I had a dream or
two. So what? I thought about many things and studied many things. So
what? I didn’t finish college, and I decided to become something other
than what I studied, without bothering with the formality of education
again. So what? I had many premonitions of things which have since
happened very much as I anticipated. So what? I became trapped in the
necessity of defending the populations of several cities from descending
into madness and slaughter in order to defend my own future. So what? I
am a storyteller who is now compelled to protect the privacy of people
who’s affairs are already misperceived by too many people, while
remaining able to be a storyteller. So what? If anyone hears this
response from one of the voices from my past, it reflects a rivalry best
ignored.
Two years ago, a woman wanted me to become her new husband. I decided I didn’t want to. She wouldn’t believe me, and returned a number of times to persuade me. I discovered a way to persuade her not to return again. She discovered a way to persuade my social circle to persuade me not to return again either, in spite of the fact that she was never a part of my social circle before. People sometimes have motivations which are not clear at first, as I had already discovered in the past.
A long time ago I went crazy. I heard voices in the skies, across the room, in my ear, mocking and condemning me for things which refused to reflect reality. I went for a very long walk, intending to escape something I knew I couldn’t, while finding strange, blue, mocking faces in objects and clouds everywhere I looked. I gathered a few bags of garbage along the sides of roads for someone to pick up. Eventually I returned home under threat from the voices I heard that I was constantly under threat from snipers, then waited in the yard for my roommate to return home and have me sent to the hospital, with the assertion that I must move out immediately. People sometimes need to establish boundaries in order to protect their homes.
I decided not to die, after considering whether I could become either a benefit or a burden to the world. My decision was based on what I anticipated in the future, and what I saw of the beginnings of it at the time. I took atypical antipsychotic medications, fully intending to abandon them eventually against the doctors’ belief that I would never be able to stop, because I knew I would eventually lose the ability to protect my life if I protected the dependency. I also refused disability coverage to eventually accept a job which I held for nine years, with a few others along the way, because I did not want to become trapped in the regional economy and culture. I can now confirm that it was a trap to later accept disability when I collapsed a disk in my neck which pinches motor-nerves, but it still became a matter of survival to escape that trap. I guess I have escaped where survival is concerned, but I know there are things I have never had any ability nor desire to escape.
I was successful at weaning myself off the medication after seven years, while also becoming successful at deconstructing the mechanisms of my experience of psychosis. Current practice is to use medication as a substitute for counselling, so I am glad to have gained that ability over time. Another reason I am glad to have gained that ability, is that it prepared me to cope with the nightmare which I now stand in the memory of. But that is not why I am writing.
I knew I had changed much by the time I left the relationship, and I immediately decided to explore it as an artist and philosopher. I noticed people were behaving differently towards me already, but I chose to just reflect the most natural, pissed-off response to the whole experience, while also distancing myself from bringing her name into it. I explored the tension between sexuality and abuse. I wrote poems and made speeches. I strove to gather friends as a fence against her return, but something was strange. My thoughts became the topic of gossip around me. Parts of my routine at home also became the topic of gossip around me. I silently tossed ribald thoughts off at life and found them reflected in people’s conversations and gestures everywhere I went. I made satire of comparing my own embarrassments to those I could imagine among those around me. I became the self-financed performer of the most popular show I had ever done, which became a frustrating thing for a veteran musician like myself to accept. It became obvious I was in deep shit. I kinda was before she showed up, but now it was becoming clear we were all in deep shit, and I began including warnings in my satire. The time I had vaguely anticipated since I was a teenager had arrived.
I’m no bible-thumper now, but when I was young I felt compelled to give it a good read, since it made the people around me so much more explainable. I did that with a few religions, and a few cultures, over time. A prophecy which stuck with me was, “Days will come when what was hidden, will be revealed.” I thought to myself, ‘what would happen if suddenly everybody knew everybody else’s private shit?’ This is obviously too much of an awareness for any of us to contain consciously, but it seemed a likely reason that people would tacitly agree to overwhelmingly flip-out. Another bit from several prophecies, was the instruction to a prophet to keep some revelations secret. Like I said, I eventually broke free from happy-pills and psychosis. The reason I succeeded is that I refused to let myself become trapped in religion, or any other assumptions. Eventually, I’ll explain that.
After I left college, I became a stage technician for several theatres and festivals. It was kind of a fluke. I volunteered for the Calgary Jazz Society, because I was into jazz, and after a couple of festivals, a production manager suggested I go talk to someone at the Calgary Center for Performing Arts. I guess this is the early-life history lesson. I broke my arm on a show after three years at it, and convalesced in a cheap coffeeshop across the street from the concert hall with a bunch of art-freaks. They kinda became the population of most of my future, but I’ll basically leave that alone. I cut my cast off after two months to work on a film, because I needed the money. I then became a nude model at the art college, and then a street musician for a number of years. I wanted to devote myself to practice and people watching, young idealist that I was. It was the nineties. None of us were good enough for the world in the nineties anyway.
Another relationship I had left previously found me in a frighteningly tight rental-market, needing to move. I volunteered to be a sound technician in an edgy nightclub, which happened to be the frontage of an inexpensive building. One of the things which kept it inexpensive was the noise from my gig and three other neighboring bars. Another thing which kept it inexpensive was an influx of dealers in crack and pills, who invaded at the same time as we were invaded by construction workers and others willing to work in the petroleum industry. I was offered a reference for an apartment, to escape my relationship then. I suddenly found myself as a popular sound technician, in a popular nightclub, on an unpopular street, living in an unpopular building. Outside, it was the heart of Calgary street crime. Inside, it was a technology park housing one of the pioneer internet radio-stations at the time. I cultivated a guarded comfort among nerds, music hounds and thugs. My boss of the previous nine years was driven to sell his business by a vicious shift in business costs, as I had anticipated. Rock and roll, relationships and Calgary are all examples of a vicious game.
Although I was born in Calgary, my first memories are from school-years in Victoria. I played ambulance because my dad was a paramedic. He also ran a deli for a number of years – I helped him make dozens of meat-pies a day, and slept under the pizza oven they cooked in with my younger sister. A loft at the back of the shop stored various supplies and jetsam, and a short railing revealed a strange floor which glowed faintly. I remembered the Six-Million Dollar Man walking on something similar once, and so I decided to give it a try and fell through the false ceiling to land on the freezer in the front of the shop. Eventually I became able to breathe, and chose not to try it again. I was also a fan of Shazam!, who took instructions from the Elders at the beginning of every show. I kept an abandoned gerbil-walking ball on the dashboard of the stationwagon which resembled Shazam’s telepathy-with-the-Elders-thingy, and mentioned their advice not to go underwater when my dad took me for swimming lessons. It only took me a day to become an avid swimmer, but I don’t have a lot of fat to keep me afloat so it’s a bit of work still. I studied first-aid and became a volunteer at hockey-games. I studied magic and did a show at the hospital once for the children’s ward. I read a Cracked magazine article on how to be a teenager while I was thinking about gravity one day, and later while I was playing I decided to jump off the carport with a coathanger in the back of my t-shirt in order to practice a roll-manouver. The coathanger was to ‘teenager-ize’ my posture. My friends thought I was crazy. I went fishing with them on weekends and brought home bass-fish for dinner as often as I could hack the cold. I never wanted to leave Victoria, except that a kid who taught me how to fight also taught me some other things which only a kid who was in grade seven a couple years too late would be interested in. The innocence of childhood is a myth quickly destroyed in the experiences of greeny, rivalry and slumber parties if nothing else. Dad was working out of town too much by then, climbing out of debt, and it was decided we would move back to Calgary.
I was a skinny, quiet kid who thought about everything. I could read anything by the time I was in grade three. I felt like I could see the future, and couldn’t accept the egotism of it. Dreams were mostly just dreams, but sometimes they were vivid. I thought about super-powers, like any skinny kid. I thought about divinity, but I could never take it literally. Any rare taste of the air of a church was an insult to the whole idea for me. I lifted weights, climbed hills, walked everywhere and went through three hernia surgeries. I played football on a quilt of front-lawns one day and ripped my knee apart, also resulting in surgery. My grandfather was a surgeon, so I kept studying everything that happened to me. I was frequently re-injuring myself, so I decided to become some kind of ninja so I could teach myself not to be such a klutz. I was right into the spirituality of it, the superpowers, the duty. I learned guitar and had a band in my basement, so I learned all the other instruments too, except piano. I got to thinking about sensitivity. Over time, I got to thinking about telepathy. When I was a street-musician, musicians I played with were often unpredictable, so the idea of telepathy eventually became handy. I don’t need to know what I’m going to play before I play it anymore.
I think of epiphanies as moments when stress reaches the point of fracturing into unstoppable, gut-wrenching laughter. Starving through an endless walk, hitchhiking through the misfortune of being left at an infamous on-ramp near Chilliwack – think escapable-penetentiary and the many kinds of cow-shit in the world – eventually finding an apple on the shoulder of the road with a quarter cut out of it, not bruised, shortly before sleeping through a ride with a speed-demon all the way to Kelowna. Hiking from a day of apple-picking for six miles in sweltering heat to take a free shower at the racetrack, then arriving at camp smelling the freshness. Many disturbances attempting sleep in a tent: morning sprinklers in an orchard reciting, “shit shit shit shit shit shit pthh pthh pthh shit shit shit…”; a deer poking it’s head at the wall as if contemplating an invasion; the tire of a truck rolling over the entrance and almost crushing my head after an overnight security shift, in what seemed a well chosen campsite at a festival. The driver turned out to be one of the drummers from one of my old bands.
About a week before I was first admitted to the hospital with psychosis, I was enjoying a show with a couple of rather intoxicated companions. For whatever reason, one of them became increasingly aggressive, while I somehow became able to believe I had superpowers, comfortable as I was with premonition. I projected this insane, overbearing love at the guy, who suddenly faded out for a moment, then forgot his train of thought. Soon after, the woman sitting across from me was describing something she was descending into despair over, and I repeated the projection, with a similar result. When she came-to, she began, “hey, you know, I see you lookin’ at me, but just don’t go there, you don’t know what I’m like…” to which I replied, “that would depend on my intentions. I don’t have any intentions right now.” She just began crying. I don’t deny I’ve always been prone to getting signals crossed. I finished my drink and left.
The bar I did sound in was a keep, in defense of the cultural refugees of an overheated economy. The hard-drug community was as openly antagonistic toward us as we were toward them. In later months, with increasing frequency, a stranger would infiltrate and push me aggressively to begin dealing for them, to which I always responded with brazen hostility. Among the ‘members’, we generally sneered that they were all amateur narcs. Then I began working with and frequenting a wider network of events, while I found myself faced with the same aggression there as well. It was too obvious my reputation was under attack, while I just carried on. I committed to defending my father from what I saw coming in his life: he would hit a snag switching from disability to Canada Pension; but on top of that, all his roommates abandoned him at the same time, leaving him in charge of the lease. My sister and I were polling assisted-living residences who were happy to tell us about a list of phone-numbers, refer to their waiting list and offer us some fundraising literature. I cajoled people I was working with to move him into the basement-suite I was left with in a similar way; while the gas and internet were cut off, the landlord was out of town, and we had to heat the place with the oven in a February cold-snap. A month later we found him a home through the Legion, although he wasn’t a veteran. I did a midnight move, I forget where. I began to forget a lot of things. That’s life on the move.
I eventually moved in with an old friend’s ex-boyfriend for a year or so. We played guitar and talked about philosophy. I had recorded a CD a few years before and began working towards a second one, while the woman who wanted me to marry her came and went, to the extent I could control anything. I was half-finished the titles I had planned to record when everything became impossible. Since then, people’s adaptation to the telepathic experience has been the only thing I could allow myself to focus on. I’ve had to protect everyone else’s survival in order to protect my own. The dance of it has become a study in catch-22. I need to protect everyone else's privacy, while I’ve completely forgotten the experience of privacy. Now, two years later, the question of who-dunnit is someone else’s question. I remain focused on our adaptation to telepathy. Lesson one: You have to have a sense of humor.
Two years ago, a woman wanted me to become her new husband. I decided I didn’t want to. She wouldn’t believe me, and returned a number of times to persuade me. I discovered a way to persuade her not to return again. She discovered a way to persuade my social circle to persuade me not to return again either, in spite of the fact that she was never a part of my social circle before. People sometimes have motivations which are not clear at first, as I had already discovered in the past.
A long time ago I went crazy. I heard voices in the skies, across the room, in my ear, mocking and condemning me for things which refused to reflect reality. I went for a very long walk, intending to escape something I knew I couldn’t, while finding strange, blue, mocking faces in objects and clouds everywhere I looked. I gathered a few bags of garbage along the sides of roads for someone to pick up. Eventually I returned home under threat from the voices I heard that I was constantly under threat from snipers, then waited in the yard for my roommate to return home and have me sent to the hospital, with the assertion that I must move out immediately. People sometimes need to establish boundaries in order to protect their homes.
I decided not to die, after considering whether I could become either a benefit or a burden to the world. My decision was based on what I anticipated in the future, and what I saw of the beginnings of it at the time. I took atypical antipsychotic medications, fully intending to abandon them eventually against the doctors’ belief that I would never be able to stop, because I knew I would eventually lose the ability to protect my life if I protected the dependency. I also refused disability coverage to eventually accept a job which I held for nine years, with a few others along the way, because I did not want to become trapped in the regional economy and culture. I can now confirm that it was a trap to later accept disability when I collapsed a disk in my neck which pinches motor-nerves, but it still became a matter of survival to escape that trap. I guess I have escaped where survival is concerned, but I know there are things I have never had any ability nor desire to escape.
I was successful at weaning myself off the medication after seven years, while also becoming successful at deconstructing the mechanisms of my experience of psychosis. Current practice is to use medication as a substitute for counselling, so I am glad to have gained that ability over time. Another reason I am glad to have gained that ability, is that it prepared me to cope with the nightmare which I now stand in the memory of. But that is not why I am writing.
I knew I had changed much by the time I left the relationship, and I immediately decided to explore it as an artist and philosopher. I noticed people were behaving differently towards me already, but I chose to just reflect the most natural, pissed-off response to the whole experience, while also distancing myself from bringing her name into it. I explored the tension between sexuality and abuse. I wrote poems and made speeches. I strove to gather friends as a fence against her return, but something was strange. My thoughts became the topic of gossip around me. Parts of my routine at home also became the topic of gossip around me. I silently tossed ribald thoughts off at life and found them reflected in people’s conversations and gestures everywhere I went. I made satire of comparing my own embarrassments to those I could imagine among those around me. I became the self-financed performer of the most popular show I had ever done, which became a frustrating thing for a veteran musician like myself to accept. It became obvious I was in deep shit. I kinda was before she showed up, but now it was becoming clear we were all in deep shit, and I began including warnings in my satire. The time I had vaguely anticipated since I was a teenager had arrived.
I’m no bible-thumper now, but when I was young I felt compelled to give it a good read, since it made the people around me so much more explainable. I did that with a few religions, and a few cultures, over time. A prophecy which stuck with me was, “Days will come when what was hidden, will be revealed.” I thought to myself, ‘what would happen if suddenly everybody knew everybody else’s private shit?’ This is obviously too much of an awareness for any of us to contain consciously, but it seemed a likely reason that people would tacitly agree to overwhelmingly flip-out. Another bit from several prophecies, was the instruction to a prophet to keep some revelations secret. Like I said, I eventually broke free from happy-pills and psychosis. The reason I succeeded is that I refused to let myself become trapped in religion, or any other assumptions. Eventually, I’ll explain that.
After I left college, I became a stage technician for several theatres and festivals. It was kind of a fluke. I volunteered for the Calgary Jazz Society, because I was into jazz, and after a couple of festivals, a production manager suggested I go talk to someone at the Calgary Center for Performing Arts. I guess this is the early-life history lesson. I broke my arm on a show after three years at it, and convalesced in a cheap coffeeshop across the street from the concert hall with a bunch of art-freaks. They kinda became the population of most of my future, but I’ll basically leave that alone. I cut my cast off after two months to work on a film, because I needed the money. I then became a nude model at the art college, and then a street musician for a number of years. I wanted to devote myself to practice and people watching, young idealist that I was. It was the nineties. None of us were good enough for the world in the nineties anyway.
Another relationship I had left previously found me in a frighteningly tight rental-market, needing to move. I volunteered to be a sound technician in an edgy nightclub, which happened to be the frontage of an inexpensive building. One of the things which kept it inexpensive was the noise from my gig and three other neighboring bars. Another thing which kept it inexpensive was an influx of dealers in crack and pills, who invaded at the same time as we were invaded by construction workers and others willing to work in the petroleum industry. I was offered a reference for an apartment, to escape my relationship then. I suddenly found myself as a popular sound technician, in a popular nightclub, on an unpopular street, living in an unpopular building. Outside, it was the heart of Calgary street crime. Inside, it was a technology park housing one of the pioneer internet radio-stations at the time. I cultivated a guarded comfort among nerds, music hounds and thugs. My boss of the previous nine years was driven to sell his business by a vicious shift in business costs, as I had anticipated. Rock and roll, relationships and Calgary are all examples of a vicious game.
Although I was born in Calgary, my first memories are from school-years in Victoria. I played ambulance because my dad was a paramedic. He also ran a deli for a number of years – I helped him make dozens of meat-pies a day, and slept under the pizza oven they cooked in with my younger sister. A loft at the back of the shop stored various supplies and jetsam, and a short railing revealed a strange floor which glowed faintly. I remembered the Six-Million Dollar Man walking on something similar once, and so I decided to give it a try and fell through the false ceiling to land on the freezer in the front of the shop. Eventually I became able to breathe, and chose not to try it again. I was also a fan of Shazam!, who took instructions from the Elders at the beginning of every show. I kept an abandoned gerbil-walking ball on the dashboard of the stationwagon which resembled Shazam’s telepathy-with-the-Elders-thingy, and mentioned their advice not to go underwater when my dad took me for swimming lessons. It only took me a day to become an avid swimmer, but I don’t have a lot of fat to keep me afloat so it’s a bit of work still. I studied first-aid and became a volunteer at hockey-games. I studied magic and did a show at the hospital once for the children’s ward. I read a Cracked magazine article on how to be a teenager while I was thinking about gravity one day, and later while I was playing I decided to jump off the carport with a coathanger in the back of my t-shirt in order to practice a roll-manouver. The coathanger was to ‘teenager-ize’ my posture. My friends thought I was crazy. I went fishing with them on weekends and brought home bass-fish for dinner as often as I could hack the cold. I never wanted to leave Victoria, except that a kid who taught me how to fight also taught me some other things which only a kid who was in grade seven a couple years too late would be interested in. The innocence of childhood is a myth quickly destroyed in the experiences of greeny, rivalry and slumber parties if nothing else. Dad was working out of town too much by then, climbing out of debt, and it was decided we would move back to Calgary.
I was a skinny, quiet kid who thought about everything. I could read anything by the time I was in grade three. I felt like I could see the future, and couldn’t accept the egotism of it. Dreams were mostly just dreams, but sometimes they were vivid. I thought about super-powers, like any skinny kid. I thought about divinity, but I could never take it literally. Any rare taste of the air of a church was an insult to the whole idea for me. I lifted weights, climbed hills, walked everywhere and went through three hernia surgeries. I played football on a quilt of front-lawns one day and ripped my knee apart, also resulting in surgery. My grandfather was a surgeon, so I kept studying everything that happened to me. I was frequently re-injuring myself, so I decided to become some kind of ninja so I could teach myself not to be such a klutz. I was right into the spirituality of it, the superpowers, the duty. I learned guitar and had a band in my basement, so I learned all the other instruments too, except piano. I got to thinking about sensitivity. Over time, I got to thinking about telepathy. When I was a street-musician, musicians I played with were often unpredictable, so the idea of telepathy eventually became handy. I don’t need to know what I’m going to play before I play it anymore.
I think of epiphanies as moments when stress reaches the point of fracturing into unstoppable, gut-wrenching laughter. Starving through an endless walk, hitchhiking through the misfortune of being left at an infamous on-ramp near Chilliwack – think escapable-penetentiary and the many kinds of cow-shit in the world – eventually finding an apple on the shoulder of the road with a quarter cut out of it, not bruised, shortly before sleeping through a ride with a speed-demon all the way to Kelowna. Hiking from a day of apple-picking for six miles in sweltering heat to take a free shower at the racetrack, then arriving at camp smelling the freshness. Many disturbances attempting sleep in a tent: morning sprinklers in an orchard reciting, “shit shit shit shit shit shit pthh pthh pthh shit shit shit…”; a deer poking it’s head at the wall as if contemplating an invasion; the tire of a truck rolling over the entrance and almost crushing my head after an overnight security shift, in what seemed a well chosen campsite at a festival. The driver turned out to be one of the drummers from one of my old bands.
About a week before I was first admitted to the hospital with psychosis, I was enjoying a show with a couple of rather intoxicated companions. For whatever reason, one of them became increasingly aggressive, while I somehow became able to believe I had superpowers, comfortable as I was with premonition. I projected this insane, overbearing love at the guy, who suddenly faded out for a moment, then forgot his train of thought. Soon after, the woman sitting across from me was describing something she was descending into despair over, and I repeated the projection, with a similar result. When she came-to, she began, “hey, you know, I see you lookin’ at me, but just don’t go there, you don’t know what I’m like…” to which I replied, “that would depend on my intentions. I don’t have any intentions right now.” She just began crying. I don’t deny I’ve always been prone to getting signals crossed. I finished my drink and left.
The bar I did sound in was a keep, in defense of the cultural refugees of an overheated economy. The hard-drug community was as openly antagonistic toward us as we were toward them. In later months, with increasing frequency, a stranger would infiltrate and push me aggressively to begin dealing for them, to which I always responded with brazen hostility. Among the ‘members’, we generally sneered that they were all amateur narcs. Then I began working with and frequenting a wider network of events, while I found myself faced with the same aggression there as well. It was too obvious my reputation was under attack, while I just carried on. I committed to defending my father from what I saw coming in his life: he would hit a snag switching from disability to Canada Pension; but on top of that, all his roommates abandoned him at the same time, leaving him in charge of the lease. My sister and I were polling assisted-living residences who were happy to tell us about a list of phone-numbers, refer to their waiting list and offer us some fundraising literature. I cajoled people I was working with to move him into the basement-suite I was left with in a similar way; while the gas and internet were cut off, the landlord was out of town, and we had to heat the place with the oven in a February cold-snap. A month later we found him a home through the Legion, although he wasn’t a veteran. I did a midnight move, I forget where. I began to forget a lot of things. That’s life on the move.
I eventually moved in with an old friend’s ex-boyfriend for a year or so. We played guitar and talked about philosophy. I had recorded a CD a few years before and began working towards a second one, while the woman who wanted me to marry her came and went, to the extent I could control anything. I was half-finished the titles I had planned to record when everything became impossible. Since then, people’s adaptation to the telepathic experience has been the only thing I could allow myself to focus on. I’ve had to protect everyone else’s survival in order to protect my own. The dance of it has become a study in catch-22. I need to protect everyone else's privacy, while I’ve completely forgotten the experience of privacy. Now, two years later, the question of who-dunnit is someone else’s question. I remain focused on our adaptation to telepathy. Lesson one: You have to have a sense of humor.
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