sick man dreams

My allegorical graduation from the marines preceded what would become the field work for my master's thesis in psychosis -- a logical progression for students of hardship (a 'fine art'); and I was as oblivious to the process as are most who study suffering. The years between my discharge and my crimes, I believe, typify the experience -- the American experience, the Twixter experience, the early 21st century experience -- for so many of my generation; faceless in the mob of the single, "middle class", twenty-to-thirty year old, perennially working dead end, low paying service jobs. True to style, I was a lonely serial dater, finding contentment only with increasing levels of sedation, while adopting anti-materialist tenets with an attitude of the desponded, self-destructive hipster. Characterizing the chief lessons derived from that time, I think in platitudes and humor article titles:

• The Horror of Mediocrity
• Life as a Case for the Merits of Abortion
• If You Detect a Trace of Mania in my Humor You're Probably Not Far Off the Mark

A sad reality is that the experience of prison, for me, is not so different in terms of interpersonal isolation, financial deprivation, fulfillment, etc. from the service job lifestyle. I don't think the reader should misconstrue this as my saying that prison simulates a certain real world experience accurately.

It is the other way around. Certain real world experiences simulate prison almost to perfection. Mine was exactly such a one.

One might think that I am speaking of the effects of the gap between the rich and poor -- and there is something to that -- but what bothers me more is the much subtler culture gap I have seen and experienced -- where people are seemingly barred from their own potential; their own depth; their own humanity; their own free will, really -- and that experience is the same, in here or out there.

Distractions still exist of course. People like to point to those and say that life is not so bad. And it's true that distractions can seem the whole point of life in the first place. I had my share -- drinking, partying, hanging out, the fruitless search for my soul-mate, experiencing art & music, exploring the trappings of modernity, pondering those weird quantum events embedded in reality, writing ever-evolving musical shorts… they helped me forget how miserable I gradually became again. What was the source of this misery? Was it internal or external? Or both?

Prison, for all its faults, is providing clues. I do feel more content than I have in a long, long time. I should be mad and frustrated. I should be railing against the walls -- at least, the TV says so. Reality shows tell me that this is how prisoners behave. But I am becoming more serene. Why is this so? I am away from all the people and things I love most. What is this lizard- like contentment crawling up my spine? I told my mother recently that I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than ever work in a customer service position again. I feel so glad for the break it is almost a fair trade. But it is also unnerving -- would other people feel the same in my position? I would have never believed it myself. There are so many others like me out there. My life feels better than at almost any point since moving to this country.

So what is it about this damn country?

I don't know what America used to be -- whatever it was -- but the land of the free doesn't seem to exist any longer. Maybe it has never been. Maybe it was always someplace else; in some other city, in some other state; as an abstraction. Or maybe it was in the potential of the "undiscovered countryside", while the internet has allowed us to more thoroughly recognize this societal delusion. People speak of the American Dream. Is it a promise or a carrot on a stick? Equality of freedom for all -- to do what? Work as a paycheck-to-paycheck wage slave? Obviously that isn't the case for everyone. I just had the unfortunate luck of being a young adult during an economic decline. I suppose that is a key to understanding how my life unfolded next -- when it seemed that things were against me, they were -- as they were against other people my age. The Confucian Curse comes to mind when I think of the present day: May you live in interesting times. The times were interesting, indeed. They are still interesting. They are, in fact, becoming more interesting every day.

After my discharge I moved back in with my parents. I was extremely happy to be starting my adulthood from scratch. Although I had wasted some early years, and my mind resembled something not unlike a defused bomb, I could see the bright side of my situation. I would have worked some job or another, I told myself, waiting for my band mates to graduate college; it may as well have been one that showed me some of the horrors of the world. I felt it could even lend some much needed credibility to an otherwise naive and pretentious musician.

And there were also the moral sensibilities I had adopted -- creeds and convictions I may have never considered were it not for my military experiences and the lessons they taught me. I was Pacifistic. I distrusted contracts fiercely, seeing them as a coercive tool. And as for coercion itself, I began to see that as a sort of rape -- a rape of the will, or the mind, perhaps; or of the dignity of the individual. And I saw it everywhere -- in business, in government, in families, in friendships. It would not be recognized as time would unfold, but I knew my past could serve me as well as any education for a man my age. I exhibited refinements which were not present in my peers. All I lacked was a certain social insight. I still had no idea who my American peers really were -- what their values were, their dreams, or their idealizations. I lacked the cultural context of my own mind -- and was discovering it had always been that way. I had been a perpetual foreigner.

It would have helped to know, then, that my friends and I would never get our band off its feet. I had everything I needed to go it alone, but I didn't. I wanted to share the experience with the people who had made my teen years bearable; who, in a very real sense, had kept me alive. When opportunities with other bands arose, I turned them down. I resisted a temptation to break away as my own artist. But over the years I realized, in succession, certain realities, each affecting me with a taxing emotional weight.

These were actually variations on a similar theme. I already substituted as the drummer since we couldn't find any. Later, I noticed that I was writing all of the guitar parts, too -- it seemed my band mates weren't confident in their writing. They couldn't commit to any of their own ideas. Later it became apparent to me that I was the only person writing any music at all, and I had also been recording everything. Then, I was the only person coming up with vocal ideas, melody ideas, and the only person sharing them.

But it was more than that. They weren't committed financially, either. They didn't have the resources. They were bogged down with work and school. And it took me too long to notice. I was busy myself, after all, blinded by optimism.

Ultimately, my friends admitted that my talents intimidated them -- even induced an occasional jealousy. And meanwhile, their scholastic and financial responsibilities dwindled their ability to collaborate with anything we had ever dreamed about doing together. Meanwhile, I became even more self-sufficient. And by then, life had crept up on me, too. Another four years had waded by, making for a total of eight fruitless years spent on that band.

This motivated me to develop a sort of axiom to help the aspiring musician: If you are not already doing it, you will never start.

I don't harbor any resentment for my old band mates. Unless you are born rich, musicianship requires a sort of fanaticism that must be adhered to or you will be swept into middle-age before you know it, and that turns many off, especially the professional and sycophantic sort. But it is also a refreshingly legitimate way of being, from my point of view. If you're not writing songs, start now. If you're not performing, start now. You have to already be doing it. You don't need to ask for anyone's permission, you don't need a consensus, you don't need a vote, and you don't need a push. You don't even need a band. Do it, or give up.

In Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman's character has a parole hearing near the end of the movie where he says that if he could go back and talk some sense into his younger self's mind, he would. One can speculate as to what he might say. If I were to alter my own history with any sort of 'future wisdom', I would not go back to the night of my arson, or to the nights I vandalized Lady X's car. I find such an idea somewhat insulting, to be frank. I already knew and believed that arson, vandalization, & targeted victimization are intrinsically disruptive and emotionally traumatizing, and I know and believe that forcing trauma upon a person is wrong. I am not trying to dispute the wrongness of my actions, nor was I when I committed them.

No; if I were to give my past self any advice I would say two things: 1) ditch your band mates immediately; and 2) if a bank ever raises your credit card payment by a factor of 5, just stop paying them-- since life has a way of making avalanches out of the strangest things.

But at first, right when I got out [of the military], things were looking good. I felt good. Calmness descended on me as I allowed my hair and beard to grow more naturally. The minutiae of my daily life no longer depended on the whims of older men whom I could not admire; whom I, in fact, had come to despise. And I would not be forced to serve that new enigma, the war-on terror. It still feels good to think of that. I know most Americans think the war on terror is a good idea. I think it just makes more and worse terror the same way the war on drugs has made more and worse drugs.

The first things I concerned myself were, typically, employment and housing. I could have stayed with my parents; in fact, probably should have, but I had become unaccustomed to living with them, their values, and some of their expectations. My father also had the classically paternal idea that grown offspring need to assert their independence or risk becoming a drain on their parents forever -- and I agree, to the extent that if employment and cost of living are reasonable there should be no reason a young adult cannot achieve independence rather easily -- and being so inclined (he) would enact certain "house policies" intended to incentivize my flight from the nest. These included, not surprisingly, chores, rent, mandatory employment or enrollment in school (which required employment by itself), and a never-ending stream of sarcastic remarks aimed at my behaviour, goals, and values.

And I think this is fairly typical behaviour for a father although I can't foresee myself behaving thusly. I suppose the son usually fights back, as I've seen in others' homes. But I never challenged or otherwise much engaged my--father because he was so ill. I probably should have asserted myself more around him. Hepatitis C had such drastic effects on his energy, his psyche, and his personality that I felt challenging him might actually help to kill him faster. Hence, we never really grew to know or respect each other in ways that I can only guess are more healthy and normal. We speculated over one another from a distance, as do countries in a cold war. This caused a disharmonic environment at home that I could not easily endure. I adopted a mask when at my parents' home - a sort of version of myself with all the volumes turned down, opinions put on hold, and problems I dealt with set aside.

(I do not mention my mother at this stage because her and I seem to think much more alike in terms of the individual's value as a resource for his or her family and vice versa. My father's illness was the monkey wrench in the health of the entire family system, and despite it, he made serious sacrifices in remaining the provider he was. He cared, and my mom, like my sister and I, was a second-hand victim of the disease. The nuances of all the subtle interplays in our family were a lifelong experience that could probably account for our more cerebral take on everything.)

So my father didn't want me to be a freeloader. He wanted me to have a job. If I were to move out, which I desperately wanted to do, I would need a job. If I wanted to go to college I would need a job, and I would need a job to buy performance and recording gear. There is nothing uncommon or noteworthy about any of this -- when I got out of the service, the first thing I needed to do, regardless of what I may have chosen to do for the rest of my life, was to get a job. I thought jobs were the only way to make a living.

So I put myself in job-mode. In resume mode. False-optimism mode. I felt I needed to cultivate that certain momentum, to be able to upsell myself to anyone at a moment's notice; be able to switch into cheery, fake-Bryan and temporarily forget about the things I cared about most because those things had never gotten me jobs before. And what’s more: I even had a decent job history for a 21-year--old. I was primed to hit the ground running.

From the ages of 16-18 I had worked my way into managing a few shifts a week at a local pizzeria -- which is impressive for someone who's not allowed to vote, buy cigarettes or alcohol, or be granted a status deserving of full human rights.

Then after High School I got a day-job in the admin department of a temp agency -- the sort you see on craigslist ads demanding "5 years experience or more, " which is total crap: a family friend needed someone to fill in for her while she recovered from a hysterectomy, and after failing to train four, more qualified individuals than myself, she turned to me as a last resort. I learned the job in 3 days. The agency liked me so much they wanted me to stay on. I handled payroll and a huge temporary employee database. It was unnerving to see people in their thirties and forties lining up and applying to be placed by this company, while I, a 6'2" bean pole in an old suit of his father's, sat in the middle of the office, bobbing his head to Korn songs; the would-be processer of their incomes. I could practically smell their frustration, and speaking of frustration, it'd be 9 years before I had a job as good or high-paying as that again.

These, of course, were followed by my military escapades - and even those weren't so bad, I thought, from the view of a prospective employer. The ability to learn a third language demonstrated a level of cognition that any company can benefit from, and the exacting demands of marine culture also cultivated an ability to comply with the most ridiculous of requests, a trait I have observed to be in high demand no matter where you are working (though employers do not generally appreciate this observation during interviews).

And despite all that; despite everything I've been building up to thus far; despite all my plans and mental efforts, the first thing I actually did when I got home was catch the worst flu of my life. A sweaty, feverish, hallucination- inducing period of weeks that changed the way I thought about myself forever afterward.

Most are familiar with the headaches, fatigue, and drowsiness associated with a strong flu. The alternating sweats and chills, the harshness of the throat and the pained labor it takes just to swallow. There is coughing, sneezing, a risk of pneumonia, and congestion, which forces one to breathe through the mouth; particulates in the air grazing at the insides of the neck as if a coarse sandpaper; scraping and drying, scraping and drying, making swallowing all the more difficult. And there is the infuriating necessity to drink pint after pint of water, only to sweat it by the quart and piss it by the gallon, each drop taxing hydration, and thereby the level of pain in the skull, all the more.

Illness is a sudden, emergency expense incurred against the economy of the body; usually such a one as its inhabitants -- cells, organs, proteins and the like -- had not adequately planned for, which must be paid in the oldest of currencies, energy itself. One finds a range of financial options available to him or her in the fight against this debt; he could conserve, using all of his resources to draw down the principle until it's completely gone, or she might make smaller payments, using what's left to attend to daily necessities, taking the illness with her, and for a longer period of time. In both cases, the illness propagates in the body, much the way interest propagates a balance. Sometimes energy has already been devoted to a cure, and access to this effort can be purchased with more abstracted currencies, while disease, for its part, investigates loopholes around these efforts, much like a corporation's evolution in the tax climate. Sometimes these assistance programs aren't effective enough against an ever-changing foe. Occasionally they even help make it more of a nuisance.

And I don't know how much of our bodies' strategies are due, collectively, to will, or conscious choice. When I get sick, I can't do much of anything but lay down and just hope I get better before I lose the will to live altogether. Fighting lethargy is bad enough of a struggle all its own; the last thing my system needs is a flu, or a cold, or even a headache to tax my strength of character even more.

But this flu was especially memorable. Its untimely arrival at such a happy point in my life forecast a dark cloud on the future of my endeavors, and its duration bordered nigh on ridiculousness: while under its effects I read the Dune series in a single sitting. The whole damned, bizarre series. I took breaks; expansive, leisurely breaks, to eat, drink, use the bathroom, and access my media library, not to mention sleep, which I spent more than half of my time doing, so I thought I'd recover before the end of the first book. It happened to be a--book that was just sitting there. But I didn't. I just stayed sick. For weeks.

And I had fever dreams. Waking ones.

I. Auditory

I was three-fourths into Dune Messiah when the first one happened. I had been sleeping on a couch in the basement rather than my bedroom, possibly as a means to force myself to get up more often, in the hopes it might trick me into feeling better. Maybe I was simply tired of my room for scenery, but I had been napping when something woke me up. Before I opened my eyes I realized there was a song in the air. A choral arrangement of a sort.

In my memory I see the singers as a choir of nuns. In my memory there is a jovial, old fashioned quality to the voices, an emphatic zeal, a distinctly goose-like annunciation to the syllables in the tune, and other things which remind me of singers at a church. But when I attempt to recall the tune itself, I remember quite distinctly that there was no tune -- in fact, the words were chanted in a whisper. And the chanters were smiling -- you can really tell when a person is smiling, the upturned corners of the lips affect the formants in the words -- and it seemed they were smiling because they were playing with me on a sort of intellectual level. As if the chanters knew they had woken me up, and knew that they weren't really there.

These whispery voices numbered perhaps a dozen or so. They were feminine -- nunly, as I said -- and surprisingly seductive, a quality which shifted my thoughts from nuns to witches. But not your wart-y, old, gray witches -if that's what you were imagining -- these were auburn, golden, and black-haired; young and beautiful; keeping in mind that I could only glean this information from the quality of their whispers. They were also hooded, I think; their words were direct but muted, and this made me think about the similarities between nuns and witches, and there are plenty of superficial ones.

But stranger than the voices was the message. Stranger still, to me, that their words were intelligible. In dreams, sometimes, the more you pay attention, the less you understand. Here, I could focus in on what was said, listen to it, understand it, and even write it down. And I did. It's the reason I can remember the event at all. I had forgotten it, like a dream, until I saw the words I'd scribbled on a napkin on the couch-side coffee table:

Whine is whine,

is wit with wine.

My task at transcription had been easy. The orators had repeated the phrase like a Mandela. And it was all just so zany. To an observer it would have appeared that I opened my eyes, sat up briefly after a minute or two, wrote a few lines of verse, then laid back down and fell asleep again. Exhaustion fought curiosity, and, satisfied I could investigate the message when I was better, I listened to the girls until I lost consciousness. I suppose whispery voices would prompt most to investigate. I didn't feel the slightest bit of alarm.

Later, when I first pondered the verse, my first questions concerned of plagiarism. Honestly; I thought they were cool lines and of using them in a song or something. And I wondered who the author of the lines was. Me? My sub-conscious? Had I heard them before and unwittingly ripped them off? I knew the voices had been imaginary, so I decided that if I had hallucinated them I had also hallucinated the words themselves, which had a word-salad quality to them while retaining some ambiguity of meaning.

And I found the meaning interesting as well.

The voices were womens', so I considered it as coming from the feminine perspective (or my projection of the feminine perspective), and I considered the first line. I considered what whining meant in the context of my life experience. Whine is whine, as they had said.

Obviously the definition of whining points to a child-like, immature protest, or a complaint, especially when done in a whiny voice -- the high pitched wail parents are so fond of -- but society has largely drifted to using it to describe almost any form of criticism at all. Now, I had often griped about the marine corps while I was enlisted. My ex-fiancée had even once accused me of blaming all of my life's problems on the marine corps, so I was interested in seeing whether these problems would follow me into civilian life or not (they didn't). But she wasn't the only woman to offer counter-opinions to my criticisms.

Other women were fond of telling me that the only person who could change my situation was me. And I actually really liked hearing that advice -- it was empowering, and it usually got me thinking in a more action-oriented way -- but it was also dehumanizing in the sense that it was a polite way of dismissing what I considered to be a serious conversation about satisfaction, happiness, dignity, and how those ideas might apply to institutional procedure.

Sometimes I would retort.

"You mean to say that I need to find my own solution to my problems," I might say. And they would nod approvingly. "And if my problem is my enlistment, it's my responsibility to find a way to terminate it."

At this point the nodding would stop abruptly -- always -- and I would hear something along the lines of, "No, you need to change your perspective."

My perspective, I wondered? Surrender my will to the status quo? That always struck me as a very un-feminine, pre-feminist notion. And that, I suppose, was the core of my issue; where does society draw the line between a happy society and a happy individual? What is sacrificed first? Why? Would slaves have been happier changing their perspective? What if America were asked to 'change its perspective' on the causes of and solutions to terrorism? Should I have asked my critics to change their perspective on my perspective? Would they have done it?

Or let's apply the idea to crime. Tell the rape victim to change his *or* her perspective on the acts forced upon them. Or the families of a murder victim to change theirs. Or how about all the arson victims? No one's asking - them to change their perspective because it's a completely untenable request.

This hallucination isolated a clearly embedded association in my psyche, one that I had somehow picked up as a young adult, which said, essentially, that most women do not want to listen to my point of view. I had developed a perception that women objectified me as a man who shouldn't talk, only shut up or change his perspective. And I resented that. The hallucination actually helped me identify this pattern of thought. Was it true? Hard to say. Either way I developed a compromise with it. Perhaps a repudiation should have been in order but I thought a repudiation would be to deny the perspective altogether, or in other words, make the same mistake. I also considered that I might be so different from other men that women might have a hard time placing me, which could understandably cause some confused emotions. Also, because I had met so few women who seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to me, I thought I could very well end up in a relationship with someone who just wasn't talkative.

The second line threw that whole train of thought for a loop. The phrase acquired compounded ambiguity with the addition of that second line, 'is wit with wine.' To express the sentence mathematically, I could perceive it two different ways.

The first was 'wit + wine = whine', meaning that wittiness or cleverness can become a burden with the addition of alcohol. A smart, funny man may lose his composure while drunk and become a bore, or even a nuisance, to his friends, wife, coworkers, or whatever combination of the three; and this did match the attitude of the domineering-woman archetype sitting in my psyche. Perhaps she was the female projecting of all the authoritarian institutions in my life, or maybe I had grown up believing that women have certain expectations of men, and was realizing, as I became an adult myself, that I didn't live up to them. My growing disenfranchisement with American culture was a strong indicator that I could never be the prince charming type, the superman type, the boy-next-door type, or others, and this foretold a lonely future for yours truly.

Now, because English can use the same phrase to say 'whine + wine = wit', I couldn't help but rethink the whole idea of whining and wittiness, or of the line between criticism and humor. Comedians traversed this line all the time, sometimes masterfully, I wasn't one myself, but perhaps I could draw inspiration from how they noticed things, and, basically, complained about them without coming across as naggers. I considered the confidence in the delivery, for instance. I considered the emotional distance from the problems they talked about or made fun of, the muted, sedated, analytical mind behind the face of the comic. I recognized that mind.

I realized that the same phrase, "whine is whine, is wit with wine," could either make me feel guilty for being critical of all the "little injustices" that added up in my life and the lives of others, or it could make me feel empowered to say something meaningful, if not even funny, about them. I settled on the latter interpretation. For the hecklers out there, I even created a hybrid rule to satisfy my solution to both interpretations: Where action is possible, talk is cheap. Where action is impossible, whining is okay, but do it with wit. And plenty of wine.

For whatever reason I felt that I had answered the 'riddle' of this hallucination correctly. The chanting girls had given me a message that could either haunt me or help me. I think the 'nunly' interpretation would have been the guilt-ridden, haunting one, while the 'witch-y' interpretation was the one I settled on. My solution was a pragmatic appeasement to both points of view. In the good-evil paradigm, my answer was none-of-the-above, which from good's perspective is still evil and from evil's perspective is just plain baffling -all of the 'damnation' for a fraction of the 'fun' -- but to me, it's satisfying.

II. Visual

I had made some headway into God Emporor of Dune, to give the reader some semblance of a time reference with the above, and I was sleepy. I was sweating a lot. I was beginning to feel very bored with my flu, or whatever it was. On the bright side, I had been able to set up my computer and browse the internet. Of late I had discovered a collaborating network of British musicians who shared some of their work on a curious website whose name I no longer remember. 'Musician' is a loose term; I considered them to be musicians of a very high and abstracted order, but the layperson would almost certainly think that their art was merely noise -- the organizing theme of the network was that music required no melody, no beat, no rhythm; no order at all, so it was very strange. It was not even dreamlike. It was pre-dreamlike; hypnagogic, even scary. I dubbed it electrotrash. I even tried experimenting with the style a few times, but I had trouble going that far out of the box.

One of the mp3s was so large my computer had enormous -trouble streaming it. The website had no accompanying text, but the file name implied that it had come from a sort of live concert. I could not imagine going to an electrotrash concert. That was something I could see myself enjoying very much. The artists all knew each other; I had an image of electrotrash as a tiny movement, restricted to a single city, county, townfolk, or whatever. I wished I could meet them. At present I was stuck in my parent’s basement, cashless and sick.

My computer had been buffering every few seconds trying to play the song, so I had paused the track prior. I believe it was an hour and fifteen minutes long. Finding the file ready at present, I decided I would lay down and listen to the whole thing.

Various medias have captured the mood I was to hear. Authors of such have largely been Japanese -- leading to a personal theory that the combination of overcrowding and technology in Japan has produced a higher instance of a certain kind of mind with which I identify. Japanese movies, television shows, and books often depict protagonists experiencing intense depression and paranoias, often involving superstitious projections. They make me feel like I am not alone. I have not seen many of these kinds of protagonists in English-speaking media.

But I was hearing the same sort of mood in this electrotrash. It was welcoming. And frightening. Calming and scary at the same time. Boring and intense. Sleep inducing as well as awakening. When I am around a girl I like it is a bit like that. There is a simultaneous alienness and a feeling of being at home. It has a very sedative quality on me. When I ponder the alien feeling I am struck with an intense interest in even the most mundane of activities the girl may participate in -- almost as if I were gathering information for a report to my home planet.

(The humans have a day called an 'errand' day. It is a different day of the week for each human. These errand days have a quality which the humans call 'boring' and is a source of embarrassment to them, since they feel responsible for maintaining an opposite quality of 'fun' when engaged with other humans, particularly members of the opposite gender; even more so when there is a mutual physical attraction. While participating in an errand day, a human can expect to travel longer distances than usual. In many respects, an errand day is indistinguishable from other days. Services and goods are bartered. Longer and more frequent occurrences of what are known as 'awkward silences' are witnessed to arise, but more subtle and intimate chances for humor occur as well. It is the author's opinion that the errand day is underutilized as a tool for socialization; even as a tool for facilitation of the thing they call romance...)

And, of course, when I ponder the home feeling I feel awash in security.

This music sparked the same. Fascination and calm. But it also had a terrifying quality that fed back into my fascination; for what, exactly, was terrifying about it? Why was it scary? Did it dial into a preconscious portion of my brain, frightening and exhilarating it? Rock and Roll in the 70s sounded like the devil's music to the old ears of its day, terrifying them in some fashion, and it went on and on like that through the decades. Today what has become termed classic rock is actually the post-modern era's folk music. Newer, stranger things adopt the banner of 'devilry,' although really there has never been a such devil's music in any time. Music is sort of a recent arrival on the human scene. I think it does dial into a preconscious portion of the brain, and freaks the crap out of it. If readers imagined suspending disbelief at a concert the way one might at a movie, they would find that the music has a magnified impact. Maybe that's why music is better "when you're high." The less frame of reference one has, the more music will intimidate.

For whatever reason, this recorded performance triggered or awakened that childhood part of me, the 'haunted house' feeling. The projected presence which used to cause it, my as-yet-unnamed tormentor, hung in the darkness of my room as a palpable danger. My eyes had already been shut for a quarter of an hour, as I lay listening to that demented and beautiful piece, and presently I found myself thinking of when I should open them. I wondered about the precise moment I would choose to confront the fear. An arbitrary one passed, of course, and, also of course, I found my room to be dark and empty as it had been before.

And then a curious thing happened. The fear decided to fight back.

Precisely at the moment I scanned my open closet, of all the painful cliche's, I hallucinated a giant hand; a six foot tall, dark, grey-orange hand, of the same 2-dimensional, shadowy quality that a sunspot has, and no sooner did I see it than it grew larger as if approaching me, which was so wholly unexpected and terrifying that I shut my eyes before I could even think.

That left me laying awkwardly with my eyes shut again. It was stupid closing my eyes, I thought. Had it been real it would have 'mauled' me anyway closing my eyes just made me blind as well as defenseless. What would I have seen if could have kept them open? I knew the hand hadn't actually been there. I missed out on something. The fear was still there, but it was just fear at nothing-- fear like at a scary movie. Open your eyes, I thought to myself. I disobeyed. Just open them. You'll see there's nothing there. Or better, you'll see something *is* there, something which could answer some questions about this fear you recognize every time you experience it but ignore every other moment. Just open them. I put up much more resistance than I expected.

I opened my eyes. There was nothing there.

The song continued to play but I didn't much feel like listening to it anymore. I felt really weak and tired; the flu was re-exerting itself, and sitting up was labored. My erratic screensaver shuffled its images at breakneck speed, the flickering suddenly agitating me. A lot of things were agitating me in that instant. I forced myself up and turned everything off. The fear was still there but it had become a nuisance. I locked my bedroom doors to appease it and tried to fall asleep. Eventually I succeeded.

III. A Delusional Insight

After I got better, I took a thorough shower. To the conspicuously clean reader: I had showered while I was sick, but it wasn't the same. This was to be the grandest shower I would undertake for months to come; a symbolic cleansing to mark my triumph against disease. An embarkment, a treat, a reward. Now my blood vessels would feel as clean as my skin, as would my nose, my throat, my lymph nodes, my lungs, my kidneys, my muscles, and whatever else one could imagine feels organically invaded throughout a bout of sickness.

And it was great as all that and more.

I would not really deign to mention it, however, were it not for a very unusual observation as I washed. I noticed that my hands were different. But I could not really discern what made them different. It were as if they had somehow been removed and replaced in the intervening weeks with what appeared to be a perfect imitation of the originals, except for the feeling of newness and strangeness. It was a difference that might have gone unnoticed were it not for the familiarity I had acquired with them as a musician.

And they really did seem different. Smaller, perhaps, or maybe longer and slightly more slender. Or did they seem younger? Softer? I checked for familiar scars and found them intact -- especially the long one on my left hand; I had accidentally sliced it open once. The hair on the back of my hand also seemed different but I could not ascertain how. I thought about how strange I might appear, standing in the shower staring at my hands. It was a waste of water, time, and brain-power.

So I finished and dried off, in the process noticing my hands again, sitting to ponder this perception of difference. It was like that Peanuts comic, "I've become aware of my tongue!" Every time an activity drew attention to my hands, I remembered the difference. My inner monologue said that this was ridiculous. And what would it mean, anyway? That my hands were someone else's? That the originals were on display somewhere? That aliens were up to something involving my hands? All preposterous. A tremendous waste of time. I was beginning to think that flu had really scrambled my brain.

A memory came to my awareness.

I remembered sitting on my parents' computer a year or two prior. It must have been during one of my leaves; when I would visit home. Perhaps it was when my father's liver failed in 2001. I had spent nearly two months looking into candidacy for live liver donation. They take half of a healthy liver, transplanting it into the sick or dying patient, and each half regenerates, both in the donor and the patient, to around 80% of the original liver size.

As it turned out, my liver has some abnormalities, including the addition of an extra arterial vein. I was a genetic match for my father, but my liver would not plug into his vascular system, I guess. That, or the doctor wasn't being straightforward. Perhaps my dad didn't want me to make so large a sacrifice and asked him to make a suitably vague excuse. When the subjective experience of two entirely different realities are the same, do you live in both at the same time?

In my free time I had been dorking around the internet. I must have been 19 years old. I was searching for first-hand accounts by family members of those afflicted with various forms of schizophrenia -- I was curious about how my grandmother's symptoms may have appeared to others. There was a small window of risk still open for me to exhibit signs of my own -- onset was rare in adulthood but not for younger adults -- and, I suppose, I just wondered what it might look like if it happened to me. I wondered what sorts of things I might need to look out for.

The only such account I found was written by the mother of a boy who developed, I think, a catatonic form of schizophrenia as he progressed from boy to teen to adult. His mother was very racked with conflicting and confused emotions which came through her prose as she detailed his decline in function. In my mind I thank her for writing the story because it helped me. I think that was what she had in mind -- not helping me specifically -- but giving others a potential for help, no matter how vague or unspecific. My own blog owes its existence in part to inspiration from her desire to share.

The boy's decline in function began to occur when he noticed a difference in his hands. It was a difference that the mother could not identify, a difference that existed purely in the boy's mind. Apparently the boy became very concerned with this difference; he could spend hours observing his hands, was distracted from tasks by his hands, and generally became infatuated with them. I don't quite remember the sequence of events or how they panned out, except that the boy was never the same again. Mostly I remember the phrase he was said to utter.

"These hands aren't mine."

And I remembered that because the same words flashed through my head after my shower, as I sat looking at my damn hands. I immediately recalled the boy, his mother, and that I had read her story.

I think I said, "holy shit."