Locking Down Boom of Life, Motion and Humanity

As published at SubStack, 1/6/23:

[Cape Town, South Africa on 8/16/21]

Born in Bombay, Kipling spent most of his childhood in England. At age 17, he returned to India, where he would live until he was 24.

In 1888, just a year before leaving India for good, Kipling wrote about being deprived of his heritage. Uprooted from their civilization, Englishmen were “all backwoodsmen and barbarians together.”

Kipling evokes London, “At Home they, the other men, our equals, have at their disposal all that Town can supply—the roar of the streets, the lights, the music, the pleasant places, the millions of their own kind, and a wilderness full of pretty, fresh-coloured Englishwomen, theatres and restaurants. It is their right. They accept it as such, and even affect to look upon it with contempt.”

Kipling was also surrounded by millions, but not of his own kind, thus most of the women in his “wilderness” weren’t English. In India, the prey Kipling craved were extremely hard to come by.

As for “the roar of the streets,” India certainly didn’t lack that. Hell, I’m still recovering from just one month in Bengaluru and Chennai, but India’s population has been multiplied by 18 since Kipling’s days, and Rudyard didn’t spend five hours each day dodging tuk-tuks on a Delhi belly stuffed with greasy samosas. A calf I had just petted butted me. Enough of your sentimental bullshit! Thirsty, Kipling didn’t down Kingfishers in bars resembling rec rooms in insane asylums.

Kipling, “Calcutta holds out false hopes of some return. The dense smoke hangs low, in the chill of the morning, over an ocean of roofs, and, as the city wakes, there goes up to the smoke a deep, full-throated boom of life and motion and humanity. For this reason does he who sees Calcutta for the first time hang joyously out of the ticca-ghari and sniff the smoke, and turn his face toward the tumult, saying: “This is, at last, some portion of my heritage returned to me. This is a City. There is life here, and there should be all manner of pleasant things for the having, across the river and under the smoke.”

Instead of “the lost heritage of London,” an English newcomer is thrilled to discover one that’s not just greater, but truer, for “at last, some portion of my heritage returned to me,” but it is illusory. It’s not his.

What London and Calcutta had in common, though, was that boom of life, motion and humanity so starved from American society, even before recent lockdowns and the final nails in Main Street’s pine coffin.

Though loneliness is impossible to quantify, it shows up in alcohol, drug, pill and porn addictions, hours staring at the TV or internet, suicide rates and general deterioration of civility.

Good natured humor has been replaced by snarkiness and flippancy, with desocialized men sucker punching strangers on the streets or online. Mirroring their foreign policies, Americans hit and run, their homemade burqas swishing into the darkness. Muslims did it!

Despite all that, there are at least 1,193 sane and civil Americans left, for that’s the exact number of subscribers to my SubStack! Of these, three have allowed me to share with y’all how they’re coping with our atrocious New Normal and Great Reset.

On 3/19/22, I quoted from Troy, who confided he had enlisted to fight in Afghanistan to escape his isolation, despair and an aimless life punctuated by mind wringing bouts of boozing. Those six months overseas turned out to be the best of his life, though crowds of booing Afghans who gave Troy and his fellow grunts thumbs down made it clear they weren’t liberators. Troy was just grateful he didn’t have to shoot anyone. Enlistment over, Troy was back to his rut.

Before joining the Army at age 31, Troy worked in factories, warehouses and restaurants, “whatever bought the beer.” Discharged, he ended up in Colorado as a wrench turner in oilfields, but only lasted a couple of weeks. “I drank my way out. The other guys were loaded on medical pot, amphetamine and steroids.”

Nearly all the blue-collar Americans I've known drank too much and were also on drugs. It’s not just the steady and total exertion needed to perform mind numbingly repetitive tasks that drives men half mad. There’s also not much to look forward to after the day’s done. OK, so you have happy hour that can stretch to last call, or another evening on the couch staring at commercials intermittently broken up by laugh tracks or a bouncing ball. Special evenings may entail inserting half the week’s earning into neon colored garter or boobs squished together.

Troy doesn’t just drink but read, so I asked him about his favorite authors. Troy:

Early on it was Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut, some science fiction, whatever I came across. In the army, I read most of Cormac McCarthy's stuff. Since then, Michel Houellebecq has been a favorite. The Elementary Particles was profound for me. Donald Ray Pollock from Ohio is a close-to-home favorite. I'm a big fan of short stories, Ron Rash from North Carolina comes to mind. There's Jim Goad, who I really credit with jumpstarting my inquiries. 

At present my big four are Postcards, The Saker, Andrei Martyanov and Larry Johnson. James Howard Kunstler can entertain and inform as well. You all keep me going, Linh! It's truly appreciated.

Kunstler started me thinking about how badly laid-out space destroys not just the life of the community, but each man’s psychology. While living in a Denys Lasdun’s Brutalist building in Norwich, England, I read Kunstler’s Cities in Mind. I had already spent two years in the medieval section of a small Italian town, so knew folks hadn’t always had to endure some pompous architect or city planner’s nightmare. In Norwich, my door opened into a concrete hallway half sunken in the ground.

Plopped down onto Michiana, Troy speaks of his space, with its “rural, rustbelt despair”:

I'm just a typical Midwestern head case who by grace of circumstance ended up with a few extra brain cells in combination with a lot of space and free time. I've met some pretty perceptive addicts out there. Unfortunately, some of them haven't made it.

I remember watching the history of Rock and Roll documentary on PBS in the late 90’s. I was a stoner Doors fan, but when they got to this scrawny guy standing in front of a cornfield to the opening chords of The Stooges 1969, something changed. I remember Iggy saying something like, “I used to go out into the corn and create my own games. I think it was the space, the freedom of where I was, that gave me an ability to dream, concentrate and imagine...”

That resonated, along with the desire to simply “escape” it all. I'm not sure about the concentration part, but that kind of wide open innocence coupled with some intelligence can create anxieties and confusions in adolescent young men. Substances, for better or worse, often fill that space. 

A lot of space beckons one to journey outward, thus Route 66, cutting right through the Midwest, has become an international icon of American freedom and mobility, with endless space to explore. From Bangkok to Beirut, that highway sign appears. In Johannesburg, there’s a Route 66 Video Arcade.

You need cash, though, to hit that road, and at the end of Route 66, there’s not so much boom of life, motion and humanity, but a kitschy boardwalk with chintzy souvenirs, and hundreds of homeless sprawled on the beach, even in daylight. Feel free to join them.

In San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and San Diego, etc., California is where the American Dream goes to get doped up then die, and it’s only by default. The ocean prevents these desperate dreamers from drifting further.

Just before this Christmas, Troy told me he had moved into a men’s shelter, so I asked if this, too, was an escape from unbearable isolation? Sure was, Troy said, and it worked, for he felt “as balanced” as he had been in a while.

Troy, “It’s definitely getting hairy here in the States. Everything seems to be slowing down and falling apart in subtle ways. I feel like a ghost among zombies, even among my closest friends and family. Still, I’d rather be aware of the situation as opposed to stuck in front of the TV, as are many of the guys.”

Troy’s dad tested positive for Covid after four “vaccination” shots. After “a lifetime of robust health,” he suffered a minor stroke last year after his second jab.

There’s nothing Troy can do, “I've been through the stages of grief over this and know better than to say shit anymore, the dissonance is such. Love him regardless, he’s actually extremely intelligent but refuses to question anything that National Public Radio (damn them) reports.”

Out in Cleveland, 65-year-old Elizabeth Hayes doesn’t even have a bar to run to, not that she can dash much, for it hurts just to stand long enough to wash a few dishes.

Elizabeth:

There used to be a bar up the street. Well, it’s still there, but closed. Years ago it was a quite popular place—bands on the weekends and pretty good food for lunch and dinner. Judy, who’d been living with preschool Gracie at the time above the bar in an efficiency, had turned the back patio into a beautiful garden/playzone for Gracie, and customers could sit out there. That’s where Gracie charmed a couple into taking her on when Judy got too sick to care for her. Last I heard they were sending her to a private girl's school that costs $40,000 a year. Not bad for a crack baby who'd been born in a Florida prison.

When the owner died a couple bought it and spent a year renovating. It was named the most improved establishment in Cleveland's local paper. Within a few years the new owners drove it into the ground. Shortly after its opening, the guy, an ex-felon, beat the shit out of his girlfriend or wife or whatever in front of customers. He banned people at the drop of a hat. He couldn't keep a cook so no more food. No more bands. The hours were cut drastically. I'd go by there on a weekend evening and there would be maybe two cars. Then for some months there was a sign outside that the property was for sale, including a Sunday liquor permit. Then signs that it would be sold at auction. Apparently nothing came of it as it was open for maybe a month more and then came a “closed for vacation” sign. That was a month or two ago. I'll bet that motherfucker beat the shit out of his partner again and she vacationed in intensive care. Really a spectacular job of fucking up a business.

Any city dweller should have at least three or four bars within walking distance, not just one, whose closure means the end of her social life.

Long divorced, Elizabeth has also been disowned by her woke daughter. The final trigger was Elizabeth’s refusal to pay for Leah’s graduate studies in art therapy. On a Philadelphia sidewalk, I once met an earnest young man who said he wanted to be a “life coach,” though he had had only the most minimal of work and life experiences. A society’s sickness can be measured by its proliferation of jivey theparists, who are themselves, most often, mentally ill.

Elizabeth:

My daughter Leah once told me she’d decided she’s culturally Jewish because it appeals to her to be part of an oppressed group. I laughed; her father’s extended family owns a Savings and Loan. Leah has not talked to me in four years. Naturally, I think of her daily with mixed feelings, outraged by what a little shit she grew up to be and missing her deeply at the same time. For all I know, she could have three kids by now. She could be dead; I don’t check the obits and doubt her father would alert me, but essentially, she’s dead to me now. My mind is haunted by many dead people.

Troy feels like a ghost among zombies. Elizabeth’s mind is swarmed by the dead. Nominally ruled by a child-groping zombie who farts, snarls and shakes hands with thin air, America lurches towards a grave already filled with millions of its victims.

Elizabeth told me about a recent CounterPunch article, “The Kremlin Goes Neocon.” In it, Eric Draitser speaks of Putin’s “isolation,” “irrationality” and “the possibility of his insanity,” on and on, to conclude that this “King Lear, as mad as the vexed sea, his finger on the nuclear button, muttering launch codes to himself,” has learnt his lessons from Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George Bush! “You can almost hear Putin’s words in that degenerate Texas twang.”

So a sideswipe at Texas on top of this cartoonish demonization of the hugely popular Russian leader, a statesman who’s dwarfing all other world leaders. Can this, ah, be coming from another Jewish warmonger, and one with Ukrainian roots, just like Victoria Nudelman? “Oh come on, you’re so anti-Semitic!” you howl. Meanwhile at Unz Review, Jewish Ron Unz continues to defend genocidal Jewjabs. They sure know when to close ranks.

Conforming wholesale, “progressives” march along, so they’re pro Big Pharma and censorship, with all questioning of Jewjabs deemed “misinformation.” So sanctimonous, they’re the true holocaust deniers.

Elizabeth:

All the people I know here in Cleveland who think they’re radical leftists think just like Democrats. They worshipped Greta Thunberg until she said it was a mistake for Germany to turn off their nuclear power. They get a reverential tone whenever talking about anyone who isn’t white. Black Lives Matter was a righteous protest and January 6th was an attempted coup. It’s an atrocity that Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t found guilty. I know exactly what they’re going to think next just by looking at the headlines of Common Dreams.

Troy speaks of stocking up on “rice, beans, canned goods and pasta,” for “a can of cold corned beef hash can be a delicacy on cold winter days.” Going into survival mode, he’s just hoping to ride this out.

Elizabeth:

I don’t know how people are feeding themselves because they won’t take the fast food/grocery store/cashier jobs. The places where such work is done have all cut their hours, and often they close much earlier, unannounced, when the employees don’t show up.

I’m very alone but not really lonely. When I was a child and first watched that old black-and-white Frankenstein movie, I remember thinking of the hermit, “I could live like that.” I don’t have a lot of hope for the future—old age has been cruel to those I’m related
to, I wouldn’t go near a doctor these days, and dire poverty (or worse) looks more than likely – but I’m not really depressed, not like those bipolar depressions I used to have. Suicide is all the rage these days, and I’ve always had disdain for the next trendy thing.

Elizabeth’s disdain for suicide because it’s trendy may sound like some goofy joke, except she attempted it decades ago. I urge everyone to read her “Why I Jumped off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge.” That’s as brave and beautiful a confessional piece of writing as any I’ve encountered.

Whether personal or societial, collapse is often boring and tedious, with destitution or even degradation increasing in small, or manageable, if you will, increments.

From Tacoma, James writes to tell me he has been turned down from yet another job. Like millions of Americans, he’s paying dearly for refusing to be Jewjabbed:

The shut downs caused me to fall into debt. Recovery is difficult when the Governor mandated teachers to become vaccinated. I lost my high school job and my part time college admissions job. Then Biden mandated vaccines which caused me to lose my computer repair job. The state requires me to repay my Covid unemployment when I refused to work at a redneck-run warehouse.

If James didn’t have multiple skills, he would be living in his car, if not under a bridge.

What’s wrong with “rednecks,” you may ask? Nothing, if you’re the great Joe Bageant, who was a self-identified redneck. As a black man, though, James has a different perspective:

When I was a kid my godmother said when she saw an emergency outside she would tell the 911 operator that a black man was roughing up a white woman outside. She said that otherwise, as they lived in a black neighborhood, the police would either never show up or show up hours later.  Her method apparently worked because the police would then arrive within minutes.

And:

As the economy slips and there aren’t enough blacks around to scapegoat, then the whites will go “anarchy” as my godmother’s sister related to me from her memories of the 1930's Great Depression. It wasn’t till a few years ago that I finally realized that blacks are here to keep the white workers scared and quiet.

As always, race complicates matters, so any unified response against this well orchestrated assault against us all is difficult, especially in the West, with its dubious and often incoherent multiculturalism.

By contrast, consider the beginning of the Thai national anthem:

Thailand unites the flesh and blood of Thais.
The land of Thailand belongs to the Thais.
Long has been our independence,
Because we have been united forever.

Just in case you think James is some rabid racist, he and his wife get along fine with their white and Vietnamese neighbors.

Interestingly, James also uses “zombies,” like Troy, to describe people he encounters:

I almost got into an accident with a mixed youth who cut me off. Amazing! Your own kind will be the ones to get you killed. I saw a six car accident on the freeway coming home. After the accident the zombies proceeded to drive like Mad Max once again.

Like “zombies,” “Mad Max” is trending on the internet. Discounting fools, everyone can see what’s coming. Day by day, most of us can clearly feel ourselves increasingly squeezed, if not suffocated.

It’s remarkable how the most natural acts, breathing, touching, standing outside or just walking down the street, etc., have been circumscribed, while the most outrageously unnatural violation, that of being injected with a bioweapon, has been mandated, even for infants.

Covid deaths were pumped up by miscounting and, even more criminally, mistreatment in hospitals, so as to frighten everyone into accepting multiple Jewjabs. Millions, then, have been duped into paying for their own suicides.

On 1/2/23, the Rasmussen Reports revealed that its “national telephone and online survey finds that 49% of American Adults believe it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths, including 28% who think it’s Very Likely.”

It’s encouraging that half of Americans are calling bullshit on the “safe and effective” injections still being pushed by Rochelle Walensky, Rachel Levine and, of course, Albert Bourla, who has made billions from his premeditated murder of millions, and counting.

When this genocide finally stops, will any of these Josef Mengeles x10, plus all the lying politicians, doctors and journalists who have been their accomplices, ever be held accountable?

With depopulation as its agenda, our ruling cabal has many more sick surprises to unleash. This war has just begun.

 

[Windhoek, Namibia on 3/17/22]

[Chennai, India on 12/25/22]

[Busan, South Korea on 5/22/20]

[Belgrade, Serbia on 9/16/20]

[Vung Tau, Vietnam on 9/5/22]

Walk This Way

As published at Unz Review and TruthSeeker, 6/15/19:





In Saigon, I live with my in laws in Phú Lâm, the same neighborhood I was in at 8 and 9-years-old, when my mother had a pharmacy here. It was named Linh. Then my parents got divorced. Sometimes in life, you end up exactly where you started.

Twice a day, I’d take my nephew for a walk, with the first usually at 6AM, and the second around 5PM. I’ve done this for over a year. Though his real name is Thiên Ân [God’s Gift], he’s called Suki, for nearly all Vietnamese babies have a nickname, usually something cute sounding, like Bim or Bon. In this neighborhood, there are toddlers nicknamed Coca, Pepsi and Khoai Tây [French Potato].

Suki has just turned two. Like me, he loves to be on the streets. Delighted by what he sees, he sometimes laughs out loud, and once startled a boy badminton player in mid swing. Suki particularly likes to observe men working. Everywhere we go, we see new houses being built, four, five stories high, so we would stop to watch men and women fill then push barrows loaded with sand or bricks. Mesmerized by cement mixers, Suki has sort of learnt how to pronounce it, “máy măng,” leaving out the “xi.” Many of these construction crews have gotten used to seeing Suki showing up early in the morning to watch them work. Smiling, they’d banter with him.

As we watched a cement mixer growlingly turn, a woman in a nearby house noticed mosquito bites on Suki’s legs, so she went home and got some medicinal oil to rub on my nephew, and this she did with the greatest concern. We didn’t even know her.

“Say thank you to granny, Suki!” I urged.

Just by wandering around nearby alleys each day, we’ve rubbed ourselves into the neighborhood. People notice.

Wending through alleys, Suki becomes acculturated, learns how to be Vietnamese, and what he sees isn’t always charming. At Phú Định Market, a regular stop, he watched as a man snipped off a frog’s mouth, hands and feet, then cut straight down its back, so that he could peel its entire skin, coatlike, off the still living animal. Eyes blinking, twitching or crawling around, the purple frog could now join dozens of his similarly undressed relatives.

Seeing Mr. Hiếu at an alley cafe, Suki and I sat down at his table. Across the way was a hideous Buddhist temple that, over time, I’ve found less ugly, and once or twice, from a certain angle and in the right light, I even thought beautiful.

To say that I’ve known Mr. Hiếu for 20 years would be misleading, for there’s not much to know. The man hardly talks. Sixty-seven-years-old, he was a car and truck mechanic, but hasn’t worked in a long time, as his strength ebbed. He lived in the house he was born until last year, when it had to be sold. Now dwelling half a mile away, he comes back to his old neighborhood each day, out of habit and sadness. Yesterday, I caught him walking by his old home just to look at it. Mr. Hiếu was married for just a year, before his wife left him. He’s been nowhere, done nothing exciting and doesn’t touch alcohol. He does smoke Jet, at 86 cents a pack, and drink iced coffee.

What Mr. Hiếu does have, though, is an abundant sense of belonging, so maybe he should feel sorry for you?

As I walked alone, a scrawny boy of about four suddenly grabbed my hand and meekly pleaded, “Uncle, take me to my mommy.”

“Your mommy?! Where is your mommy?”

“That way.”

“But I don’t know your mommy. Where do you live?”

“This way.”

“Why don’t you just stay home, and wait until your mommy comes back?”

“I’m home alone.”

Turning to a nearby woman, I asked, “Do you know this boy?”

“No,” she smiled, “but he can stay with me until his mom shows up.” She yanked over a low plastic stool for the boy to sit on. Becalmed, he perched.

“I’ll leave him with you, sister.” Satisfied with this arrangement, I continued my rambling.

In the US, I also walked tirelessly, for during my 30 years as an adult there, I owned a car for just one year. Though certainly not the most efficient way to get around, walking is the most intimate and social, for that’s how you can measure your environment with your body, one foot at a time. Wandering, you can feel the friendly, off-putting, desolate or menacing vibes of each neighborhood.

I logged many miles in San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, St Paul, Chicago, Columbus, Cleveland, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, New Orleans, Charleston, Atlanta and Orlando, etc. Mostly, I walked all over Philadelphia, for that’s how I got to know my city. Not too wisely, I repeatedly strayed into its least congenial sections. When I lingered at the corner where my friend Jerome Robinson had been killed, an angry, scowling teenager marched over to tell me to get the fuck away. Jerome was shot by such a kid.

Much of this walking, I did without any maps. When I got lost in Washington’s Anacostia, one of its few remaining black ghettos, I asked a woman to point me to the nearest Metro Station. In the sweetest, most maternal voice, she said, “It’s this way, baby!”

In Philadelphia’s Logan, a woman who appeared to be half black, half yellow asked me as I passed her on the sidewalk, “Are you partly black?”

Half amused, half apologetic, I had to answer this lovely lady, “No, no!”

Working up a sweat, I would reward myself by barging into any bar that looked cheap enough, and the reception I got was nearly always convivial. In 2012, I dropped into Chicago’s Logan Square’s Western Tap, a joint I had been in just once, in 2009, yet the bartender, Pancho, still remembered me. Granted, no other Vietnamese had likely sat in this long-time Polish bar, then frequented mostly by Puerto Ricans.

Another guy, Manuel, was perched on the same stool as three years earlier, and he too remembered me . As we chattered, Enter The Dragon came on TV, so we talked about Bruce and Brandon Lee, and I told him about my recent travel. Manuel had only been to New York once, for two months, and had returned to his native Puerto Rico a handful of times, and that’s it for his traveling. Too busy working, he had never even been to nearby Milwaukee, St Louis or Detroit. Manuel had toiled in all types of factories, and even in a Chinese restaurant. “There was so much work back then. You could always find work, not like today.” Manuel labored so hard, he never got around to getting married.

On the Western Tap’s sign, there wasn’t even its name, just “HEILEMAN’S OLD STYLE” framed heraldically. Like the beer, the bar is gone. Like diners, dive bars are disappearing.

There are many reasons for this. Its function as a public living room, as in England, has been diminished relentlessly, as people would rather sit home, alone in the dark, to be indoctrinated by a screen, and you can’t readily masturbate in a bar.

Modern city planning, with its zoning laws, is also culpable. In The Road to Wiggan Pier (1937), Orwell points out, “A whole section of the town is condemned en bloc; presently the houses are pulled down and the people are transferred to some housing estate miles away. In this way all the small shopkeepers of the quarter have their whole clientele taken away from them at a single swoop and receive not a penny of compensation. They cannot transfer their business to the estate, because even if they can afford the move and the much higher rents, they would probably be refused a licence. As for pubs, they are banished from the housing estates almost completely, and the few that remain are dismal sham-Tudor places fitted out by the big brewery companies and very expensive. For a middle-class population this would be a nuisance–it might mean walking a mile to get a glass of beer; for a working-class population, which uses the pub as a kind of club, it is a serious blow at communal life.”

In the US, the same dynamics occurred with the mass exodus to the suburbs, a process accelerated by the race riots of the 60’s. Millions of whites simply gave up their turf to blacks. Sick of strip malls, many are now moving back into cities, but each ghetto encroachment is being met by resentful blacks, for that’s how it is and has always been, a battle for lebensraum between competing groups. A different mode of living demands its own space. As intended, multiculturalism increases and intensifies these battles.

It’s no big deal to talk to strangers, really, as long as you’re willing to listen, but first, you must walk towards them.

Many, though, prefer to head the other way, and this antisocial walking is perhaps best exemplified by Thoreau, “I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.” Following his lead, Americans trek into their magnificent landscape, so much of which remains open even today.

As for city walking, it’s not a very popular pastime, I don’t think, and one deterrent is crime. A friend, Wendy, just emailed me from Cleveland, “I think I told you then about my black friend who’d been killed in the ghetto, shot three times in the back, and nobody knew why. Every black person I talked to about it just shrugged and said, ‘Probably just another random shooting.’ In the past year there’ve been two black-on-black shooting deaths in my neighborhood that I know of. One was at the gas station/convenience store just down the street. It’s since installed bullet-proof plexiglas to protect the clerks and keep a security guard on duty. Well, three deaths, because when I saw the police all over the place, I went to the drug store across the street to ask what happened. There was a black woman there who said, ‘They killed my boy last week too.’

“The other one was at the watering hole I used to frequent, T’s, just up the street. T’s used to be a place where people in their 50s-60s hung at during happy hour, whites, blacks, Russian immigrants who live in the low-income housing; carpenters, schoolteachers, retired folk, etc. Every once in a while we’d get a little buzzed, put some money in the juke box, and dance around. The bartender was a middle-aged lady who told great jokes. As with many of the bars around here, after happy hour the place would ‘change’– dive bar parlance for turning entirely black. Since the murder there, the owner has given management over to some black pimps; the barmaids are ‘dancers.’ The great thing about the sort of black people who frequent these places is they get plastered on the high-shelf stuff before tearing the place up and getting out their guns, and usually they miss. When people start moving out because of the violence, it’ll be chalked up to racism.”

So now Wendy can’t even drag her creaky, middle aged ass to the local dive to palaver away her sorrows.

Maybe Wendy can drive half an hour or so to the nearest shopping mall, and after finding a parking space, go inside to march around with other mall walkers. Among the benefits of this new American pastime is the presence of “mall security staff and presence of other walkers and shoppers [which helps] to alleviate a fear of crime that may be prevalent in other neighborhood areas,” as explained by a University of Washington brochure. Chain stores will be her world.

During my two months in Marfa, Texas, I would daily walk around this handsome town of 1,800, but the front porches were mostly empty, thanks to the air conditioners. Neighborly bonding did occur at the Lost Horse Saloon and, especially, at high school football games, where enchiladas were sold and everyone chattered quite cheerfully through another spirited loss. The Shorthorns simply suck year after year. Among the cheerleaders was a sprightly queer, so he too had his place.

Every community is woven together by the stories of its inhabitants, so if you don’t know your neighbors’ stories, you’re homeless.

This week, I reread Chekhov’s Little Trilogy. In “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries” and “About Love,” a character narrates a longish tale to two listeners, and this is no fictional device, but perfectly realistic, for before the advent of electronic media, people routinely told each other stories. I had many such evenings as a child, in the 70’s. More than entertainment, it was a social necessity.

Now, billions are enraptured to dumb skits, porn and real or fake catastrophes cynically or sinisterly beamed from thousands of miles away. Hardly knowing where they are at any moment, they have become emotional, social and political castrati.

The literature of walking is endless, and immediately, Basho’s Backroads to Far Town or Neruda’s “Walking Around” will spring to mind, but to me, the most astonishing writing on walking is Robert Walser’s “The Walk,” for it captures perfectly the multifaceted elation that walking’s intercourse with life often yields.

Walser, as translated by Christopher Middleton, “A walk is always filled with significant phenomena, which are valuable to see and to feel. A pleasant walk most often teems with imageries and living poems, with enchantments and natural beauties, be they ever so small. The lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker, who must of course walk not with downcast but with open and unclouded eyes, if the lovely significance and the gay, noble idea of the walk are to dawn on him.”

Walking’s main usurper and enemy is the automobile. Walser, “To people sitting in a blustering dust-churning automobile I always present my austere and angry face, and they do not deserve a better one. Then they believe that I am a spy, a plainclothes policeman, delegated by high officials and authorities to spy on the traffic, to note down the numbers of vehicles, and later to report them. I always then look darkly at the wheels, at the car as a whole, but never at its occupants, whom I despise, and this in no way personally, but purely on principle; for I do not understand, and I never shall understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. In fact, I love repose and all that reposes. I love thrift and moderation and am in my inmost self, in God’s name, unfriendly toward any agitation and haste. More than what is true I need not say. And because of these words the driving of automobiles will certainly not be discontinued, nor its evil air-polluting smell, which nobody for sure particularly loves or esteems. It would be unnatural if someone’s nostrils were to love and inhale with relish that which for all correct nostrils, at times, depending perhaps on the mood one is in, outrages and evokes revulsion. Enough, and no harm meant. And now walk on. Oh, it is heavenly and good and in simplicity most ancient to walk on foot, provided of course one’s shoes or boots are in order.”

Fearing life, Chekhov’s man in a case erected every barrier against it, and was only at peace in the coffin, where “his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put in a case which he would never leave again.”

Similarly, contemporary man has encased himself against life. Strapped to agitation and haste, he unhappily hurls himself past everything that makes this existence meaningful.






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Elizabeth Hayes' "The Hospital Stay"

[following "Why I Jumped off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge"]





When I was in the hospital, I had this roommate, Chrissy, for a while. She was diagnosed schizophrenic. Her legs were broken, and one was really badly shattered. What had happened was she had gone off her antipsychotics because they made her feel dead, and she began to imagine that her boyfriend of ten years or so was Satan. So she had decided to do the Christian thing and kill him. She asked him to go with her across the bridge to find some new shoes at the mall, and she’d drive. Once they were on the bridge, she started bashing the passenger side of the car against the side rails in an attempt to murder him that way. I don’t see how that could work, but at any rate, in the act of doing so she realized what she was attempting was wrong, so, in a suicide attempt, she stopped the car and ran in front of a vehicle coming toward her. Her face was very badly damaged in on one side, a mass of browns, pinks, scarlets, and purples, from it bashing into the windshield. The main injury, though, was the badly smashed leg. A large screw stuck out of her calf. I’d never seen anything like it, and never got the medical explanation.

Chrissy was a well-loved person. Her parents, your basic nice, conscientious suburban types, came to see her at least once a day, often with a friend of theirs, a man of about 40 with an Appalachian drawl. Sometimes her old schoolmates came as well, and all these people always brought gifts: little teddy bears, balloons, flowers; her area looked like a hospital gift shop. They talked about old times at the high school, their white collar careers, their children, and such. They reminisced about prom and grade school.

Chrissy was very concerned about where she was going to live when she got out. She had a job with some public mental health program, but she wasn’t going to be able to return to her old apartment because the building had no elevator and the apartment was three flights up. She was keeping an eye on the rent ads in the local newspaper. Her mother was arguing, very gently, that she should go to a nursing home because she needed physiotherapy, but Chrissy argued that a physiotherapist could come to an apartment, so her mother was looking for a place for her, or so she said. Chrissy had found a basement apartment in the paper, and her mother said, “Chrissy, that has stairs.” Chrissy said, “Just one short flight, Mom! Once I get down there you can bring me groceries and stuff and I won’t have to leave the apartment until my legs are all better.”

Was it just an extraordinary coincidence that in this city hospital, two white women with “serious” mental illnesses, both of whom were there because of a suicide attempt involving a bridge, ended up being roommates? Or did some administrator look at our records and think, well this should make for interesting conversation for the staff? To be serious, I reject the second theory; the place was too slapdash in its operation to consider it. This was the city hospital that served mostly the poor, no nurse’s first choice for certain, as I found out in subsequent conversations. I think it was one of those strange, unlikely coincidences that will happen from time to time. And to suggest this is synchronicity shows a misunderstanding of chance. Nothing seems more unjust to a gambler than somebody who wins the lotto big on his second ticket.

You might think that we would have lain there weeping and regretting and crying out to God, but that wasn’t the case at all. We watched talk shows and sitcoms to pass the time and laughed at all the jokes. Chrissy talked about having gone to college to study religion and literature, so we discussed William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience and our favorite authors. She said she’d had to drop out of college when she had her first psychotic episode, but she was getting back on track and was signed up for college the next fall. She wanted to become a minister.

“Oh, you better watch out with that religion stuff!” I said, laughing, “I knew this chick who got so psychotic that she thought she was the Pope and a Navy Seal at the same time!”

Chrissy thought that was hilarious. “Oh, don’t worry. The only psychosis I ever get is thinking that guy is Satan.”

“So this isn’t the first time?” I asked. She said it has happened since she’d been with him, off and on. Usually when she went off her medication, but sometimes even when she was on it.

“Do you think there are angels and devils all around you? That chick I was just telling you about did. When the psych ward discharged her after the money ran out, she let these two co-patients live in her apartment. She thought they were angels, but they stole everything she had.”

“No, nothing that crazy,” she said. “Which psych ward was she in?” I told her it was the one in East Cleveland, and she said, “Oh God, that one’s the worst,” and I said, “I know. I was in there for three days once. First and last time I’ll ever let myself be admitted to one of those madhouses.” That was the time I was trying to figure out how to hang myself with a two belts attached to a hook on the ceiling at 5 am, so I went over to Judy’s and she insisted I call 911. I had the worst psychiatrist ever in there. Wouldn’t let me out because he said I ‘needed to be punished.’”

I hope you will not think me rude, but my biggest fear at the time was having a bowel movement, which was going to be painful, particularly considering that opioids make people constipated, not to mention that the effort would surely make my sciatic nerve go mad: the operation had been botched and a nerve had been caught in the screw, so the pain was intense if I bent too much toward the sitting position. To ward off the inevitable, I wasn’t eating anything, just drinking black decaffeinated coffee, broth if I got some soup, and water. Most of the nurses were fairly pleasant, except this one who was always in such a bad mood she handled me roughly, and seemed at the edge of full attack at any time.

I asked Chrissy about her life. She said that she’d been fine until she turned 20. “Wow,” I enthused, “Me too!” She had been studying religion and literature in a local private Catholic college and all was fine, and then she met this older man and fell in love with him, even though she was the more intelligent. Usually she went for the intellectual types. That’s when the schizophrenic episodes began.

‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘these coincidences just keep piling up.’

She had a lot of issues with men hitting on her all the time. She talked about a boss she had that was always trying to get her in bed, and what really angered her was how her coworkers reacted. They assumed she was getting all the easiest and most profitable work because she was sleeping with him, which she was not. Like most of the mentally ill, Chrissy was quite sensitive to the emotions of others; we can nearly smell them. Her coworkers’ attitudes really made her fume, because she was really a hard worker and deserved what she got. She talked about that situation quite a lot, although I can’t remember the details. Some sort of sales job. Chrissy had quite the feminist take on life.

Once she got a nurse to give me one of her little teddy bears. I guess she felt bad because nobody had brought me anything—the book was from the library, just a loan. The teddy bear wore a little Scottish cap and kilt. It held up a sign that said “FEEL BETTER!”

David called up once and chatted for a while. “That was really stupid,” he said, laughing. “Why didn’t you go to the middle of the bridge?”

Chrissy would not let them take an MRI scan. A doctor came in once and argued with her about it. They absolutely needed to do this before they performed the necessary surgery. She refused, over and over. Finally he said, “We are wondering if you are mentally capable to make these decisions,” and left, quite exasperated.

That was the only time Chrissy seemed at all insane. “Chrissy, why don’t you let them put you in an MRI machine?” I asked. She said it was the radiation. I said, “But x-rays give you radiation.” She hadn’t known that, so maybe this was not insanity, just a bit of ignorance. “Chrissy, do you want to live your life with a screw sticking out of your leg? How’s that going to look?” So Chrissy did get the MRI scan, got the surgery, and came back.

Her face was looking a little better after a week or so, more yellow and less of the darker colors. Her eye had cleared of blood, so she looked much less frightful.

I was missing my intensive care nurse, a beautiful Latino who was so kind. He told me funny stories about his little son; I can’t remember what they were but I very clearly remember he would say, “OK, I will see if I can get you some more pain medication, but don’t tell anybody,” and wink at me as I lay flat on my back, excruciated by the pain whenever I had to use the bedpan. He acted like attending to me was the greatest delight, the most important thing in the world. I remember a doctor coming in at some point and explaining to me what all had broken and what the plan was, He did this very briskly so I can’t remember what they all were. He called in another nurse to help turn me on my stomach, which, let me tell you, was quite the painful experience, and mapped out all the major contusions on a diagram of a human back, and then explained that he had only included the worst ones because there were too many.

The memories of those first days are a bit sketchy, and one persistent one is quite dubious. I was in a room as copious as a low-ceilinged dance hall. I was sitting in a chair facing five doctors, which would have been impossible because, first of all, I couldn’t sit in a chair, and second, getting that much attention from that many doctors at a time is highly unlikely—particularly given that they knew I had no health insurance, which makes doctors surly, and these were quite intent and patient. But in that memory, most of the room was dark; there was just some light beamed at our little group. Something was going on in the other side of the room, in the dusk, but I couldn’t tell what. Something musical? A bit of carpentry? Something with noise and rhythmic busyness involved, maybe tap dancing, as the doctors asked me questions and tried to get me to perform physical acts. I found I couldn’t lift my arms over waist level. That part was true.

I could not tell dreaming from consciousness for a while, but that has happened before, even without massive drugging. For instance, I dreamed so often for years that there was a fantastic nightclub on the top floor of CSU’s oldest building, an art deco confection called Fenn Tower, that I actually believed it was there for years, and sometimes my dreams are so mundane and realistic that I’ll think I’d bought groceries because I’d dreamed of doing so the night before.

My Latino guy would peer into my eyes with empathy, grave concern, and then a bit of mischief, and slip me some more opioid. I doubt he was giving me more than what the doctor ordered; he could just tell that I loved transgressions, so pretended for my sake.

I don’t remember how long I was in intensive care, but eventually I had an operation to put my pelvic bone back together: there’s a substantial eight-or-so-inch screw in there—I saw it on an x-ray once—and when it was over, I was wheeled into the room with Chrissy. My daughter showed up. “Mom, how did this happen?” she asked, and when I fessed up, all sympathy left her face and she walked out, never to return that entire hospital stay. Judy showed up a few times. Judy is my best girlfriend. She is 15 years my senior, old enough to be my mother, and spends a lot of time in hospitals due to various problems with lungs and bones, mostly. She loves going to the hospital and being served food like a queen, but this hospital had really crappy food.

She talked to the social worker on my behalf. She said that although I could get really depressed, I was not dangerous, but just such a sweet woman who teaches English. Judy does a very good sweet little old lady act herself, which serves her well, particularly when she’s run through all her SS money because she bought a bunch of plants or even crap off the TeeVee, is out of SNAP, and wants me to “lend” her some. She told me she would get my house, which I’d left in a disastrous state, all cleaned up for me, and feed the cats. My friend David the carpenter was going to mow my lawn. I asked her if she had anything to read. She pulled a book out of her bag. I have no idea what it was called or who the author was, but it seems to me it was translated out of the Swedish or somewhere thereabouts. It was a really sick book about this doctor without nipples who murders women, cuts them up, and then rearranges them into sculptures. This reminded me of the sculptures Judy used to make out of dead animals she’d find out in the yard, combining their bones and bits of fur, along with rusty nails and assorted hardware, into interesting shapes. It is so like Judy to bring me a book as horrorshow as that one days after I’d jumped off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge.

This hospital is known for its focus on intense physiotherapy. Not long after I’d been in with Chrissy, a physiotherapist came in with two nurses, one of them that really angry one. Chrissy’s mother was sitting with her; Chrissy nearly always had company. The physiotherapist announced that it was time for me to sit in a chair. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll stay with you, and will put you back in bed if the pain gets too bad,” and then they wheeled in this contraption that foists people like me up and into a chair. One nurse took my arms, one by one, and pulled them up to the bar, and then they wheeled the contraption to a chair and dropped me into a sitting position. The pain was just fucking Boschian.

That physiotherapist lied. She and the nurses left immediately and did not come back for nearly an hour, and that whole time I sat writhing in pain, sweating and writhing, moaning and grunting, watching the clock for them to come back, so relieved to see it reach the half-hour mark, and then so angry that they didn’t come back when they said they would. Meanwhile Chrissy and her mother discussed plans for after the operation. Chrissy’s mother did get me some water, which was nice of her.

When they finally returned they took their fucking time wheeling that contraption in that would carry me back in bed. The physiotherapist just glared at me triumphantly when I complained of her tardiness, as if to say, ‘You’re a spoiled asshole and don’t know what’s good for you. I’m the Expert here.” When for some reason I had to lift my hands to the handles on top of the bed, the mean nurse spit out, “Do it yourself.” They kept on forgetting about the shoulder adhesion problem.

Man, was I relieved to be back in bed and see them go. I lay there with my eyes closed for some time, then turned on the TeeVee. “Hey Chrissy, there’s a documentary about John Lennon on. Wanna watchit with me?” She turned it onto her TeeVee and we watched it. I’m OK with John Lennon, but watching him and Yoko Ono frolic around their English estate was kind of depressing. However, nothing else was on, and I was done with that horrorshow book Judy had lent me.

Then there were the psychiatrists who would come in and stand around the bed. There was the middle-aged Indian woman, who was in charge. Then there was this innocent-looking Chinese kid, I think, second in command. Then there were three even younger ones, apparently students, their fresh little white faces attempting to beam some proximity of cheerful good will at me. Circling around my bed, they tried to pressure me to take some psychotropic meds. I told them no thanks. But they would not hear of it. They kept telling me all the dangers of not taking them and all the benefits of taking them. When I explained my history of taking psychotropics, they assured me of all the wonderfully new advanced meds out there. When I told them about that chick who thought she was a Navy Seal and the Pope, the Indian woman said, “The profession makes incredible advances year by year. Such a thing would never happen now.” That’s what they ALWAYS say. It took me a long time to get rid of them.

The next day, however, the Chinese psychiatrist came in alone. Bossy Indian lady must have decided he could persuade me; he had a very gentle persona. Actually, I think he was truly sincere. He talked to me about my suicide attempt, and how he really wanted to help me so I wouldn’t do it again.

This really pissed me off. So I went into a rant, and it went something like this: “First off, how do you think I’m gonna manage to kill myself? I can’t even lift my arms or stand up. Unless you leave a razor within my reach, I don’t stand a chance, so don’t pretend to be worried about that. And why don’t you quit sticking your nose into other people’s business? It’s no skin off your ass, and no, I don’t think it’s murder, if that’s what you’re thinking of telling me. Isn’t it my business what I decide to do with my life? Isn’t this the land of the free, or are you another one saying no?” On and on like that, ending with “I’ve already told you I’m not going to take them, so get the fuck out of my face.” I’m sure I said that.

It worked. He looked a little frightened, and wandered off. About ten minutes later Chrissie said, “I heard what you said to that psychiatrist, about suicide.” Then a minute later, she asked, “Do you believe in evil?”

I thought a minute and said, “I don’t know. There’s that theory that good is battling evil, and then there’s the one that says what people call evil is just an absence of good. Take your pick, same difference.” Boy was I in a bad mood. She had some tact, or was lost in thought. In any case, she left me alone, not saying a word for at least an hour.

Finally, after a week, I realized I could not put off a bowel movement. My favorite nurse was on shift and I told her I was going to try, so get out the suppositories. She was very cool all through the process, which was much worse than childbirth—and mine was really bad—and took her entire night shift, nearly. Some monitor I was hooked up to was malfunctioning, and she complained about how these things cost 25 thousand a piece and don’t even work half the time as she banged at it. She came in periodically to stroke my head as one does to calm a child. It stunk like hell.

This nurse was a trim, pretty Romanian who told me that she had seen what life can be like—things will be going fine, but one day some horrible mishap will happen out of the blue, and it will be nothing but pain, excruciating pain and suffering from then on. It was a hard job that way. She said that to cheer herself up she gets a pedicure, pointing down to her feet. “When this is all over, that’s what you should do, get a pedicure,” she said. I have never and will never do that, but I was grateful for her good intentions.

She told me about fleeing Romania with her son. She said, “The police will not help you, like they will here. I tried to get help, but they did not care that my husband was beating me up. They knew him.” So, upon fear of death, she came to Amerika, and it was very hard, working and raising her boy, plus going to nursing school while trying to learn English.

She knew that my daughter never visited me; everybody paying attention knew. The contrast between my barren surroundings and Chrissie’s abundant silly gifts and constant visitors was obvious. “You know, my son doesn’t visit me either,” she announced once. “He could care less about me, but that’s how it is at their age. He says he’s too busy, but he still drops his laundry off once a week.” She beamed at the thought of that, and I didn’t want to shatter her illusions by telling her he sounded like a real asshole. But what do I know about Romanian parenting?

The Chinese guy tried again, and was there just when a resident showed up to tell me that the doctors had consulted and decided against an operation to free the sciatic nerve from the screw. They figured that with physiotherapy and Neurontin, that wonder drug to beat all, I could do fine. I said I could not take Neurontin because it’s an SSRI and could make me manic. The psychiatrist confirmed this. The resident made a note of it, and left. The psychiatrist then asked me how that made me feel. I said, “What an idiotic question. Those doctors have decided I can bear a lifetime of severe sciatic pain, and you’re asking me how it makes me feel?” He left after that remark.

The next day, though, the doctor who had done the operation came back from some remote area, looked at the pictures of my pelvic area, and decided an operation was necessary after all. So I had another one. When I came back from the surgery, that bitchy nurse was on staff. What she was angry about all the time were all the double shifts they made her pull. And she hated her supervisor, who was not fair on scheduling. She took it out on me by jabbing needles into my wrist a tad too hard. Hospitals assume that to do their job you always have to have a needle in you. What is so wrong with oral medications? And why can’t they give nurses a constant shift, rather than switching them from first to second to third all the time? That might calm this bitchy one down a bit, and she’d be a little kinder with the bedpan issues too.

A long hospital stay is mostly tedium. There was nothing but the TeeVee and borrowing Chrissy’s magazines: Cosmopolitan and Time. Then there are meal-times. The people charged with bringing me food dressed in cheap replicas of tuxedos, comically enough. They’d come in to take my dinner order, and give me two choices. Once I asked one of those guys what he thought of the chicken option, and he stared at me blankly and said, “I’ve never tasted it.” I said, “Nor would you, right?” He just laughed. Man, the food sucked!

The nurses were entirely exasperated with Chrissy for the fact that she drank so much water that she always overflowed the bedpan. She just could not accept that this was a problem, because drinking water is good for you, and she was thirsty. They began to refuse giving her as much water as she asked for and gave her some lozenges to suck on that were supposed to quell thirst. It didn’t work and made her mouth feel icky. There was a lot of complaining about that.

The psychiatric team kept showing up, nagging at me to take their drugs.

Apparently pushy Indian lady had decided that Chinese boy couldn’t manage it, so she took charge, showing the other four how. Finally she broke me down; I just had to get rid of them. “But no antipsychotics,” I said. I stayed firm on that one, despite their protests, but agreed to a few drugs I’d taken before that had had absolutely no apparent effects. I think they had me on three. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d have to pay for them, or that the nursing home nurses would insist on making sure I took them, standing over me until I swallowed them. But what matter? It’s not like I’ll ever be able to pay those bills anyway. I get too panicky to even try looking at them.

One day Chrissy’s parents came with their friend with the Appalachian drawl, and then the parents left, leaving the man, and it was just the two of them alone for the first time.

With a sly smile, he drawled, “So you’re planning on going to live in a basement, all by your lonesome.”

“You’ll never see it!” she answered.

“Waaahl, what if there are rats down there? Then you’ll be callin me up, now won’t you?”

“Believe me, you’ll be the last person I’ll be calling up,” she said, on her high horse.

“Waaahl what if your back itches, and you can’t reach the spot?”

“Backscratchers can be bought. I’ll get my dad to find me one,” she lobbed back.

Then a bit of silence, after which he said, “We’ll see about that, Chrissie.”

I thought, ‘Oh my God, now I’ve heard everything.’ I looked at the book about the doctor with no nipples, and whispered to its author, ‘You could learn something herein about boys and girls. And I do not believe you about a guy without nipples. A human with no nipples?’

“Chrissie,” I said the next day, “That guy you were talking to yesterday; he’s the one you tried to kill, isn’t he.”

She admitted this to be so. I asked, “Well, if you go psychotic thinking he’s Satan, don’t you think you should stay away from him? Then you might not even need those pills that make you feel dead.” I didn’t mention that it might keep her from killing him some day, a possibility that nobody in that little family romance seemed to have the least regard for.

She was looking down at a little Teddy bear he’d brought her that day, one among many. “No, I couldn’t do that. He and my father are very good friends.”







......................................................
See also her "Teaching Torture in the Homeland."



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Elizabeth Hayes' "Why I Jumped off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge"

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I tried to kill myself once, March 5th, 2012. I could not take the depression anymore and at about 6:30 am I drove myself to the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, parked my car on the west end, where there's a little neighborhood of crap housing, and walked about what looked to me like one-third of the way up the bridge. A tad skittish, I kept looking down to make sure I'd jump far enough, and when it looked like it was at least 100 feet, I climbed over the barrier and jumped. This was when dawn was just breaking.

There was a crucial catch, however. The barrier is short but about a foot wide, and there's another foot beyond that, so you cannot see straight down but only slant. So I could not see that I'd be falling into a dead tree 50 feet below. The specifics are not clear by any picture of that bridge, and I’ve yet to find the nerve to actually inspect it (does it matter, anyway?)—but in any case I did fall into a dead tree and bounced off it, apparently. When I awakened sometime later, I saw below me a barren tract of land where some huge mechanism was being driven around a road far away, and I tried to scream out to the driver, many times.

But that mechanism was very loud, and I was sitting in scrub and a bunch of trash, so I tried to scooch down so maybe somebody could hear me. The temperature was just at the freezing point--0 C/32 F. My coat had blown off of me and was about two feet away. My purse, which I'd brought so somebody could identify me for my daughter's sake, was hanging just above and behind me on the dead tree like some loony Christmas ornament. I was not feeling cold, even though I was only wearing an insubstantial dipsy-print rayon blouse the color of loden, so with that and my dirty blonde hair I blended right in with the landscape. I felt no pain.

What worried me, though, were the hawks, and the fact that when I fell, my right leg had somehow been entrapped in a noose made out of vine, which became apparent as I scooted down, and all I could think was, ‘Holy shit. This is how I am going to die. Me, privileged white girl. I will die here very slowly, out of thirst first, and then the birds will come down to peck out my eyes.’

Why did I do that? I must say it’s a stupid question, because why does anyone try to kill herself? The answer is simple: an overwhelming desire to die, to get it over with already (well, some people like the fabled Willy Loman do it to give people money). The only reason people ask that question is that they really don’t understand complete despair. Once one of my bosses said that once he had woken up and for an hour felt no hope, no hope at all. I just stared at him for three seconds and changed the subject. I wanted to say, “Try that for an entire year, you big baby, and nearly always show up to work and do your job regardless.”

I think it was about eleven that the medics finally found me—somebody had seen me jump and called 911, and they’d been searching for hours. I don’t know how long I was unconscious and how long I was conscious, sitting there trapped and considering the hawks. I don’t know how the medics got up to me—there must be stairs? A friend knows a retired cop, and he found the recording of the conversation. I’d said, “Just take me back to my car and I’ll be fine,” apparently, but I don’t remember that. Instead, they took me to the hospital, and somewhere on the way the pain began.

I failed, even at this simple task of dying by jumping off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, which should be a no brainer. I did, however, manage to break my pelvis in two places, crack most of my vertebrae, break my shoulder and a few other bones (they said twelve, if I remember correctly, but I was so high on opioids when they said it I could be wrong). I also got myself deeply in debt. I had no health insurance because of my bipolar one diagnosis, which the insurance agencies would not touch, even though I had no history of hospitalization for that little problem. I ended up in a hospital for a month and a nursing home for three months, where nobody gave me a shower for nearly two months. I had to go to a nursing home with psychiatric “care.” This meant merely that this psychiatrist came to visit one time, along with some woman to listen in (why? I have no idea, but probably she was “in training”). The psychiatrist asked about my psychiatric symptoms, and I said it’s mostly anhedonism. He asked what that meant. What the fuck? If you look up bipolar depression, it says it right there, and this sham doctor purported to be an Expert. I said it means the incapacity to feel pleasure (ie “an”+”hedonism”). “Oh,” he said, “I should have known that; after all, I took four years of Latin.” Then he told me that I had not intended to kill myself; this act was merely a cry for help. No. Cutting your wrists the wrong way is a cry for help, idiot. Maybe he thought me so stupid I’d buy into his nonsense, but come on!

That guy charged me 200 bucks for that waste of an hour, while the angels who swept my floor, handled my bedpan issues, and brought me perhaps the worst food in the world got minimum wage. They would sit and talk with me intelligently. They told me the most interesting stories about their ghetto lives, their crazy mothers, their jailhouse husbands and unruly children. They told me jokes to cheer me up, particularly this one woman, an elegant, slender brown woman who always wore the same choker—she would have looked incomplete without its metal scrolls stretched around her neck, like someone with an ear missing. I loved to hear her cajoling this one really cranky guy to stand up, laughing as he cussed her up and down. Then eventually she’d come in and tell me about what kind of bullshit her grown up twins called Click and Clack had been up to. Sometimes one of the aides would buy me something decent to eat.

Sure, they wouldn’t bother to wheel me across the way where there was a shower all set up for the likes of me, unable to put pressure on my feet at all, but you cannot expect everything. Eventually they hired this beautiful Irish woman with Celtic tattoos who did finally take pity on me and got me to the shower a few times. What a relief that was!

Much of my problem is that I think the world is all wrong, all backwards, and if I could rule the world things would be so much better. Decent food would be served in hospitals and nursing homes, medical folk would get that food has something to do with the health of the body (I mean, duh!), the aides would be given the respect they deserve, the sham Experts would be laughed out of work so maybe they could start over with some humility, and sadism would not be tolerated. As it is, sadism is celebrated. That’s pretty depressing, isn’t it?

I try not to hate but I end up despising. The Experts, the ones in charge, are some of the ones I hate: the “professors.” The administrators, the doctors, the lawyers, the politicians, the bankers, the landowners. They are the stupidest, most heartless people on the planet, and should be locked up and fed nursing home food. I am THAT judgmental, yet when I was given the Myers-Briggs exam, I scored zero on judgment. All perception, it said, no decision-making capacity. That is so wrong, so that’s another reason. I make plenty of decisions; unfortunately, they are mostly the wrong ones, or so my daughter says.

Yes, according to the Myers-Briggs test, I am an INTP. I scored very low on emotion; supposedly I am a logical type. Well, that’s wrong too. Any intellectual crap I’ve ever developed is a shield to protect myself and others from my extreme emotionality.

When I was going through my three-and-a-half-year custody battle, the court social worker gave me this other psychological exam, which is supposed to be foolproof. My lawyer told me not to lie on it, but I did. I lied about all the questions that would prove me to be bipolar, like “Have you ever been awake for 48 hours without feeling tired?” or “Have you ever had ten drinks without getting drunk?” The only other question I lied about was “Have you ever enjoyed marijuana?” My lawyer said, ”You should not have lied on that one. That’s the trick question they use to feel out people’s honesty.” My God, it’s illegal!

The results came back: “Elizabeth Hayes lied about just about everything, so it is hard to say much about her. But one thing is clear: she is not bipolar.” When I’d outfoxed my stupid ex-husband’s lawyer on just about everything, he said, “What about this psychological exam? It says she lies about everything.” I said, well, it also says I am not bipolar, and clearly I am—after all, that’s the whole reason I’m here, isn’t it?” The magistrate sighed and threw the test in the trash, and I won what I’d asked for: shared custody, 50/50, just as my daughter had asked for all along. After the papers were signed I danced around the courtroom and cried, “Now I can act as crazy as I truly am!” By the way, I proofread those papers, and it’s a good thing I did because they’d gotten enough of the dates wrong to render them null and void, I do believe. Idiots. But hey, that’s why they get paid the big bucks.

So after all that going to court being accused of being a bad mother and a lunatic, three-and-a-half fucking years, not to mention a really horrid pregnancy, being in labor for 48 hours, a bad case of hemorrhoids, quitting a job where the boss pleaded me not to, even dangling a vice-presidency before me, all so my daughter wouldn’t have to go into day care, marrying her stupid father in the first place so I could have her in a situation of some financial stability, and nursing her for nearly three years—she just would not wean— taking her to the mall (my least favorite leisure activity) and buying her whatever stupid crap she desired, trying to teach her everything, taking her to the movies and the art museum (when she was three she could identify a Picasso of any of his styles), and so much more, do you think my daughter has one iota of respect for me? No she does not. That’s another reason.

When I was 19 somebody asked me, “But don’t you want to get married?” I said, “If I’m gonna get married, it will have to be 1) some autistic guy and 2) someone who is gone a lot.” By autistic, I meant somebody who would leave me alone and be incapable, and disinterested, in figuring out what I’m up to, as long as I’m fairly discrete. At 33, I decided I really wanted to have a child, so should find someone to marry, and none of the guys I’d been hanging with would think of having a child with anything but horror, and would have gotten pissed at me even bringing the matter up. And don’t give me this nonsense about how single motherhood is the way to go.

Then I met Malvin, appropriately named as it turned out (bad wine, get it?), a jazz musician (flute and sax) who had a steady job as a bureaucrat at Welfareland. At 45 he wanted to finally settle down, and get this, beyond his stupid bureaucrat job, he gigged at least three times a week! That fulfilled criterion number two, and Mal’s mood variations were nil, any intuitive powers lacking, which fulfilled criterion number one. Therefore, I decided I’d get a baby out of him.

I wasn’t in love with him, in fact often disliked him and thought his musical ability mediocre at best, but he fulfilled the necessary criteria, wanted to buy a house and set up for inner ring suburban normalcy, and it seemed like a decent plan. He had fairly cool friends. And that being “in love” business had never worked out so well. I’d been doing little but working 60 hours a week at an economic analysis papermill, churning out fake statistics, making largely clueless predictions on growth (always growth must be predicted) of various manufacturing endeavors while editing everyone else’s analyses to conform with my boss’s very exacting ideas of proper sentence form for economic bullshit—he would freak out if someone had written “above” or “below” 4.2, for instance—and it was becoming intolerable. In my defense, my boss was driving me insane.

Once married and in a little house on a street nearby where every little house is one of two models, with superficial variations, things were not working out as planned. I really dreaded sex with the guy—I’ve rarely slept with anyone else so bad at it—but managed to do it enough to get pregnant. Once married he became intensely Jewish, and his family was awful. His father was all right, a retired pharmacist who gardened a lot, but his mother was a coddled, greedy testament to supremist egotism. This was the type of Jewish family where the matriarch is in charge and worshipped. She had really bad taste in furnishings, and all the family members had to go over there for dinner every Friday and eat her awful briskets and dried out chicken breasts with this gooey icky orange sauce baked on top and ooh and ahh about how good it all was. They all spent ridiculous amounts of money on ugly clothes, tacky jewelry, luxury cars, etc, and the mother had a sister who had married a man who had eventually established a local savings and loan, a real Horatio Alger story, as they told it, so I also had to deal with these stinking rich relatives who snubbed me when I was obliged to go to their mitzvahs and weddings and funerals. They all seethed over my refusal to convert, but I finally got the Rabbi off my back by telling him that if I went through the process I’d be lying, and he wouldn’t want that in his temple, now would he? Mal’s sister, a stereotypical Jewish princess, once told me that her mother cried when she saw my Christmas tree in the window. In their neighborhood, the only tree decorated at Christmastime was in a back yard.

Once married, I could not say anything that Mal thought was right. Everything I said was suspect and rejected, and I would get so galled when some yahoo would come over the house and say the same thing I’d said, and then Mal would immediately take it to be true. I love to cook food of all kinds, and if I took the trouble to make something that took some time and attention for dinner, he would say “I could eat this once a month,” implying that I was supposed to fill out a plan of meals each month like a high school cafeteria. I’d hoped that as the years went on, I would “grow to love him,” as the old wisdom of arranged marriages puts it, but it seemed that my fate was going in the opposite direction. Finally I stopped cooking altogether, forcing him to take me and baby daughter out to dinner every evening. To be fair, that did show that he had some sense of moral responsibility: he could have left us to starve. I’d quit my economic analysis job and had little income of my own, just this stupid little freelance job writing real estate ads. Mal had grudgingly consented to me quitting the economic papermill when I promised everything I bought for Leah and me would be second-hand, so we could live mostly on his income. I couldn’t see the point of farming my child out to some day care; I love the little ones, and wanted to spend my days with her, so eventually I took other kids in too for cheap, thereby expanding my personal spending money.

In this situation of constantly having all my views ignored or denounced, I started getting very depressed; suicidal thoughts returned with a vengeance, and I decided that given my responsibility to my daughter, I should really finally go see a professional to work out this little depression problem. I refused to go to a psychiatrist, but would allow myself to be analyzed, Jungian style. I heard by word of mouth that Diane was pretty good, so I started seeing her once a week. I figured it wouldn’t take more than a year.

Analysis was hard on me. In the first session, I told Diane I don’t feel things very much, that I’m not an emotional person. I held onto that idea for a while even though, when talking about my childhood issues I would start sobbing and run to the bathroom to get over myself, which at first would usually take up most of my session time. Eventually I could manage to make it through most of the sessions without total meltdown. Diane started telling me she could make no further progress unless I’d submit to seeing a psychiatrist and getting on an anti-depressant.

I resisted. Since the age of 20, I knew my depressions were no trifling matter, but also saw some people go to psychiatrists who never had a life after that, and I wanted a life. I would demand it at all costs. However, Mal had an old friend named Rosemarie, a retired school counselor who was at the time president of the local Jungian Society. Part of her obligation therein was to put out a monthly little rag to send off to members, and she suggested I could help by writing a review of Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. I did that, giving it a fairly thumbs up assessment but ending with my opinion that treating depression as a positive experience was really dangerous and cruel. At my local bookstore, Care of the Soul was right next to Listening to Prozac, so I read that too, and decided to see a psychiatrist after all. Besides jumping off the bridge, that was my biggest mistake ever.

!!!!

Once when Leah was 14 she called me into the living room to watch a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman called Anywhere but Here. It’s the tale of a very wild mother who drags her daughter to Hollywood and causes the poor little girl all manner of embarrassment and hardship. After the movie was over Leah’s heavy silence filled the room. I knew what she was thinking: ‘Don’t you see how I feel, poor me?’

‘As if,’ I thought. ‘As if it’s all my fault. What have I done that’s anything like that movie? OK, putting you through that marriage to Bob the total asshole was pretty bad, but didn’t I kick him out pretty quickly? Haven’t I tried to give you everything you want, kept the bills paid, worked my ass off, bought you stupid things you don’t need, made nice healthy dinners, packed you lunches even when I lack the time, driven you all over the fucking place when you should be walking? Your unhappiness is not my problem. I can’t help who I am, not altogether anyway, and if you think some 14-year-old spoiled brat is going to make me feel bad about myself and sorry for her just because I am bipolar and not June Cleaver, then fuck off.’

But of course, like a broken woman with her leg caught in a noose with no apparent help coming, I did feel trapped into feeling very guilty and very sorry for her. How could I have inflicted that drunken carpenter on her? Like my sociopathic sister said, he wasn’t even good looking and he had no money.

It is true that it is hard to deal with a mother who gets really depressed and sits on the couch staring into space dumbly a lot, and who gets up at three am and wakes her up shrieking because Mommy’s having another panic attack, freaking whenever she has forgotten to do something, no matter how minor—always predicting disaster. I have endured really low depressions for years at a time, and whether the meds were affecting my synapses or my history affecting my predictive powers, I had to get up very early so the panic could subside enough to carry on in practical life.

When my daughter was 14 she made me promise I would not kill myself, never ever no matter what, and I held to that for five years that felt like forever. Nobody’s perfect, but she sure comes down hard on me if I make the least mistake. Like once when she was 15 I slapped her because she had been a horrid bitch for months, demanding that I drive her here and there, clogging up the bathroom with her one hour makeup and hair preparations just to go to the convenience store, all that stupid stuff which I abided to the best of my ability. (After all, if she was displeased with me she could run to her father and complain of abuse and/or neglect, and then it would be back to court. She had me over a barrel.) She would give nothing but sullen one-word answers to friendly questions.

Finally I could not take the attitude. I slapped her and yelled, “Who are you and what have you done to my daughter!?” That woke her up and helped her see how she’d been treating me. I did not even slap her that hard. Then she regressed, going on and on for years about how abusive I am; no doubt one of her stupid therapists told her to think that way. For that one little slap? My God, my father used to knock me to the ground, and I never much minded. You just get back up.

I knew why she was being such a bitch. She had a crush on a pretty boy who played with her head, teasing her into trying while always rejecting her advances; and her father, after his second botched marriage to a woman who was terrible to her—an unbelievably nasty woman—bought a house next door to that boy. But she never thought that was abusive. And when she was 16 she moved in with her dad for good and hardly ever even called for years. Why? The stated reason was that he bought her a car and said she could not use it to come to my house, but I think it was much more than that. She did submit to going to the movies and out to dinner with me once in a while.

When I was in the hospital and she was 19, she came to visit me once. She asked me what had happened and I told her the truth, so she walked right out. When I was in the nursing home she visited me once, for ten minutes. So she attended to me for about 15 minutes, max, all that time, and she considers herself devoted, generous, and victimized. Everything she writes is about my mental illness and abusiveness, really nasty stuff, and I forgive her everything, while she forgives me nothing. Everything wrong with her life is entirely my fault, and she keeps telling me I need to go back to the psychiatrists and will not believe me when I say the drugs make me worse. She thinks I need to see a therapist and I say, “Well, it makes no sense to hire a friend; isn’t that oxymoronic?” She doesn’t believe that either. Her father has been sending her to a therapist since she was five, and she thinks it’s a great idea to just unload all your shit on some idiot who considers you a specimen and source of income; it is so healing.

When I was going through that custody battle my ex (actually I’ve got two legal exes) told the court social worker I had never been able to be a caregiver. But Leah’s therapist had told me that Mal had told her that I was the perfect mother until my breakdown. So I called that therapist and asked if she would please let the court know what he had said, and she screamed and screamed that she was not going to get involved in the court situation, no way. All I was asking her to do was utter one God damned sentence, and she chewed me out. But I am unreasonable and sick and she is noble and well. Those in the mental “health” field never take responsibility for their actions.

OK, for now I will shut up about mental health “professionals.” I will tell you about all the people I have loved who have killed themselves, most all while under psychiatric care. In my crowd it’s “the thing to do.”

First there was this guy, Bob. In my high school years my father made me go to the country club once in a while though I preferred the beach—I hate rich people generally, and have always believed that even highly polluted water is healthier than the chlorinated kind—but Bob was an exception, and not even that rich, and made going there tolerable. He had two brothers who were tall, handsome, and lawyers, while Bob was short, crossed-eyed, and always fucked up on some drug or another. Once he nearly drowned because he fell asleep at the dinner table and collapsed his face into the soup. He would take me places and then forget where he’d parked his car, and we’d spend hours searching for it. He shot himself in his wretched apartment in the Ashtabula harbor district when he was 25.

I’m pretty sure my high school boyfriend, such a vain ass, killed himself because he’d stalked me for decades and suddenly it stopped. For I can’t remember how many God damned years I’d have to change my phone number to get rid of him incessantly calling me, then he’d call my mother and he’d wheedle it out of her, no matter how many times I told her not to. She always adored Tom and thought I should have married him. It didn’t matter to her that I told her he was a compulsive liar and had spent much of his adult life in psych wards. Or maybe he got run over by a bus or something. I must say I was somewhat flattered, but once he pierced my ego by saying he stalked all his ex-girlfriends.

In college I had a terrible crush on this dashing flush-faced Anglo guy who fell into a psychotic episode at the end of each semester, so never completed a course. Being the son of a dean, this was permitted. My friend David had a crush on him too, and we’d take turns babysitting him when he was out of the psych ward. He wrote really alive poetry, banged away manically on the piano, took me on adventures that involved the whimsies of the gods of wind and such, played pinball and pool with me, but he would not ball me. I don’t know why. He balled just about everybody else. David thought he was afraid of me, but in any case, he married a delicately beautiful artist from India. She took care of him for twenty years, had three children by him, put up with all manner of abuse, from flagrant infidelity to beating her up, and finally couldn’t take it anymore and kicked him out. So he killed himself by overdosing on his psychotropic meds. It took him two weeks to die, lying in a hospital bed as his innards hardened.

My first psychiatrist, the only one with any real compassion, reputedly the “regional expert on depression,” shot himself. His name was Dr. Podlipski. He was so respected that when the hospital I visited him at went smokeless, he got away with disregarding this policy, and kept a rack of interesting pipes on his desk for the patients to examine, and would let me bum cigarettes from him. He gave me this and that drug and after a year of sharp, rapid ups and downs, I said, “I can’t take these anymore,” and he said, “I don’t blame you.” He started telling me that the neuroscientists only know the function of a few neurotransmitters, while there are thousands, and the profession really has no idea what they’re doing to people’s brains.

So I stopped the psychiatry, but a year later my Jungian analyst, who had talked me into seeing a psychiatrist in the first place, said I must try another one. She referred me to Dr. Sawyer, who overdosed me on Prozac with four times the tested dose. This put me into a three month highly euphoric mania where I thought I was so smart as I destroyed my life. It only ended on my 40th birthday party, when a man tried to choke me to death for no apparent reason. He punched me really hard in the eye, which the doctors said I nearly lost, and then threw me down and started choking me. And I do have collaboration on the fact that there was no provocation. I was merely sitting quietly talking to this other guy, and if he hadn’t saved me and taken me from there I’d be long gone.
The one that choked me was just the sort of guy you can imagine has cloven hooves, the kind I am fascinated by when at my worst. I had rented his downstairs apartment and was sleeping in his bed upstairs, and I think he did not want me anymore in his nefarious business, his bed, his apartment, or anywhere but under the soil. The party was in that apartment: about 30 people I knew came, and we danced, confided, and laughed into the wee hours. None of them could figure out I had gone berserk, strangely enough. About half of them had PhDs; about half were barflies and folks on mental disability: my kind of crowd.

Right after that jolting experience my mood nosedived within 24 hours, and just then the custody battle began, and my lawyer told me I needed to show the courts I was under psychiatric care. My analyst finally told me that Dr. Sawyer was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and he said my case was too complicated for him. So I went back to Dr. Podlipski and he was looking even worse than me, ashen faced and sucked dry, yet working at four facilities. I suggested he slow it down and he said, “I cannot leave my patients to those idiot psychiatrists.” A month later he shot himself.

My friend Alois killed himself about a year before that. He had gotten into some mad frenzies. He’d decided he was in love with me, after being my pal for 15 years, and then he got obsessed with hermaphrodites, and then, of all things, with guns. At that time he was married for the fourth time to a woman named Kate, and one day he went up to her and said, “Watch this,” and he fired his gun at the ceiling. “Like a proper cowboy!” he enthused. Alois was from Germany and was trying to be a true Amerikan.

Kate had been keeping him on the meds, which was stupid because they always made him manic. Alois was normally a very gentle guy, with a kind of scrunched up face and droll whine, a meat cutter and translater by trades and devoted to Goethe. He was my best friend for many years. We’d never become lovers because when he first met me I was sitting down. We talked for a while, getting some strange heat going, but then I stood up and he decided “too tall.” All of my height is in the legs. One of the last times I talked to him he called me up to say he’d figured out how to make The Lord’s Prayer work for him with just one word change, and I said, “Alois, I just cannot take it anymore” and hung up on him. I rue that move, always.

Kate got her MA and started teaching at CSU. She was a real mess. She’d gained a great deal of weight and made this weird whining, wheezing sound, probably unconsciously. I hadn’t seen her for some years because when Alois discharged that bullet she left him. One day on campus she told me that the doctors had pulled her off of Prozac because she had a heart condition. That’s not wise, at all. She fell into a deep pit. “Why did I do that?” she sobbed. “Alois was the only man I’ve ever loved, and he wouldn’t have shot me.” I said hindsight is 20/20. Then she said, “I’ve got a catch of drugs; I’ve been saving them up.” I pleaded for her not to do that, that she had a granddaughter to think of, but a few days later she overdosed on her heart medication in a library study carrel.

Finally, there was Dennis, whom I was very close to for, oh, seven years. He died the same year I jumped, 2012. I first met Dennis in a support group I’d created—no health care professionals allowed—and thought, ‘What is up with this one?’ He was speaking very formally, and I thought, ‘Is he gay, or just highly repressed?’ A few days after I first met him I saw him on campus. It turned out he was teaching psychology. The first time he tried to kill himself his spouse, Ron, caught him on the rope in the nick of time. The second time he didn’t. I’d been dreading this. Dennis was 62 when he killed himself and had been going through severe anxiety and depressions for his entire adult life. He’d told me once that a psychology professor said that at a certain point, after too many cycles, people just give up. Dennis wouldn’t take my word that those pills were toxic. In his last severe depression I would call him up to see how he was, and he’d always sigh, pause, and then say, “Not so good, but I just had my medications adjusted.”

When I first met Dennis I was back on the meds again. Stupid—you don’t have to tell me. But I’d gone into my second mania and I was terrified of the crash downward. I tried working with a homeopath, who got me off the mania within two days, but could do nothing about the depression, which was digging in deep.

??????

So once again: why did I jump off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge? Certainly it was in part from the loss of those friends and the hysteria that followed each one, feeling I had no discernable path but the one they’d cleared, but it was more than that. Maybe it was because I’d tried everything—dietary changes, those horrible psych meds, homeopathy, naturopathy, Chinese medicine, Jungian analysis, group therapy sessions, and nothing made a dent, so I was disgusted and drinking a lot, a whole lot. Certainly it was severe psychic pain, with an inability to feel any pleasure or even a few moments of composure to help me deal with it, and this had gone on for years. But perhaps I could even have endured that and plodded on so that I wouldn’t disturb anyone’s delusional sense of reality but mine, which is generally considered the real delusion. But I figured my daughter was old enough to take it, and she hated me anyway, and why persist when I could give her my house and car?

Part of it, though, was the understanding that “mental health Experts” are actually sadists—although likely mostly unconscious of the fact—and that even when you beg for succor from those friends and family who actually love you (or at least honestly try to), they will demand you go to these Experts of the psyche for help, feeling totally inadequate to help you themselves. And they will say they will not deal with you until you do.

When in enough desperation you do take their best advice and begin seeking the expertise of these secular high priests, the Experts will hardly help you; instead, in the name of therapy, they will take over your brain like you cannot believe (that is, unless you’ve been through their dire processing yourself). As your mental state deteriorates, they will offer you hope (the next med cocktail will do it for you, there’s a new drug just out that is enormously promising) and shame (you must be drinking or smoking marijuana or even worse, you need to get a handle on your sleep habits, you need to go on disability for your own good). If you start to lose too much weight because you are too anxious to eat, or gain weight as an effect of the drugs (and all do have such effects or even more horrendous ones; just read the labels), they will send you to a doctor to counsel you on diet, as if doctors know crap about that—and come to think of it, psychiatrists went to medical school too, so why don’t they just tell you in their 200 bucks per 15 minute sessions? They will tell you that they are practicing an art, although eventually, if you go to the support groups, you will find that everyone is being given the same newest, most promising, most expensive drug.

So this is not so much an art but a science experiment, and you are one of their lab rats. The FDA requires tests before drugs are released to the psychiatrists. These are a total joke, for more reasons than the fact that they can and do throw the more damning results in the trash, but you are among the real test subjects; and if you fall deeper and deeper into abjectness, the psychiatrists can just say that that is the natural progression of the disease. Poor baby, you, I feel so much empathy, they’ll say—the scientifically remote version, anyway—for your stupid pain. In the meantime, all the experts make a lot of money.

You would think that these MDs would have some degree of common sense in doling out the meds. After all, they do, it is claimed, know something of science; they took all those courses and passed all those exams, anyway. They must realize that their wonder drugs have a very powerful effect, so what do they think is going to happen if they switch you from one to another on a monthly basis? Each drug hits the nervous system in a different way, so is the brain going to find any stasis in which to heal? But somehow they cannot see how this could possibly have a deleterious effect on the patient. Everyone knows, or should know, that any drug has its toxic as well as beneficial side; every label says that they can create the same symptoms they are supposed to treat. But the psychiatrists seem entirely ignorant to this fact, save poor Dr. Podlipski.

What keeps these psychiatrists in such a state of ignorance? Well, first of all, there is money to be made, but not nearly enough, given the high cost of medical school, monetarily and in terms of the intense competition of getting and staying in, and the punishing piles of information to be tested upon, and the grueling residencies. When all those years of punishment are over, who can blame anyone for not wanting to cash in on the rewards? Enchanted by the promise of luxury autos, clothing, homes, and fine dining, the logical (or at least societally-endorsed sane) response is to push forward, get the goods, and ignore all the patients who go into disability and persist in agony, and even though some may jump off some bridge or use the rope method or shoot themselves in the head or overdose on their meds, this is, after all, the natural progression. And those patients were not compliant and so ignorant, while you’ve read piles of peer-reviewed journals and worked very hard, pushing yourself to your very limits. Also, the fact is, some people actually do get better, or at least stop bugging you, so they must have found relief, even success, in your tender care, huh?

And it’s not like the money is so great, not like the plastic surgeons who make scads more inserting silicon into breasts and lifting baggy eyelids and sucking fat out of women’s butts. It’s not like you make nearly as much as neurosurgeons or heart specialists. True, you were hardly the pick of the litter, but what is so wrong with getting a little break by accepting the pharmaceutical manufacturers’ offers of free educational trips to Hawaii to learn from the best? Isn’t that a good thing? And if you feel a little squeamish about taking some good bucks for presenting a given script about a new psychotropic to a seminar of your peers—the script written by the manufacturer—well, if you don’t do it, somebody else will.

That’s exactly the thinking of every crack dealer I’ve ever talked to. They all figure that if they don’t do it, somebody else will, so what the hell. Whatever else may be true, I’ve known enough psychiatrists to realize that they are nothing but glorified drug dealers, and not at all different at heart than GE, Dick Cheney, and the Pentagon: doling out death and suffering for their comfort and pleasure.

The psychiatrists will tell you they are better than the drug dealers who hang around schoolyards getting the kiddies hooked on mostly marijuana, but occasionally crack and heroin. After all, the psychiatrists will exclaim, we are better than the drug dealers, and the proof is that those types can be incarcerated whether or not they kill anyone. Those dealers in illegal drugs are doing something actually illegal, the psychiatrists argue, while we are licensed and bona fide, even if we do kill many. We are only here to help, the psychiatrists say, while those other drug dealers don’t care about those who buy their drugs, while we REALLY do, so much. The illegal drug dealers only have customers at best, or should we call them victims for profit; we are dealing with “patients.” That word changes everything.

Only it doesn’t, at all. The psychiatrists are increasingly widening their diagnoses, so they are giving pre-schoolers very heavy drugs, arguably much more dangerous ones than those the illegal drug dealers tempt middle-schoolers with. Despite their protestations, psychiatrists are at least as heartless as most hitmen. I wish all our doctors would be forced to take years of hard-core poetry training, and only be admitted into med school if they can write a poem to make one’s heart break, and have actually been entranced by a prostitute of whatever sex. Just because, as we all know, our culture is a relentless whorehouse. If you’re going to prepare to be a slut for the pharmaceutical pimps, the manufacturers’ reps that is, learn the trade from the mistresses and masters.

Nothing awakens a person to the evils of capitalism like having your psychic pain be made into a cash cow for the psychiatric profession. In the case of the psych patient, no discernable crime has been committed and the illness considered perhaps more to be pitied than despised, at least in public conversation; you are not to be punished, but aided, and the general consensus is that reliable treatments have been developed and all is well, but as one of the diagnosed as having a “serious disorder,” and having been close to many of the treated, I just don’t see it. Some suggest that the successfully dosed are in the majority—70 percent is the statistic they made up—and are productive citizens indiscernible from the general population, happily and without mishap swallowing their reliable, safe meds, and are not noticed because they do not go to therapy groups and have been normalized. Somehow I find that suspect. In my experience, none who have gone through the treatment regime have gotten out unscorched, few are “productive,” and many are dead.

Those of us, my friends and I who have been screwed by the mental health professionals, are hardly alone in the larger situation of a world run by bean counters. We can include those imprisoned for a victimless crime, like merely selling a bit of pot for the rent money and some cool shoes, but there the punishment is overt and few will say more than “do the crime, do the time.” People lose their jobs and their houses, but those are just assumed by the general public to be losers. People wander the streets homeless, but they are deemed the necessary downside in a great society which, admittedly, does let a few fall through the cracks. Nothing’s perfect, after all.

The bean counters are all drunk off their asses with lust and dreaming up ways to pile it in that should be absolutely shocking to the average citizen, but apparently most are not. The reason for the behavior of the very rich is obvious: they have simplified the process of producing food and other necessities to a degree that they have a nation of mouths to feed but little need for them, and obligation is something that only the quasi-moral masses have any sense of. There’s plenty of crap to sell in a consumer society, but it is just not enough.

So what to do with a huge population that is largely unnecessary? They can become profitable items themselves! In the medical field this has become increasingly obvious, even to some of those average citizens as they lose their homes over a botched operation. In incarceration, much can be made on the poor by convincing the general public that they must pay for their safety through building more prisons, making more things illegal, and extending sentences. In schooling, the employment of more “specialists” are required to help the students, and all those kids need computers to prepare them for the 21st century, although the Internet will have to be filtered severely—this will cost even more from the public dime. As employment opportunities, decent or otherwise, dwindle, college becomes necessary for all if they hope to compete and not become those despicable “takers,” and as higher ed is getting more expensive all the time, both those higher institutions and the banks benefit. After all, the children are counselled that this is the surest path, and not doing so would caste them into poverty fer sure. I could think of more examples, but you get the idea.

The flip side of this message of fear being put forth is that being safe is the most important thing, while being daring is to be stomped out by all means. Play the game, keep your head down, work until you drop, and do not look at the man behind the curtain. Meanwhile, Hollywood tempts us all with daring feats and extreme sexual endeavors, but this is necessary to trap some into trying such stuff out, and then they can become profitable to the medical, correctional, legal, and military industrial complexes. You may call those movies catharsis, but that theory has been disproven.

The world outside my bruised brain appeared to be as hideous as the happenings inside. Even if the sun was shining, the birds chirping, the leaves glistening, it made no impact except for me to recall that this kind of day used to make me joyful. Every morning I woke up at three or four; there was no use in just lying there, because no more sleep would be possible, and I’d just dwell on my dark thoughts. So I’d go downstairs and read the students’ papers or check out the on-line news or reread the assigned readings of the day, and look up anything I wasn’t so sure of so I could answer any questions a student might ask—highly unlikely, but not impossible. These are not exactly the most cheerful activities. Perhaps in those wee hours I’ll have a panic attack or two over something stupid. Then at the last minute, I’d take a shower, find something half-presentable to wear, and go teach.

The college administrators were not all that hot on me, not since the administrators had gotten clearance to read everyone’s electronic communications. The students liked me well enough, because it was in the classroom where my enthusiasm peeked out—nobody would have guessed what I was like outside of there—but the classes I was assigned kept folding so I was teaching less and less, and none of those administrators were giving me a break for long-term service. I had no idea what to do next, what sort of work I was cut out for. The economy had crashed and the job market was flooded, and a burnt-out, bipolar, bedraggled slut in her 50s was not much in demand.

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So those were a few reasons I jumped. Why haven’t I done it again, getting it right this time? After all, my life has not improved—I’ve got ridiculous medical bills and am currently ousted from teaching. The bean counters and legally endorsed killers are still at it, actually getting more and more unabashed. Maybe the residual effects of all those awful pills have finally worn off. Maybe my hormones have shifted around somehow in my post-menopausal years, or maybe the gods have decided to be kind for a while.

I guess one reason I haven’t duplicated the act of jumping off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge is something someone recently said to me: there’s always more. There are always more people to be charmed by, always more things that can make me laugh really hard, always something to surprise me in a delightful way. Sometimes I haven’t been able to find any for years on end, sometimes it seems like everybody I love either despises me or ends their own life, sometimes I think I am a poisonous creature, possibly possessed. However, I doubt it. A brat surely, but that’s pretty much par for the course with my privileged upbringing, and I’m still working on it.

Patience is key. Being charmed, being able to see beauty and feel pleasure, finding myself in a situation where I can attempt to do anything for love—it is always possible that those things will return if I am patient enough, the anhedonism will give me a break, if I will once again put my hand out with palm up and open to the next person who draws me in and knows a bit about what I’m all about—well, that makes staying on the bridge worthwhile.

Like just about anyone who is paying any attention, I am horrified by people generally, not just the people who make the decisions to go to war for profit, to torture people, and convince people to love it here in the Homeland. I am also horrified by all those who buy their crap, literally and figuratively—those who will root wildly for killers in military regalia at football games, who will not question why we must continue giving all our money to the Pentagon, who will not think there is any other way to live than as slaves for the robber barons, who just won’t listen to reason and won’t accept that history has anything to do with it, so know absolutely none. Why should they, after all?—here be happiness, to be an Amerikan. I am as horrified by the people who buy into this obvious bullshit as by those who dole it out. But the fact is, I thought like them too as I lay shivering in my bed as a child, deeply terrified of the dark and the monsters: that happiness is to be a comfortably ensconced Amerikan. So I would pray to God, I know this to be true, so why am I so unhappy? Knowing this was confusion based on endless lies gives me a certain amount of despair, that’s true, but there is some hope that if even I can cut through some of the bullshit, enough other people might too that maybe the world could be less devastatingly horrid.

Ach, the psychiatrists, the professors, the analysts, the allopaths, the Experts—my contempt and anger spews out to them all, but I have decided to go with MLK’s line: if you hate, you can’t think straight. The real therapy, then, is only to deal with the hatred with the purpose of trying to clear it out of my head, heart, and marrow, and to try to relax a little and have some fun, because I am such a hedonist. And what better philosophy to have when living in a global madhouse? Because if you’re not walking around laughing at your own jokes, you just might not be able to take it.

Regarding the central heartbreak, maybe my daughter will never love me; or rather, she will always deeply resent loving me and hate me for it, and it will churn in her and give her all sorts of maladies: food obsessions, self-loathing, bad skin, irritable bowel, headaches, clueless decisions, etc, and I will continue to feel guilty. And maybe she’ll decide I’m crazy to tell her to keep off the Prozac, and I’ll have to watch her suffer; or worse, to be a good candidate for that pill and become libidinously numb, numb to both others’ suffering and her own joy, as so many of its devotees are.

Maybe, though, she’ll realize that I did my best, given severe limitations, and that it is no longer my responsibility to try to satisfy her desires. I’ve done my duty. Maybe she’ll take on the mantle of self-direction and outpace my bathetic attempts at wisdom by the time she’s thirty. That possibility is tantalizing enough to keep myself alive as long as possible, within reason. After all, there is always the chance for forgiveness and resolution, even with my daughter. If I jump off that bridge again, I’ll probably never know.

I said somewhere above that jumping off the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge was my biggest mistake ever, but let me contradict myself. If you haven’t gotten the message yet, I am a foolish creature, and doing so woke me up a little. By my own misgauging, I was given another chance. And by the way, the name of that bridge was changed to the Hope Memorial Bridge in the 1980s, but nobody here in Cleveland actually calls it that.






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See also her "Teaching Torture in the Homeland."



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