Mental Illness

Photos of Alienation and Despair: A Primer

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I’m in a lousy headspace today. The depressive side of my bipolar is at least half-rampant –if rampant happened to be the heraldic term for laying on the couch.  I’m just sorta perched on the edge, waiting for something that’s never coming. Hence, half-rampant.

So I thought I share some photos which I feel depict alienation quite well… plus instructions for their use by the lay person…

Enjoy!

Iron rusts from disuse water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind. –Leonardo DaVinci
Black and white or sepia tone

The use of black and white or sepia tone, perhaps lit from a slightly skewed angle gives that feeling of decay. Color would just ruin this old, forgotten furniture, adding too much detail.  We cannot have happy yellows in a stifling Texas attic. This way the viewer can feel old, unused, and unloved.  Perfect for birthdays.

 

“He was an introverted kid, so I didn’t send him to his room as punishment. No, I took him to a party.” ― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
The sad person in an otherwise festive setting.

The sad person in an otherwise festive setting lets the reader know how isolated you feel.  A great one for conveying introversion.  Pro tip: cropping the subject towards the edge makes it looks like he’s trying to escape. Gay Pride Float, Budapest, 2009.

 

“Most of us need something not to walk away from” ― Josh Stern
This photo combines three im

This photo combines three important elements: slightly off-focus, the subject is walking away, and if you look closely enough, it a graveyard. Pictures like this are especially effective if the person is no longer in your life –or even better, dead. Confession: I am still friends with subject, but I felt the need to include it because it’s a graveyard in Berlin, which has got to add six or seven alienation points. Pro-tip: it’s really easy to compose out of focus shots using the “zoom” feature on the iPhone.

 

“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” ― André Malraux
Obstruction

Am I the subject or is the plant? Does it matter? Feel free to let your viewer know you know you mock any investment they may have in you. Bonus juxtaposition! I am obscuring myself in the Philip Johnson “Glass House.” That gives the viewer an added shot of irony, which people love, especially when it’s is as obvious as possible.

 

“The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.” ― Karl Kraus
incarceration

Feeling trapped, say in a never-ending cycle of unemployment or meds or vanishing friends, then you should chose a sad of example of something that should be free… like you wish your dreams were.  Look at this ancient Wollemi Pine being held against its will at the Kingsbrae Gardens in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.  Don’t you think it’d be much happier romping with its fellow trees? [Bonus irony points: trees can’t romp; there is no escape.]

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt” ― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
sublime

See that mountain in the Highlands of Scotland. Beautiful? No, it’s sublime –just too damn big to be beautiful.  All it can do is threaten to come tumbling down upon that poor little house. By the way, the house is you and your dreams. Including the sublime in your alienation pictures really drives home how insignificant you really are. Pro-tips for New Yorkers: look at all those tall buildings. Tourists may find them beautiful; you should find them sublime.

 

“And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.”
― Jane Austen
imperfection

One surefire way to convey alienation is to take an image everyone associates with joy and discovery, and then show it in an unflattering light.  This is how I encountered the Eiffel Tower when I visited it on a high school trip. Now the Eiffel Tower is ruined –hopefully, ever hopefully –for everyone.  This is why ‘US Magazine’ always shows us stars without make-up. No matter how pretty someone may be in the popular eye, they could always be much, much worse.  This technique also works well if you consider yourself well-liked –just focus on those people who’ve shunned you at any time in the past. You’ll be feeling like a smog-shrouded World Heritage Site in no time.

“Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.” ― Ben Casnocha
At

At first this picture of a cherub outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music seems like the furthest thing from alienation.  I mean, he’s a cherub; what’s cuter and more self-actualized than a cherub.  Now add the following quote from the Heavenly Maestro:

Welcome to Heaven’s Most Holy Orchestra! Here’s your triangle.

I honestly hope this helps you the next time you wish to illustrate your alienation. Take care.

Thus endeth the experiment in decorative spandex…

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My friends Damian and Mirch throw a monthly dance party for your homosexual element called DIRT, and it’s held the first Friday of every month at The Eagle, NYC’s premiere leather-themed bar. One does not hold a monthly dance party for your homosexual element at The Eagle and call it Orange or Chamomile. Maybe Cammo-Squeal would pass muster, though. I like attending their party because instead of soulless, wordless gay techno that’s only ever existed in a machine, they play actual rock-n-roll. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Judas Priest in a gay bar, where frankly it belongs, then you should go to DIRT. These are all songs that existed in the air as actual sound waves before hitting the tape, and they RAWK. Also, Damian sometimes takes my suggestions and plays songs he’s never heard before. That’s how I got to hear both “Ah, Leah” and “Freedom at Point Zero” in a gay bar. This week he was going to play a song that I had found by The Moving Sidewalks, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top’s first band.

I wanted to go, and I wanted to give back. So when I saw on the Facebook invite that the theme was one of wrestling singlets, I called my friend Greg and asked if I could borrow one of his multiple wrestling singlets. Multiple. The layperson would be surprised at how often the gays throw parties where the theme is wrestling singlets. But with a little thought one realizes that a) they leave little to the imagination in both the twig department and the berry department; b) a lot of us spent a lot of time in high school and college watching wrestlers punish their bodies to get down to some ridiculously low body fats; and c) when the wrestlers stopped wrestling, they put on some real weight and began to drunkenly tussle about shirtless on beer-soaked fraternity multi-purpose floors.

Only problem is… I hate spandex. Continue reading →

Did you really expect faking amnesia would get you out of this?

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For the roughly five years after my mom passed away, from junior year of high school then through three different undergraduate institutions, a quick tally comes up with at least a dozen trips to the emergency room. Of course, some of these were for bona-fide emergencies, but way too many times I ended up in the back of an ambulance because of –for lack of a better word –“escalations.” In this case, at the 1983 Buckeye Boys State at Bowling Green, I had run into a doorjamb… Continue reading →

The night I sang “The Night My Dignity Died.”

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The white cassette tape with no writing came from that particularly messy corner of my bedroom. I knew exactly what was on it without playing it: Me singing Paper Lace’s #1 hit from 1974, “The Night Chicago Died” in a karaoke bar. In Burbank. With seven vodka tonics in me.

It’s not perfect.  It starts late and drops out once or twice.  Also, I suck.  Come, discover why my brother-in-law wouldn’t allow me to sing the “Please don’t eat all the morsels” song to my future-niece in utero:

 

But, you have to admit, those voddys sure gave me some stage presence. Continue reading →

Why ORNAMENTAL ILLNESSES?

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I’ve actually managed to convince myself there’s some meat on these flippant wordbones. First of all, the word “ornamental” isn’t completely accidental. There’s a reason that word in all its forms was the base for a whole mess of handles on “dating” sites in the first few years after I came out. I’m a bit of a design geek, and by far my favorite architect/designer is Adolf Loos, an Austrian who worked at the turn of the 20th century. He is probably best remembered for his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” in which he declared –he was always declaring things –“The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.” In his eyes, all extraneous ornament does is render an object subject to the whims of fashion; the crime part comes in when you think of all the labor that went into a thing that’s only going to wind up in the trash because folks stop liking tassels on their shoes, big-ass carved eagles on their breakfronts, or acid washing on their Z Cavariccis. You could say that one of the purposes of this blog is to get people to look past the extraneous illness and focus on the sturdy, well-made individual underneath.

Interior of the The Villa Müller in Prague.

Interior of the The Villa Müller in Prague.

Of course it’s not entirely accurate to say that whatever’s going on in my brain, or anybody’s mental illness, is an extraneous part of them. I was born with this, so naturally my personality developed and matured under somewhat different conditions than someone with “normal” chemistry. There’s not enough room here to go into what proportion of myself was shaped by this chemistry or by my environment or by an environment I perceive through a distorted lens because of the stupid chemistry.

Yet, there is one way that the “illness” can be seen as “ornamental.” I think sometimes I’m faking it. I know I’m not faking the underlying ailment, but I know sometimes I selectively emphasize and announce symptoms for my own purposes. I am not above using my reputation for claustrophobia as an excuse to leave a boring party or bar where all I’m doing with my life is shouting small talk over bad techno. Or there was the time when I got out of being arrested small-town Georgia deputy by staging a panic attack complete with wheezing and purple face. You could just see the visions of paperwork should I die passing over the deputy’s face. And I was voted Class Clutz of my senior class in high school, but don’t think for a second all those stair-dives were due to slippy TopSiders. Concern can be a powerful aphrodisiac. I have no illusions that my illness has made me a saint. I plan on exploring the ways I have used the bipolar to shape my surroundings to my liking. Whether that is a good thing or, shall we say, suboptimal, is open for debate.

It’s still Christmas if the tree is bare, but it’s a helluva lot more Christmas if the branches are dripping with glass balls and tinsel.

Welcome to ORNAMENTAL ILLNESSES…

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Update: March 2019…

When I started this endeavor back in ‘013, it was a “writing blog devoted to this bipolar guy’s journey…” 

It’s still a writing blog because words and sentences and an over-reliance on ill-timed alliteration. A lot of keywords will still reference mental illness, and I’m not taking anything down.

 However, I am no longer operating under the assumption that I’m bipolar. Or bipolar II. Or borderline. Or unipolarly, majorly depressed, or psychotic. Some diagnoses had more staying power. Borderline didn’t last long because I refused to do the workbook. The bipolars have been suggested on and off since 1985 when I mentioned “sometimes I’m up, though.” Whatever it was, my brain was diseased.2567918_0

And a diseased brain needs drugs. My world soon began to resemble an early Damian Hirst installation done with way too many physicians’ samples.

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Pharmacy by Damian Hirst, 1992.

And on a small dais in the center of the room was me doing a long form performance art piece. Fancy crowds carrying plates of tiny appetizers gawk in amazement as I enact side effects in real time. Diarrhea painting! The impotence/priapism lotto! Profuse sweating! More diarrhea! And a stunning display of weight gain!

But like all performance art everywhere, this installation just peters out. The crowd slowly disperses as the the piece just sorta levels out. The highs and lows are gone. Even the diarrhea gets to be old hat. Soon it’s just a fat guy laying there, no visible emotion. Simple maintenance is never interesting. Maybe someone will buy a fridge magnet on their way out. Maybe not. Who cares?

In 2015, I had to move back to my hometown of Columbus because I was just winding down to nothing. Friends were peeling off because I was somehow both boring and suicidal. Thank god for the cat.

In Columbus I began working with a therapist who wanted me to view my brain in a different way. Instead of a diseased, structurally normal brain, maybe my brain is perfectly healthy, just odd?

As I understand it, I don’t have a bouncer. Every little bit of information is allowed in, each one of the utmost importance. Basically, I notice everything. Every sound. Every song. Every emotion. Every instance of discordant feng shui. Every word choice in every text from every acquaintance.

(He says I’m profoundly ADHD and could even be on a spectrum if that made me happy. ‘The Spectrum’ I asked. No, but it’s adjacent and somewhat overlapping. If two spectra overlap, aren’t they the same spectrum? This debate took up the rest of the hour.)

It all just pings around, and sometimes it overwhelms me. The therapist has me reconsidering many of the instances of worrying behavior that got me on the pills. Perhaps they were not DSM symptoms; instead, could they be overreactions to overstimulation?

So, what did I have to lose? Laying there, being chemically warehoused? In June of 2017, I quit the seven different psych meds I was on cold-turkey. Yes, I know that was stupid and the rollercoaster coming down was not fun, but I was very worried they would talk me out of pursuing a new path. Also, I was getting the feeling that I was just being seen as a revenue stream. (After all, why couldn’t I ever renew my scrips without seeing the psychiatrist every single month?)

And I’m sick of thinking of myself as diseased. Odd is not a disease.

It took around 18 months for me to feel my old brain coming back. I’m talking WAY too much again, sometimes even to people. I’ve lost 35 pounds. I tell myself colors are brighter. At the gym, I practice smiling (It hurts.) There are patterns again. All the birdsong. I’m itchy for stuff.

I don’t know where this will all lead, and I honestly have no idea what the hell I’m doing. It’s like moving thru an unfamiliar corridor with those automatic lights that only turn on when you’re underneath them.

And I’m running up against confusion, stigma, ageism. It’s always amusing/saddening when a supposedly inclusive space or person “others” you if you have some grey or drop a Kajagoogoo reference. Either I’m held up as everything that’s wrong with western civilization, or, if I do something surprisingly not-awful, I’m like a bear in a tutu riding a unicycle to them. Isn’t it amazing that he’s not awful?!?

I’m getting “that look” again. Good. I missed it.

I can’t control others’ reactions. You’d think with my brain being all odd and everything, I’d be able to control other people. But, it’s their thing. All I can do is plug ahead, choosing engagement over avoidance.

Now that I can, I just have to keep moving. 

I’m writing about that.

Holy Saturday, in which I almost get beaten up at the C-Town and am shown to be an a**hole.

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I almost got beaten up at the C-Town yesterday. I’m trying my best to convince myself that it was my fault.

The C-Town’s narrow aisles were thronged with folks stocking up for their Easter feasts. I needed a few things for some Twice-Cooked Pork I was testing out for the next meeting of my Cookbook Club. As I walked across 9th Street from my apartment, I girded myself for the obstacle course that lay ahead: people moving at all speeds and stopping for no reason in front of foods I find disgusting; precious, precious Slope Spawn given charge of the cart; and the C-Town’s insistence on stacking things in the aisles proper. I was in a good mood. I had just finished a nice walk around the neighborhood and had a great phone conversation with my sister despite her infuriating habit of not watching The Americans in a timely manner so we have something to talk about.

uncleleo

Uncle Leo knows the score.

I find that when the C-Town is crowded like that, all I can do is smile. I glide thru the masses, knowing exactly where everything I need is.

“Excuse me.”

“Sorry.”

“Hwooop!” [done with a kind of evasive twirl]

“Pardon.”

Repeat five or six times, and I’m in the final aisle, smiling because they finally have sliced Havarti. I make my way toward the 10-or-15-Items-or-Less lane –it all depends on which sign you follow. But before I can get there I have to make it past the final series of bottlenecks: a ginormous Pepsi end-cap, the ice cream freezer of indecision, an Aztec pyramid of that toilet paper those cartoon bears use, a drink cooler of brightly colored impulse buys, and finally a 90-degree left turn immediately into the express lane.

Continue reading →

Friday Night with my TV friends

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It’s cold. It’s rainy. I have not been invited out into the night. I am alone. It could be 2014.

I settle into a night of Benson, Bosom Buddies, and Dallas. It’s 1981. I will not be watching Falcon Crest because of their refusal to feature actual birds –Lorezo Lamas’ hair doesn’t count no matter how majestic it may be. Also, I find things go easier if I force myself not to look at shirtless guys.

Mr. Lamas as "Lance Cumson"

Mr. Lamas as “Lance Cumson”

Besides, my main job this evening isn’t TV. I need to listen for the sounds of an imminent TPing –mass movement of any kind. This is Muirfield, nothing moves after dusk because there are no streetlights, no sidewalks, and everything is painted brown. I am alone. Mom and Dad are out with other executive couples. The men talk business; the women, my mom’s cancer.

Continue reading →

The Cactus Knows You’re an Introvert

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All plants need to see the world.

All plants need to see the world.

I got a cactus last weekend. You probably already know this because I won’t shut up about it. It came in a sand art planter that screams 70s so much, I have named the plant Jonathan Livingston Cactus. I just checked my phone, and it contains fourteen pics of Jon. Fourteen. More pictures exist of this cactus than of my baptism. I cleared out a space of honor on the plant shelf in my kitchen window then ran downstairs to see if passersby on 9th Street could see him. They could. I IM’d my buddy Damian, who is some sort of plant whisperer, about care and feeding. A little bit of water every other week and plenty of sun. Then I went to bed, content in knowing I had given a cactus a good home. If I remembered dreams, I would say I dreamt about pushing Jon in a swing garlanded with gerbera daisies.

Upon waking up Sunday morning, I got my customary swig of Diet Coke out of the fridge, and he was there on his shelf being all cactus-y. I imagined myself telling people things like “Oh, that’s so Jon!” I wondered whom I could call that morning to tell about the cactus but decided that maybe 8am on Sunday wasn’t the best time for breathless cactus news.

Then the wheels started turning: What was I doing up at 8am on a Sunday? Don’t I have a life? Has my life shrunk down to the point where purchasing a cactus becomes a life event? Remember when you had dreams? You don’t deserve a cactus like Jon!

Continue reading →