre.  Bullets became blanks. Domestic disputes became sexual experimentation. People of all types from the Lizards of Leonardo to the deranged militants of the United States of America stopped their murderous self- indulgent madness and for the minute saw the error of their ways. Words could be taken back. The past could return to the present. The future ceased to terrorize.

In the galaxies of Lunus, filled with premature ejaculators and psychotically fertile women, there were approximately four billion children conceived in the span of that one 60 second interval. In their history, it was called the Baby Big Bang.

Flowers of all types bloomed, wildly out of season across the galaxy filling the air with pollen and petals. Believe it or not, for one whole minute life was only added to the universe, joy multiplied and grief temporarily extinguished. There was no death, no end of love, just blossoming and beginning, as though heaven came to the temporal realm realizing all it desired was already there.

Picture, if you will for but a moment, a universe of peace.

In the background of an all white hospital room in the freezing cold city of Edmonton  plays “No More Love on the Run” by Billy Ocean.

Over the last few days this classic hit had climbed to number one on the US charts and baby brother Canada was following in the Billy Ocean inspired madness.  Copies of Time Magazines advised people to mind their manners, though the creature that would be born on this day would permanently refuse to do so for the entirety of her life.

A strangely inappropriate pop  music single was released by a woman who called herself Madonna.  This little ditty was titled “Like a Virgin.” No one noted the irony of this song’s release on the most sexual day of the year.

For now pay attention to Betty’s controlled breathing, tired, exhausted and ready to give life to one of the truest mysteries in the galaxies.

She wasn’t swearing or demanding drugs or cursing her husband.  She was hungry and wished she had a pizza. Her husband Paul was too tired to get it for her.

As two proud parents waited in a hospital room, Ronald Reagan won another term in office, thumping Walter Mondale in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

This mattered little.

Betty’s water broke as a young nurse made an attempt to bring her to a new room to deliver her baby.

As Betty walked down the hallway, a babe began to fall out between her thighs.

The nurse hadn’t planned on this birth being this quick.

It was only through a miracle that this special baby was not “special” for an entirely different reason.

Most babes would have landed on their soft spots and saved their parents the price of university tuition.

However, THIS was not an ordinary little girl. Most children are not born with a magical and quite retractable horn, especially not one that that would stab into the floor and keep the child balanced between her mother’s clutching thighs.

Her name was Stephanie and this is appropriate for her name meant Crown and it was the horn pointing out of her crown that saved her life.

It was this child that gave us that one singular moment of universal peace.

You see, so long ago, magic had died in the many billions of worlds.

For one fleeting moment God needed silence to see the one thing in all of his universes that baffled him. Indeed how could he miss it?

This is the story of the Alacorn that was born a girl and would become a legend.

For a moment the universe stopped.

Simply to look at you.

The Girl who would teach a poor fool what love is.

Seeds of Doubt by Chris Benjamin

Posted on | June 14, 2011 | No Comments

I have been asking talented Canadian writers to do guest posts on the blog about their 20s and Chris Benjamin is a particularly talented Canadian writer. Enjoy.

The first seeds of doubt were planted when I found plastic bits scattered across my desk with the words “My Pooper-Scooper Prototype” label-markered down the shaft, which had a handle with a squeeze lever. At the other end were two empty yogurt containers held together by spring-loaded hair claws. The idea was to squeeze the trigger, which moved a single claw that then squeezed the double claws, pulling the yogurt containers together, conveniently scooping Rover’s poop. No bending necessary.

“What the hell’s that thing?” I asked Ray, whose desk abutted mine.

He looked up from his computer. “That, my friend, appears to be your first pooper scooper.” He glanced at his watch. “That took, how long you been here? Three weeks?”

I nodded. This was my first job out of business school. I was a market analyst at a non-profit resource centre for inventors in Southern Ontario. “First pooper scooper,” I mumbled.

“We get pooper scoopers about twice a year,” Ray said.

I had a week to do my research on the pooper-scooper market (competitors, growth rates, demand, etc.), and assess my client’s money-making potential.

Ray shuffled through his files. “Here we go,” he said.  He handed me a stack of folders. “In two years I’ve done five pooper scoopers.”

I browsed the folders. “Can’t I just photocopy one of these?”

Ray raised an eyebrow. “Essentially, yes,” he said. “But you have to update the numbers.”

Turns out consumers are not anxiously awaiting the invention of the perfect pooper scooper. By and large they are happy to stoop and scoop with a plastic bag. But the water and sunshine on my pooper-scooper seeds of doubt came in the form of a fire-extinguisher cabinet.

According to the client, the fire-extinguisher cabinet would save lives by beautifying the fire extinguisher, causing people to store it in a more visible, accessible place. In the event of a fire, precious seconds would be saved. The cabinet would be the difference between a little black mark on your carpet…and a blazing inferno enveloping entire neighborhoods, forests and wildlife, taking the lives of brave firefighters, innocent campers and rangers. The trick is to show consumers not a cabinet but rather that difference, so that they say, “How much?” and, “Is that all? For peace of mind? Sold!”

People ate that logic up. The fire-extinguisher cabinet scored off the charts in market potential.

Within a year I’d left my market research job to volunteer for three months in the St. Lucian rainforest, during which time I got excessively skinny from dysentery and was robbed multiple times, including two in one night – one at gunpoint and one by machete – by the same guy. I returned home to learn that the girl who could never love me enough, loved me no more. It’ll come as no surprise that two years of grad school did nothing to reassemble my shattered perception.

My cure was six months hitching around North America listening to average Joes complain how the Blacks, Mexicans, Natives, Asians or whichever group (you let them talk long enough everyone had a very specific ism to get off their chests in private) ruined their hometowns or other favourite places, interspersed with stints volunteering on organic farms.

But in the middle of that, and my 20s, came the craziest thing to happen in this part of the world in my lifetime: 9/11. I was in a café in Prince Rupert playing on a Guns-n-freaking-Roses pinball machine. I had just won a free ball, which I’d never done before, when Peter Mansbridge interrupted my slacktivism. I abandoned the free ball, which was eagerly snapped up by some kid who won about 30 more of them and played off my loonie for hours. To this day I can’t hear the opening echo-ey power chords of “Welcome to the Jungle” without seeing that second tower fall.

Everybody was saying how everything had changed forever. A leftist friend warned me away from anti-globalization protests because the cops would have free range to bash us in the name of freedom fries. (She was right. My old army shirt still smells like tear gas.) I thought it was all bullshit. It was a shocking and frightening event we watched ad nauseum on television, but it was also just another example of haters killing haters. In retrospect, the world has become crazier at an accelerated rate since that day. The difference was, now we could be the victims at any time. The odds are longer than the Burj Khalifa Tower against it, but the very possibility, however infinitesimally small, sent everyone into a permanent, angst-filled spiral. What did it matter whether that girl loved me if I could be obliterated by Osama at lunch?

I spent the next month in the States on Greyhound buses. All those scattered isms of my hitching honed in on a single (albeit broad) target: the Middle East. “Dust ‘em all,” the soldiers on the bus said. I’m sure not everyone agreed, but we were all too nervous to argue, having been patted down and scanned for metal as we waited in stretched lines with the suddenly aero-phobic masses. All our angst was on display in conversations of war, drug abuse, naked ambition, jail time and hatred of others.

These things are personified in my memory by a single young man who, as I slept, jabbed his finger into my ribs and showed me a little yellow pill in his open palm. His other hand was making a “Shh” sign on his lips. His brown eyes bulged under his homey prep-school visor. I closed my eyes and he jabbed me again. “You want a cigarette in your ear?” he asked.

I told him I was sleeping.

“Don’t act like a retard with me like that,” he scolded. “I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

“Try it,” I mumbled, all my nervous energy and exhaustion bubbling out of my mouth.

“What’s your problem, Dude? You got no friends? You don’t know how to deal with people?”

I took his questions seriously, started thinking about my recent fallouts and failures with women, the tongue-tied inaction and hiding in books and newspapers amidst rambling anxious Greyhound conversation. I contemplated and said nothing until he became so disgusted that he moved to the back of the bus and sat with two older women. They moved up front and whispered something to the driver. Within minutes the bus was meeting the cops at a 7-11 and the guy was being hauled off in cuffs.  He had a gun in his pants, which he had proudly showed the older women in the back.

“He said he would protect us all in case of terrorist attacks on Greyhound,” they said.

The craziest thing is: nobody laughed. They all thought it made sense that Osama’s next plan of action could involve taking out a bus full of have-nots and hippies, maybe a few low-ranking soldiers. This was common sense after 9/11.

But, while the plane-struck towers stand tall in our psychic landscape, mass murder is a daily occurrence among post-modern humans. We’re caught in an escalating cycle of ultra-mass-violence. Angst is a natural result of the uncertainty this creates. In all this madness, which assaults our senses relentlessly via a plethora of diverse media, how is one supposed to answer the basic questions that are our rights of passage into adulthood? How are we to make sense of the world? How do we know what is right? How do we make a living without contributing to the madness?

At the same time we are conned, by ‘strongman’ politicians and dazzlingly entertaining multi-sensory stories, into believing that life should be safe, convenient and easy. Chronic anxiety comes from increased risk and decreased tolerance for it. And so we fervently attack the things that seem controllable: children, coyotes and dandelions. But if you’ve tried to control these things you know that, simple though they may be, they rarely cooperate with our schemes, which drives us ever madder. I have a neighbour who roams his yard with a weed plucker (sort of a better-designed version of that Pooper Scooper Prototype) muttering, “This is not a lawn; this is not a lawn.”

There are varying degrees of madness. The magnitude of the suffering of a diagnosed schizophrenic far exceeds my teeth-gnashing tendencies. But that is more a difference of scale than quality. In a mad world, sanity is an illusion.

Chris Benjamin is a freelance journalist and fiction writer. His critically acclaimed first novel, Drive-by Saviours, was listed as a Canada Reads Top 40 essential read of the decade. His first book of nonfiction, Atlantic Canada’s Sustainability Innovators, will be published by Nimbus in Fall 2011. He is the Sustainable City Columnist for The Coast (www.thecoast.ca).  In 2006/2007 he worked as a journalist in Ghana. He was a finalist for the 2010 Fusion Go Sustainability Award and shared an honourable mention in the 2009 National Magazine Awards. Chris has written opinion, fiction and features for The Globe and Mail, Chronicle Herald, VoicePrint Canada, This Magazine, Now Magazine, Canadian Dimension, Descant, Third Person Press, Nashwaak Review, Pottersfield Press, Rattling Books, The Society, University of Waterloo Press, Z Magazine, Briarpatch Magazine, Coastlands, Progress Magazine, Rural Delivery and many others.

www.chrisbenjaminwriting.com

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Introduction to the Cure

Peter Diamond Gallery

About

Michael Kimber is a 26-year-old journalist who suffered a nervous breakdown on November 3rd, 2009. On March 28th, 2010 when he recovered from mental illness, he began writing a blog called Colony-of-losers. About falling on your face to figure out who you are and the hilarious antics of a blond jew. What began with a few friends and his mother reading has become a cult phenomenon, averaging 10,000 views a week, receiving praise from Commonwealth Award Winner Shandi Mitchell and many others. On, November 3rd, 2010, the one year anniversary of his mental breakdown he signed with Anne McDermid and Associates, the largest literary agency in Canada. In a year he went from wearing pajamas, making his couch depression HQ to leaving his hometown for the Toronto, where he exclusively wears business suits and the armor of ancient Greeks. Don't worry, he's still choking on the feet he contently sticks in his mouth and making moments awkward just by being part of them. During these struggles he met other talented bastards and drew them into his circle. Peter Diamond became his illustrator. Patrick Campbell his video editor and part time photographer. He recently added the incredibly talented John Packman as Colony of Losers Toronto photographer. Without the support of the Colony of Losers, Michael Kimber would be nothing. Welcome to the losers and the success that comes from utter and complete failure. You aren’t alone. Follow him on twitter.com/colonyoflosersand twitter.com/quimbo. If you’d like to hire him for a public speaking engagement for mental health events in Toronto, like to arrange an interview, offer millions to publish his book or for another reason contact Michael please email him. And join his facebook Colony of Losers.

Really obvious disclaimer:
I’m not a trained psychologist. Just a fellow traveler. If you need help seek it from the professionals. The Canadian Mental Health Association provides a help locator. You can find crisis resources provided by the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. If you are in the states check here. It will give you services by zip code. I’d also recommend checking out Mindyourmind.ca. I think they do great work and have been a help to me personally.

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Fantastic Thoughts of Quimbo

Michael Kimber
I suffer from anxiety, being a twenty something and having an awesome blog. Check out colony-of-losers.com
Great meal last night with @jusfrais @SALTwinebar. Service was exceptional, food was amazing.They really know how to treat a customer right
"what a bunch of greasy cheeseballs" -the hippy
#SavePicnicface
http://t.co/mN0dWQsq
I miss the days when you were good looking for being famous, rather than famous for being good looking.
Who told you that Bob Saget died?
Why did duelling go out of fashion?