Pink Stuff

Posted on by meltingneurons
Credit for photo to: blog.writersdomain.net

Damaged in an intrinsic way
which belies the way we think,
I’ve settled now in harmless times
with glasses casting shades of pink.

Never say the world is tough
or filtered with what’s unfair,
in desperate times when life sucks
take the cue and be aware.

So crinkling in memorized skin
and dancing with memories come neigh,
I’ve taken solace in the work being done
strive always to hold my head up high.

Plasticity in that neural net
the one which directs the play,
regrows the joy that fear had stole
and gives birth to come what may.

Gods, Giants, Children & Men

Posted on by meltingneurons

Found this unexpectedly in my drafts folder, don’t remember writing it, but then again I don’t remember a lot of things in the ways that others do at least.

I don’t know that the entirety of any story,
will cover what I had wanted to say initially.
I don’t believe that the ideas are wholly there,
sitting more like clumps of clay
waiting for a better artist than I to mold.

I had a moment once where the world laid open its belly to me and told me to come close, listen at a heartbeat that thumped with mysteries beyond anything I had ever dreamed of before. A kiss to the forehead of reality and the absent blast from it’s withdrawal were the price. The air was a hazed crackle of something intangible and without form and face. A feeling left as an impression the walls of truth and the faded glories of all the wishes we had as children. When we were young enough to put our heads together and pass thoughts back and forth, pretending we were telepathic and could read each others minds. Racing the wind across the grass and stumbling because we felt we had grown wings to carry us at the speed of air. We were flying, brazen fuck yous to the established status quo of gravity bound worms that we had been, free to soar, smiles cutting our faces so broadly that they felt like they would never leave. It was a moment and a time when there was nothing impossible and anything you could think was only a moment of focus away from being achieved.

Close down to a belly thick with the furs of nature gone to shit and trees whistling with empty branches. An incoherent ramble across the soft pink that raised out a welcome heat in radiance and peace. Touch the skin with a shovel and pull the axe blade back out so that the blood could go free. Cinders and ash blasting away thoughts and giving the entertainment for the evening and the night as the moons went rising over the hillsides and into the ethereal realms which can be tasted in the heart and break the mind that walks through them.

Safely in the comfort of truth we could sit in the caverns beneath what you saw in the over world. We were realized and all to ourselves. Peaceful gods surrendering to the joy of being lighter than the air, more stable than the mountains outside. Fucking giants as children, children as men, and something gone to dust during the interim.

Memory Spiders

Posted on by meltingneurons

Vividly vicious,

Pointedly pernicious,

Real life though through time they are sent.

Soaring sacred,

Helping hot hatred,

Occupying thoughts and blinding sight with recall bent.

Worldly window,

Boldly brittle,

Truncated life in fell cobwebs do they build.

Spindly spiders,

Truthfully totter,

Legs dancing across silk fields.

Memories mine,

Flurries recall and define.

The man that I once was,

Chaos attached to the leg of a dove.

Today I acknowledge the taste,

Confront the facts,

Carve away all the emotional waste.

Crystal Meth

Posted on by meltingneurons

Pumped up on that chalky sunshine,

The moon is fading to another vicious morning.

Spent my hours beneath the starlight in the wind,

Lovingly hitting repeat on every action I’d begin.

Glassed eyes and withered muscles ache,

Blood thundering past a thirst impossible to slake.

The ride was hot and heavy to the top,

Until we picked up speed enough to never stop.

Is BiPolar Mania a Drug to an Addict?

Posted on by meltingneurons

From a general standpoint, every mental illness (at least in my experience) offers it’s afflicted a slightly varied experience from the next in line. The numbers rattle off to “BiPolar Disorder Type I – Last Manic Episode Severe w/o Psychosis.” Next up is the well beloved Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) rounding out with Borderline Personality Disorder for good measure.

In a world of “medicated everyone” not many people blink an eye when the sack of pills comes out. Though in a strangely uncomfortable way it occasionally strikes me to explain what they’re all for and watch them adjust their demeanor in that so common and anxiously polite manner I’ve come to expect.

Here’s the kicker. When I was running a sales organization with a 150 reps, and quotas, plane travel 5 days a week – outside of the unchecked alcoholism at the time – you would never have known. The counselor that has finally found a checkmark next to his name for me continuously tries to reinforce that the mania can be used as an asset, a tool.

That’s where the differentiations come in for all of us.

In the early stages, mania feels like the beginning of fearless adrenaline rush without any edge. Endless possibilities are all within easy reach potentially. The stacks of chaotic problems encroaching all around are not only solvable but nearly laughable in their simplicity. With a blossoming confidence that transcends arrogance to simply become conviction that ANYTHING that I want to do right now I could do. Usually, I start walking, headphones in, my face will become unable to hold onto anything but a ear splitting toothed smile as I laugh out loud looking at the oncoming traffic. Air crisps or whistles across my skin. It’s the first moment you meet a new woman, it’s the first cigarette in the morning, it’s a tank of gas in the car and a world to explore, and it’s far to exquisitely perfect to be sustainable.

For me, this is where it starts. To the reader, if you felt as though there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish, the world was your oyster for a day – would you find it tempting to hold onto that?

Challenge #1 with comorbidity and dually diagnosed:

  • Regardless of consequences, addiction says “If it feels good, do it. Do it again….”
  • Mania can feel equally as potent as the strongest narcotics, with the same hazing of rational cause/effect evaluation.

The logical outcome is the circular pattern of up, down, feel bad, look for other options. Recovering from addiction is reliant almost entirely on the willingness to simply hand in the weapons and stop fighting. Surrender to the reality it is a losing fight, and if you stay away from using, you are on your way to brighter things.

Mania is deceitful though. Sure, it’s easy to throw an ungodly sum of anti-psychotics down someone’s throat until the pattern may well be nearly impossible to repeat. It could be argued on some level, that while a Thorazine shuffle isn’t a high quality of life, if it’s sufficient to overcome the initial hurdles of early sobriety without a high flying manic swing knocking you off the tracks, I don’t know how hard I’d argue against it.

That said, I’m a stubborn and foolish individual who continues to bolster the thought that, “If we just edge down the manic swings a touch so that I don’t feel like me I bet it would work…”

The reality is that I’m trying to stay high without thinking of it that way directly. My brain will pull magnificently orchestrated rationalizations out of the neurons they were stuffed for a rainy day until I’m willing to concede, that maybe, just maybe, this time everything will balance out. This is where the big kicker comes into play.

Challenge #2 deals with facts:

  • Not only do I know that I can do anything while manic, I’ve proved it to myself so many times over that it feels like I’m reliant on the mania to accomplish anything. Without tipping off into psychosis (which I’m blessed to not endure), in full blown mania, I truly will be the bizarrely entertaining, wildly offensive yet endearing, crazy charismatic and charmingly maniacal life of any party. FYI – sales is both a great and terrible place to put this to use.
  • Factually, I know that I only will have about 1-2 days of the enjoyable mania before it starts to turn me into something wildly unpredictable, sleep deprived, and consumed with a NEED for more – which inevitably leads into the cycle all over again.

 

I had written something try and put it in perspective for my poor parents who have watched this for 15+ years. Mania tried to capture all the blended excitement and frustration attendant with the feeling.

In essence, as everything builds up further and further, I force myself into a corner where the only outcome is going to be using my own self prescribed medication, or face another hospital which in the throes of mania seems completely ludicrous.

I recognize that the world looks at the series of insane adventures that have certainly occurred, the days without sleep, the spontaneous flights of fancy and even actual flights as something only a “crazy” person would do. Certainly, there is an element out of the norm, that’s why I’m taking medication and working on counseling in the first place. But for all the oddness, I delude myself with imagining that there is an element of jealousy beneath the demeaning words tossed around.

When things fade down, I’m always certain to get right back into the cycle with meds, visits, check-ups, retrospection. Invariably when the cycle completes I’ve lost my job, money is gone, probably overdosed once, and I’m homeless and coming back to family with my hand out. There is an absolutely bittersweet element to everything related to the upswings in BPD (much as I’m sure there are to the down as well).

This is not a life that I want to lead. I am working to follow the directions and accept the help of those still willing to offer it. So often though – just like with drugs and alcohol – all the progress fades away when the world takes on that special hue, sharpens up, and the rush comes on. I’ve lost homes, my wife, family, my life 6x (god bless Narcan), and even access to see my children for fear I’ll disappear again and leave them devastated. In the same breath, I left my pregnant wife nearly bankrupt and verging on foreclosure before she divorced me, and since, there are wide oceans of wreckage that spill against the happy homes of those that dared to care.

If you happen to see someone else having the time of their life while they pour gasoline on everything they’ve worked so hard for – speaking from experience – the smile is masking a far greater pain and frustration then is easily seen.

Tears from laughter and tears from misery both look the same.

This was originally written as an awareness building essay for another site that didn’t use it, so I’ll feed myself (and anyone who cares to listen to me prattle) the leftovers. Thank you for reading, and I really would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. ~S

He was a cat, and lived in a pink room.

Posted on by meltingneurons

 

Living like a cat last summer,

Couldn’t afford sheets or real food,

But the room was a soft pink,

And the lumpy mattress felt softer than the bricks.

 

Living like a cat I was,

Crawling under piles of clothes to nap,

Eating cans of tuna (pocket sized),

Basking in the sun so the shade felt cooler.

 

Cat life is great for those critters,

But at 6’+ and a bundle of seething “more,”

It’s feline for some but didn’t sit right on me,

So I’ll gladly hand it back this time around.

 

Feeling a bit more canine today.

 

Though cans of tuna still roll free,

I have a forever human to lick,

Hopefully I’ll get older than a pup –

— goddamn pet control still wants to lock me up.

IMG_0224
The Pink Room in its Reflective Glory

….sampling the insanity.

Posted on by meltingneurons

A portion of the memoir thingamajig I’m working on…think Hunter S. Thompson meets the Tasmanian Devil on acid and they go on a road trip…I have no idea how bum alive….
Me at 17…

The first time I had ever warn (my Santa Hat) it off season was in 9th grade….I didn’t want to fall into any of the socially nebulous categories that everyone knows of in high school. I was a rock climber, I was smart, I was weird, and I wanted to do drugs. A Santa Claus hat during the end of Summer into the Fall seemed lie a sufficiently bizarre calling card to elicit the kind of attention that I was hoping to draw.

Turns out I was right, and years later, when I wanted to recall some memory from those individuals who remembered my reputation for dropping acid before school and freaking out in the commons, getting the entire science glass tanked on ethyl chloride while the teacher gave a presentation, robbing the gym locker room, getting suspended and expelled for very mysterious reasons and then disappearing for a year and a half – all I had to do was put it back on. It became my calling card, my cape, and my identity. If I needed to become the villainous madman ready to do anything at any cost – burn the world to the ground for just one more $20 – let’s bring in Santa! It was stupid and youthful….but I thought I looked fucking good.

Realistically, I was a skeleton. Nearing vaporization. At one point I0 was standing 6’2” tall and weighing in at a staggeringly huge 135lbs. of skin and bones. I’m pretty sure if you looked close enough you could see the molasses my thickening blood had morphed into trying desperately to move beneath the paper disguising itself as my outer layers. The hollowed out chunks in what was my skull were no longer recognizable as anything describable as attractive windows to a soul – just aching cut outs to coals of frustration, mindless chattering banter between myself and the seas of demons that I was tormented by constantly by my own actions which invited them in to travel between my buzzing ears. There’s a tattoo that is perched forever on my left shoulder these days. It started during the final days of the longest spin I ever got spun on. It highlights the image of me face in all its weirdly grotesque glory going into the 300+ hour awake mark.

At that point there’s nothing real left in the world. The fabric of existence has been ripped to pieces, and resewn by crystalline fingers into a tapestry of madness that drifts between the cosmos. Ethereal, haunting, overwhelming when it chooses to present a new scene for the viewer to be engulfed in with neither option nor control over their role to play. One moment they may be a super star drug tyrant overseeing the peasant users around them – fools to touch such tools as these that they cannot hope to understand…..the next, huddled underneath the glovebox with a permanent marker jotting down the next sequence of license plate numbers and their related car descriptions (particular attention to be noted to the gold Volvo which is always third in line at each intersection) which form the state wide task force that has been deployed to hunt you down after the systematically arrest each of your friends and turn them against you.

The tattoo shows the lewd, cheek partially raised, only one sided grin that became a permanent fixture on my face for several weeks. There was something that was both somewhat charming – think everyone’s favorite super villain from Batman – and terribly off putting. There was no rhyme or reason to why I was “smiling”. Nothing phased me, or it. The situations that were plaguing my now nearly homeless existence; the impending and quickly approaching doom that I seemed determined to drive myself to by ingesting enormous quantities of ice all at once – to that extend that even when the dealers or our funds would dry up for a day or two, I could ride the high for the intervening time without coming down even a touch. Even when I was passed along right after the initial outline was laid in by the artist (also a middle man to my dealer who was trying to knock me out with sleeping pills unsuccessfully to get me out of my psychosis since I was freaking people out) to a black man who worked at Starbucks with less polite sexual intentions towards my nubile young body….couldn’t let the smile waver.

I really can’t even remember that much of what happened, nor if something did. Though I have to assume since I’d been awake for well over the 450+ hour mark by the time I got to the basement with its strange purple feathery covered couch and mood lighting and all I had eyes for was the pipe – who knows what I would have been willing to do. I can recall dancing for him with no shirt on. Many, many, many plants upstairs. Lining the kitchen counters. And he had a fascination, bordering on obsession, with ensuring that I only used the blue part of the lighter flame to hit the pipe. It had something to do with it being the neutral part – but it doesn’t make sense to me in retrospect. Didn’t matter then, I just know he had almost a ball of some truly superb crystal, and even typing about it now I can feel my heart accelerating and my eyes start to cross dreamily.

How oddly sick isn’t it? In a recollection of potentially being raped over drugs by someone I didn’t know in their basement – where I believe I can account for being locked for nearly 3-days since I didn’t make it to detox until the 28th day of being awake, which I went to almost directly from there. But that aside – despite the fact of what is happening during the recollection – it actually inspires a desire in me to go get high on the exact same substance precipitated the event in the first place.

Being an addict sucks, it really does. You want the things that kill you worse than the things that save you. It’s like the survival instinct we’re supposed to be born with was installed backwards and then given some extra juice.

“We fucked up the orientation Ted, may as well make it run fast and aggressive eh?”
Love to hear your thoughts!