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“There is no fucking ice cream
in your fucking future.”
Otis Driftwood, The Devils Rejects

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this was less than two minutes of ‘manic’:

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“If we could all erase the colour of our skin we would all die because we would have none and then what would hold our stomachs in and without stomachs we would go hungry and we would be so busy trying to hold our stomachs in place that we’d all starve and nobody wants to starve so we should leave our skin alone and maybe learn to live with different skins and be thankful we aren’t hungry or that we have to walk around without them because I don’t know about you but I hate to see blood. Or we could all wear Body Glove diving suits. Maybe the neon ones so nobody would dissapear in the night and get hit by a hippie driving a semi taking his fruit to market somewhere in Montreal because if you do get hit then the hippie is late with the fruit then it goes bad in the back of his truck then he’s out of a job and then he’ll blame the government and become a radical shit disturber and shoot his foot off during terrorist shooting practice and then he’ll go on welfare and go to college as a “mature student” and become a journalist and only make $9,000 a year and he’ll be really, really bitter and nobody will like him and he won’t get laid so he’ll become a yuppie but will remain bitter and nobody likes a bitter yuppie cause all they do is whine so keep your skin on stomachs in and wear neon otherwise the fruit will go bad and nobody likes a hostile fag but if it were possible to erase your skin and not create hungry bleeding hostile yuppie whining fags with one foot I’d like mine to be the colour of my couch so I could sleep all day and not have roommates hastle me about my dirty dishes or maybe the colours of a Chia Pet so people would pour warm water on me and rub green seeds all over my body. That would be cool.”

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When I was unmedicated I used to think that the pressure that built up in me was the inspiration welling up, I would scramble for a pen and some paper and furiously write until whatever was inside me calmed down. In 1992 I even wrote about how painful it was to be in one of those states: “Sometimes I’ll be writing and I’ll feel like I have to remove my socks, so I do, but then the feeling comes back so I remove my pants and then it’s my shirt and I’ll sit there naked in front of my page, pen in hand and I’ll still feel like I must remove something else, my skin, hair, blood, veins, muscle, everything — and I realize it’s my sould screaming to get out, so I lift my pen and put it to paper. God It Hurts”. I scrawled that in red pen across the torn and crumpled remnants of the last piece of paper I had in my little room. And I hate writing in red pen.

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When I was younger I thought my disease was what gave me my inspiration, and that everything else — the suicidal thoughts, the crippling depressions — were what had to be endured in order to keep that inspiration. I wasn’t the writer, I was the instrument for the disease to speak through me. But I was wrong. The disease wasn’t my inspiration, in fact my disease had taken my inspiration hostage and was keeping it in some previously abandoned barn a hundred miles north of here where, over a period of several years, my disease turned my inspiration into its Patty Hearst. In 1994, when I ended up in a College journalism program, I was also starting to experiment with Lithium. It’s remarkably easy to find a doctor willing to prescribe Lithium, and when I started school I thought the pills would give me the focus necessary to be able to attend class and be, bascially, normal. Which was a really, really good idea. But after two weeks of classes I became convinced that the pills were making me too normal, and were actually preventing inspiration from occuring. So I tossed the pills. And, of course, I was kicked out of the program. And still I didn’t take the pills. In fact I did everything except take the pills. I moved back to my little village so I could see my doctor, I tried a light lamp… actually, that was about it. Doctor appointments, the occasional handful of Lithium, and I stared into a stunningly bright lamp twice a day for a few weeks.

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And still, even though I wasn’t writing consistantly, I remained convinced that the only way I could be a writer was to be an Unmedicated Manic Depressive. I had spent close to four years one step away from being homeless, I had completed one semester of College before being asked to leave, the two most important relationships I had been in up to that point had been blown away, I had no job, no prospects of ever having a real job, most of my friendships had imploded and, for at least six years, I had the worst fucking haircuts this world has ever seen — I had a fucking “tail” for over a year. But I had a disease which had convinced me it was the only thing I needed. That it was the only thing I would ever need. I saw the world through the prism of mental illness for a very long time. It was never the disease offering me inspiration so powerful that I felt like tearing my skin off to find it. My inspiration had been so repressed by the disease that it had to fight through the disease to find me. I’m a writer who has a crippling mental illness.

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I wrote this next thing in a moment of clarity back in 1994. I had gone a few months relatively symptom free, and I could feel the disease coming back. The upper and lower case “I/i” was done on purpose… I can sort of remember why… since all upper case meant screaming, I thought all lower case could be whispering. So this is me whispering so I wouldn’t wake up the thing I was talking about. There’s also supposed to be an air of uncertainty to the whole thing, until the middle where I’m kind of standing up, but then I give in again. I know you didn’t ask. Back then, I would have been 24, I “saw” the diseased me, or the me that exhibited the symptoms of the disease, as almost a separate person — at least I did when I was writing poetry about the disease. And, in writing, I’ve always referred to the Disease as a “he”. Anyway… I wrote this, on a typewriter, back in early 1994 while living in Ottawa — so it would have been a few months before I tried College and a few months after I wrote that piece about erasing our skin. Basically this is my proof that I knew what was wrong, but I was lacking the awareness or knowledge — or even, possibly, the desire — to break away and get myself some help… maestro, in the key of weeping angels: