Embracing Self

I've been trying to think of the best way to introduce you - the reader, the stranger, the non-crazy person-to my crimes. I read a neat book this weekend. Here's an excerpt, from Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharp. The book bares no resemblance to my life but I find its prose resonating and its main character extremely identifiable:

Please indulge me here, reader, as I ease out of the 'prologue' and into 'chapter one' of 'my'
'life'; take a moment and try to think of everything that happened to you every day for a
week of your life starting in, say, September of the year you were ten years old. Did you try
it? It's really difficult, right? In my case it's especially hard since around that time my mind,
unbeknownst to me, began its own program of forgetting. My mind's reason for forgetting
was, I assume, to banish grief from it's domain, and in this it was only partially successful.
Some of the grief remained, while certain other virtues of mental and emotional life fled;
kindness was one, memory of daily events was another.

I mentioned my depression to another inmate recently, since he asked about my symptoms, and he was surprised to learn that I could remember having it as a child. In retrospect it is easy to recognize such things (cliches of this phenomenon abound). I didn't know it was depression at the time. I thought everyone felt the way I did.

In kindergarten strange feelings were much easier to deal with. During an anti-social bout I could tell my Mom I didn't feel like going anywhere. Kindergarten, being a glorified daycare, wasn't a big deal to skip. I wonder if I had feelings of resentment for the German children who had no trouble communicating with one another. I was certainly frustrated that I knew few English-speaking children (and the ones I "did" know were often strange). Regardless, if I felt overwhelmed I could stay home.

Things changed after I reached 1st grade. I felt horrible for my dad, knowing that he didn't have a choice either, for suddenly I understood that he couldn't skip work anymore than I could skip school. I didn't completely understand adulthood, but I knew I would reach my father's age someday and I seriously pondered whether life was worth it. From time to time these ideas would resurface and I grew to become familiar with death wishes. Having no communicable basis for these feelings, I introspected.

School was not a problem in and of itself - it was usually tolerable. I don't think my moods were based on laziness, either. It was different - a depressed outlook changes everything. Experiences are tinged with sorrow, sadness, enmity, etc., which often render them seemingly pointless. Why are parades thrown if they incite such anger and frustration, why do people gather when all they wish to do is leave? Thoughts like these often made me suspicious of the motives of adults and societies, but that is not to say I treated everything thusly. I was just suspicious and inquisitive enough to become an insufferable devil's advocate. My mother often thought I argued for argument's sake (she still accuses me of doing so), but now I realize my thought process as a child: how could I not argue against the status quo or challenge that which is taken for granted when it had not made me happy? I also believe that growing up among foreigners has allowed me to notice when people are acting on an often arbitrary assumption that is universally accepted. I could tell that more things were relative than people let on to - and I also knew that I felt unsatisfied, morose, tired, directionless. I did not know for what I was searching.

I believe that adulthood has made it even more difficult to recognize uncommon feelings. Minds cannot overlap, and only common experiences can be shared. Perhaps people with schizophrenic symptoms don't have a habit of making up vocabulary to describe their moods and experiences, or perhaps they are adverse to attempts at sharing them. (Perhaps they are not so universally common, either.) I tend to stumble over words in person, often pausing to think of some fleeting memory of a word... and somehow I am always interrupted by my surroundings, closing my mind even further and agitating me severely when I am stuck trying to communicate an idea. Blogging is still pretty new, and in this area, that of sharing my experience in the hopes of garnering perspective, I believe it's perfect for me.

My lawyer sent me an article by Mayoclinic.com relating to schizoaffective disorder. One of the symptoms really grabs my attention. I exhibit all of them, but this one stands out to me especially. I read it over and over the first time I gleaned the paper. It describes catatonic behavior, which is not something I considered myself as exhibiting, except for the description itself - lack of response, sometimes with an extreme agitation that's not influenced by the environment.

Could it be referring to - that?

I cannot tell you exactly what I meant by that, although it brings to memory a conversation with my friend Michael. "Why do you do this?" he asked. "Why do you get so weird around people sometimes?" We were at JR's for the second night in a row. The night before I had felt more or less "normal," but that night I felt the agitation. I feel it all the time, usually triggered by a certain kind of carelessness that irks me and always has - and I feel ridiculous mentioning it except for the rage it induces. I react by clamming up and glancing around, seeking a less crowded space; perhaps this does appear catatonic to other people.

The trigger is when people in my presence are talking loud enough to be overheard. It doesn't matter what they are saying. The content of their message isn't important; neither is the place - the setting of the conversation. Sometimes it doesn't even matter how loud they are speaking, just that they are talking at all and that their message could be interpreted in any way by someone other than myself. But since the place, the content, and the method of information do not matter, what is the true trigger, the agitation itself comes from nowhere! I believe it stems from a paranoid fear I developed in my teens and early adulthood - I haven't completely rid myself of this rather embarrassing compulsive superstitious fear: I am terrified of invisible things.

I don't know what I think they are. Are they ghosts? Spirits? Angels? Demons? God? A waking, conscious universe? It doesn't matter. Ultimately it's all the same concept. Cognitively I am able to understand that a part of my brain recognizes patterns, interpreting incorrect sequences of post hoc ergo proctor hoc and attaching significance to trivial details. I subscribe to Richard Dawkins' idea that the human brain uses 'shortcuts' to perform complicated tasks more quickly (to paraphrase crudely), and that they could be responsible for a side-effect of superstition. I will divulge more information about this fear in a later blog entry.

There's an inmate in here named Jason Fujiwara. He's a short, skinny guy who walks around the pod, moving his arms like an animatronic puppet, swaying his head from side-to-side as he converses with invisible conspirators. He regularly laughs at his food. Sometimes he talks to the rest of us, and when he does he seems lucid enough, but his face scrunches and his eyebrows furrow in concentration. It takes effort for him to interact with us. Maybe he wants to and doesn't know how? Consensus among the inmate population is pretty uniform: how did he get here? Why is he in prison at all? He should be somewhere where he can get help.

Besides all that, Fuji isn't even a danger to anyone, except perhaps to other short, skinny, Jim Henson creatures. I don't even know what he is here for, except for a suspicion that it is drug-related. Another inmate I know used to shoot heroin with him. I don't have the fortitude to talk to Jason. Despite his weirdness, he is not very interesting that I can tell, anyway.

If I were to hold up a ruler to represent a scale of severity for Jason's symptoms, I would say that he walks back and forth between the 5 and 9 inch marks with the 12 inch mark representing someone who is "beyond all hope" or at least all hope that's not very expensive "in fact, I'm not quite sure what I mean by hope here, perhaps a larger capacity to take care of himself - although using said criteria he's done somewhat well finding a place where food and housing are completely free." Sometimes Fuji's just weird, and sometimes he's way out there. For myself I think I walk back and forth between the 2 and 5 inch marks. The average person, I think, walks back and forth between a 1/2 and a 3, with 3 representing something like moderate superstition. It takes a lot of bravado for me to muster the courage to essentially say, "Fuck my compulsions I'm doing what I want to do no matter how it makes me feel". Can you imagine someone from TLC's Horders telling that to themselves? This often causes me to live in two worlds at the same time - the "real" world that you and I interact in, and the "other" world which I am constantly ignoring for the sake of my friends and family. But I'll get to that later, too.

We get a few cable channels in prison - many people are surprised to learn that we have TVs, coffee machines, radios, typewriters, but I digress - one of the channels is Fuse, which hosts Lady Gaga videos pretty often including her interview with them from a while back. I found her interpretation of people as monsters to be a fun and interesting idea, and it's one I have adopted. I have always felt like a monster or a masquerading demon of sorts ("wraith-like" is a word that comes to mind when I see my shadow), and it has always caused disconnect between me and my perception of others. I never thought of extending the perception to include everyone, but now that I have, I like people as monsters. It all makes more sense to me that way. Societies, value systems, varying concepts of justice; these all make more sense to me if people are monsters. Animals might be a better choice, after all humans are animals. They are fiendishly cunning. Devising intellectual instruments, they control one another in the effort to secure resources, spinning off societies & cultures as so much waste; so subversive they don't even realize that's exactly what's happening. Humans certainly match the criteria for animals - but what are monsters if not exaggerated animals anthropomorphized and possessing our degree of cunning? They manifest our fears of big scary animals sure, but more importantly, of big scary intelligent animals. A lion by itself is scary, but give it just a modicum more intelligence than it's known to possess and you have a monster in your imagination. Yes, man as an animal is accurate, but as mankind differentiates between himself and his animal brethren (at least, "we" do, in this US of A and in most other countries). Mankind has forgotten that it is an animal, culturally. Another word is needed. That word is monster. But monsters don't have to be evil, or even scary. And that's not a new concept at all. When I was a child I read about Where the Wild Things Are. Those monsters were not scary. No, I suppose monsters are only scary when there's a conflict of interest. And humans are especially so then, aren't they?

Back to the point at hand. I'm in prison, and I'm trying to tell you my story. The core of it, I think, is that I was not true to myself. I feared myself, felt that I was too different from others (from you). I felt trapped by my job, by Bank of America, by my own car, by my destroyed shoulders and lack of healthcare. I knew that the resources to support my existence were out there, but I had no way to access them. I was a failure by every measure I had erected for myself. I became very manic. With nothing to lose and death wishes to guide me, my invisible fears became real. I have talked with some schizophrenics online at the somethingawful forums and some of them describe tactile hallucinations as the sensation of bugs crawling on their skin. Mine were not like that.

I am trying to imagine how to convey exactly what I thought they were. I could use words like angel, spirit, ghost, demon, guardian, guide, but these words are ideas which are attached to other ideas which run on different operating systems from the one I am trying to convey. Pretend these concepts are all limited interpretations of the same thing; of an invisible representative of some hierarchy of invisible intelligentsia that transcend the forth dimension somehow. I'm not talking about deities. I am saying: imaging all the things that are common to angels, spirits, ghosts, demons, guardians, guides, etc. as they are found in the sum of human lore, and forget everything else. Picture one such being. Now imaging a host of them interacting with your nervous system. I'll get on this later.

The whole point of this blog is to reconcile my desired future against my statistically probable one. There's a weird double-expectation in society and among inmates that I am trying to stay clear of. The majority of the people that I interact with every day are in love with failure. They are in love with incarceration, imprisonment, shortcomings, excuses, and they don't even know it. They are apologetic, touting justice when it suits them. The robbers say, "the murderers are scum," while the murderers say, "the child-molesters are scum (in fact, everyone does)," while the child-molesters say, "the gang-members are scum," and the gang-members say, "the other gang-members are scum." They talk about incarceration all day long. They watch shows about crime & justice, listen to music about crime & justice, have conversations about crime & justice, and quite frankly it is the most boring topic I can think of, especially here. "You're already living it," I want to yell, "there's no point aspiring for even more!" This is true for you too, American reader, your society loves every piece of it. My father used to joke and speak lightly of prisoners, "ha ha, that's what you get," even while he was dying of cancer and his own son was being put through the ringer. He told me once, "son, I think if you do end up going to prison, you won't be in there for very long. You are not like those other people."

The joke is on him, though. Here's the punchline: not only am I going to be here for a while, I am a bit like these people. So are you. So was he. The "wheat" of those who "should" be here is approximately 1%, the rest are the chaff. Our country is so fucked, America. I had no idea, just like you have no idea. You won't, either. I can't convince you, I won't even try. Actually, I will a little. But not too much. There are so many voices that are trying to [convince you] every day that I feel little need to add my own to the gnashing and wailing. For myself, I think there is still hope. Can people identify with my story? I think so. Am I monstrous? A little, and so is everyone. Am I dangerous? I don't have a desire to cause anyone harm, so, no. I'm not any more dangerous than you are. I am comfortable where I am and where I am going.

Back to the love of failure, which story is better, mildy crazy guy flips his lid, goes to prison, introspectively heals himself and becomes a comeback success, or mildy crazy guy flips his lid, goes to prison victimizes himself and disappears into an existence of Yum brand servitude? There are so many versions of the latter it makes my head spin. I already know how that life pans out. I choose the former.

I would like you to read another excerpt, this time from my sentencing hearing. Before you do, here's another blurb from Nothing Is Terrible: Sorrow makes its own principles, which are not necessarily shared by the unsorrowful; I hope you will bear this in mind as you read on. This was written and read by Lady X. Tread lightly, for you walk upon her memes:

On Sunday May 18th I woke up early to leave for the Colfax marathon with my dad who met me at my apartment at 5:00 a.m. I found my rear windshield smashed in. I filed a police report. I had to pay my car insurance deductible to have my windshield replaced.

On Tuesday May 20th I woke up early to go to the gym. I got in my car, but I didn't get very far before I noticed something was wrong. Four screws were forced through my two rear tires, two per tire. I went back and looked at my assigned parking spot and found additional nails and screws positioned where my tires would be.

I filed a police report. One tire had to be replaced and the other repaired. I was terrified I was being targeted and I had no idea why. I didn't know if I was being followed everywhere I went. I was afraid to be around friends or family in case I was being followed. I was nervous at work and at school. Every time I came out to my car I was worried some new damage would be there.

I knew I had to get away from my apartment as soon as possible. I spoke with my landlord who allowed me to leave at the price of my security deposit. I rented the very first apartment I could find and moved in that weekend which was May 24th and 25th.

On Tuesday May 27th I received the first email it was an email from the email address: housyoucar@gmail.com. The subject was, how is your car anyway and the message was I noticed you moved this weekend. This was all the proof I needed to know that I was being watched, followed and someone meant to harm me.

I responded to the email that evening as follows. Who are you and why are you doing this? The reply came the next morning, I am trying to complicate your life. Saturday morning I woke up to work to find a voice mail from my dad asking me to call him. My dad's house had been set on fire at 4:40 in the morning. He was asleep at the time the fire was set. He woke up from a sound and got up to go to the restroom. He noticed a light and saw the fire.

He called 911 who responded to the fire and put the fire out. If he had not woken up, my dad could have died. I received a final email from howsyourdad@gmail.com with no message, only the subject you could have prevented it. The email was sent just 12 minutes after the fire was started. The email address howsyourdad@gmail.com proves the fire was lit with the knowledge that my dad was inside and could come to harm.

I have never been so scared in my life I was being followed by someone with malicious intent to both me and my family. My request for the judge is that this case not be evaluated solely on property damage but as a deliberate act of violence with the worst intentions. Thanks.

Not everything in her statement is true. I didn't have the fortitude to say such at my hearing. As a consequence, I received a ten year sentence rather than something closer to four. Is it fair? I don't know. What is fairness but a glint in the eye of the beholder?