In Canada It’s Not Called Summer It’s Called The Off Season Unfortunately The Off Season Started Last Night

Posted on April 17, 2008 by Gabriel...


Senators pre-game skate around; March 27, 2008 — Photo by Me.


Ottawa Senators take the ice, 03.27.08; Video by Me
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.

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And it started so well. So promising… after losing in the Stanley Cup Finals last June to a stronger and more experienced Anaheim team the Ottawa Senators began this season with the National Hockey League’s best start ever, going 15-2… that’s fifteen wins, and two losses. Then, sometime around January, their brains exploded.

It wasn’t like they couldn’t win games… just that they couldn’t win them in bunches. From December until the end of the regular season in April, they went 28-29-8 and came within just a couple of points of missing the playoffs altogether.

It’s actually not that unusual over the past dozen years for the team which loses in the Finals to miss the Playoffs or get creamed in the first round. But the other teams previously in the same situation as the Senators started the season with losing records. They were hungover, burnt out from two straight months of hyper-competitive playoff hockey, whereas the Senators seemed to be energized and experienced.

There are a couple of excuses, a player with a bad attitude, a coach who got fired and some injuries to key players, but really the team just got into a deep funk. The team was in a malaise worthy of 1979’s Jimmy Carter. They tried meetings, they tried a couple of trades but everything they tried just seemed to act as a hand pressing down on the heads of the players.

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Posted in Canada, crazy people with no pants, Health, Hockey, Old men in red suits, Ottawa, Punk | 5 Comments

The More Things Stay The Same The More They Continue To Suck But In A Totally Bad Way

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Gabriel...

When I was in my twenties a good day was when I had $10 in my pocket. With $10 I could buy enough food for four or five days and a pack of cigarettes which would last two days… two and a half if I saved the butts and had some rolling papers.

Most of the places I’ve lived had a shared fridge, which basically meant having no fridge at all because even the good rooming houses are rarely filled with people you should trust with your 1.89L jug of lemonade. So I’ve mostly relied on canned and packaged foods. I did most of my $10-shopping at stores like Giant Tiger, where I could buy two or three packages of soft cookies for $1.99; Ichiban ramen noodles for $0.19 a pack; canned brown beans for $0.79; tomato soup for $0.49… not for the taste but because it went with the noodles or on its own.

Spaghetti was a staple for a long time. Mostly plain, or with butter and occasionally Parmesan cheese. It was hard to cook anything though… I can remember the Teflon on my two small pots and one pan peeling away so I’d have to pick little black flakes out of my food.

For most of my adult life I’ve never owned a set of pots and pans… I still don’t. I have pieces from three different sets as hand-me-downs. Two years ago I bought my first set of dishes and my first complete set of cutlery because I had invited people over for dinner… but mostly because I was in the right section of the store, with enough money the moment it occurred to me “I don’t have four matching plates.”

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Posted in Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Clinical Depression, crazy people with no pants, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Poverty, Punk | 13 Comments

Living Off The Avails Part Four Days Like This Keep Piling Up

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Gabriel...


Angel, my friends girlfriend (R), running the grill in her restaurant — photo by me, April 02, 2008

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“To Be Treated”; Terry Reid
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.

“So there was my mom, finally starting a career which paid her real money, in a new marriage with a wonderful human being and finally moving past her past… with me on the phone once a month asking for money.”
Living Off The Avails Of Others: The Monster In The Room

“What Really Is and What Might Have Been can get confusing and sometimes people have to live in the later to get past the former… and there’s no quicker way to snap back into What Really Is than a midnight phone call from your son asking for $20 or maybe, you know, $40 for some food.”
Living Off The Avails Of Others: What Really Is And What Should Have Been

“When I got home that night I decided I had had enough of this stupid town and this stupid life. I made sure my little brother was comfortable and knew how to change the channel on the TV, went into my mom’s room and broke into her piggy-bank. I took as many handfuls of pennies I could stuff into my little pockets. I was leaving.”
Living Off The Avails Of Others: A Hand Full Of Pennies

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This is the fourth in what will probably be a 2350 part series on what is without a doubt the primary cause of my clinical depressions. Superficially it’s about money… and my total lack of it. But it’s really about a whole lot more… it’s about my relationship with my mother, her parents, my father and his parents. It’s about the help I’ve been offered in my Recovery and in my Life by each of them, how little there has actually been offered and the guilt I feel surrounding the whole freaking mess.

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There is one question I cannot answer… and it’s the one I’m asked by everyone I know. I just spent the weekend… actually a decent part of last week trying to save someone. A little melodramatic but I did believe he was heading for a precipice. He had made the classic cries for help we all make just before we walk towards the cliff… he threw the things he cared for most into the fire and called the people he identified with and told them it was over.

It’s what we all do. It’s what I’ve done more than a few times in the past. There wasn’t much I could do of course. I know his name and his email address and not much else. We’re total strangers, we’ve never met and probably never will. I’ve posted a few times on his blog, he returned the favour on mine.

I recognize the same vulnerability in his life that was there in mine for so long. That’s why I did it, and why I’ll be emailing him later on tonight. Why I’ll keep sending him letters and notes. There isn’t much I can do, but I’m doing it all the same. Because of that vulnerability… because when he responds to my emails he’s using the same language of bewilderment and desperation I would have used.

What did you do today? That’s the question I can’t answer. Because I’m still standing still. One thing I’ve noticed is it’s pretty rare for two people to ask that question once they’ve established what it is the other person does. But for people in my position the question almost seems like a counter-introduction.

Hi. Hey. So… what did you do today? Today? Well today I learned my grandparents, who gave me $25 six weeks ago, are paying for my cousin to go on for her Masters, then I got my OneTouch UltraMini Blood Glucose Monitoring System because my doctor thinks I have diabetes then, later on, my girlfriend broke up with me because spending Friday nights on my couch watching a movie just isn’t a real relationship. The Monitoring device is a cool shade of green.

Then, for the rest of the weekend, I sat very still.

I don’t blame her for not seeing a future with me. I rarely see a future with me. She’s a year removed from an abusive relationship, she went back to school and is now working in a real job making real money for herself and her two kids. A good day for me is when I can answer “what did you do this week” with “I spent a day in Ottawa with my mom”.

I’m not angry with her, I’m not even really upset with her. I understand exactly what she did. So I’m not burning stuff, I’m not making phone calls and heading for the bridge, but what it did, what finding out about the diabetes thing did, and about the money my cousin is receiving did, was put me back into a position where I have to ask myself… looking forward, is this worth it? Who am I, based on today’s evidence, at the age of forty?

But of course the question is completely unfair. It’s a question all addicts and other people who are vulnerable ask: Who am I in ten years, in five years, tomorrow? Well… who we are in ten years is someone with ten more years worth of experiences from being alive. Ten more years of learning how to cope and deal with the shit which, otherwise, would overwhelm us.

But when I look forward, especially after a day like I just had, I still see me. I don’t see anyone too different than the person I recognize now in the mirror. I hate that I resent my cousins for the largess poured on them by our grandparents. For the laptops they received, where I had to walk the ten miles to their condo to help my grandfather with his computer because I couldn’t afford bus fare both ways. For their rent occasionally paid by our grandparents while I ate at a soup kitchen.

I wrote something a while back about how the manic depression is relatively easy to fix… but once it’s out of the way it’s the clinical depressions it was hiding, they’re the hard stuff. It’s the primary cause of relapse in addicts. They get their vision back, realize just how fucked everything is and they climb back into the pipe or the bottle.

Well looking forward I see a guy with diabetes, no family of his own… who can’t even afford an entire set of cutlery, sitting down with a cousin with a brand new Masters degree asking me how my fucking day went.

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Posted in crazy people with no pants, Health, Living Off The Avails | 10 Comments

When All We’re Left With Are The Yellow Pages And A Broken Phone

Posted on April 12, 2008 by Gabriel...


Out driving — photo by me, April 10, 2008

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Since he deleted his blogs ‘Marty’ and I have exchanged a few emails… the thing is, I don’t really know ‘Marty’ (I’ve changed his name for this post). I only looked at his blog occasionally. But I think I recognize ‘Marty’.

A friend of mine… a former best-friend of mine took a left turn about ten years ago, now he thinks the American government have set up concentration camps all across their country, ready for the coming coup in November. My friend watches planes crisscross the Ottawa skyline, but for him their contrails aren’t exhaust it’s chemicals being sprayed over all of us… he’s not clear as to the why.

My friend spends his days getting high and staring into a camera and speaking about global-wide conspiracies to a mostly nonexistent audience.

‘Marty’s’ blog was almost entirely taken up with anti-psychiatry conspiracies. There were fifteen or twenty pages made up of proof of a cabal of psychiatrists who take people off the streets and against their will subject them to ECT treatments and medication regimes. Thousands and thousands of people have been subjected to these experiments.

I think we all have some aspects of this before we come to treatment, and even for some time afterwards. And I think it gets much, much worse when all we have is ourselves to act as both speaker and audience.

We don’t know who we are, how fucking crazy we are, until we start saying the things in our head out loud. Until we place ourselves in situations where we have to talk, speak our opinions, to people and not just to the three other voices in our head.

And the more we’re alone the more we limit ourselves to having conversations solely in our heads.

There’s a program called Futurama, it’s done by the same people who put The Simpsons on TV… only it’s funnier. Tonight the cable station it plays on started playing it from Episode One again. The difference between the first episodes and the last episodes are almost like watching a different program. As a series progresses it becomes a parody of itself. Each season the hijinks get a little wackier, the characters get more ridiculous. Each action and reaction piles on top of the last until you have a doctor on “ER” killed off by having a helicopter land on him and explode. Or Sam wanting desperately to marry Diane on “Cheers”… or Fonzie jumping a shark in “Happy Days”.

These are not natural evolutions. These are situations forced into very narrow parameters which only make sense within the parameters. These are situations based around very limited casts, which then limit the story lines. The cast of “Cheers” could never meet new people, so their situations were limited to interactions with the cast.

Being on our own is the same thing. Instead of getting out and interacting with new people and expanding our understanding of who we are, people in our situation speak only to ourselves. And after time stuck within those narrowest of parameters we become parodies of ourselves.

I think the biggest problem for myself and ‘Marty’ and my friend, is no one listens to us like we do to ourselves. Nobody reacts to us in ways which make it easy for us to react better than ourselves.

I’ve known my friend since high school. It’s easy for me to remember how funny he used to be. When I see him now I see a parody of that person. Even when he does speak with other people now it’s in speeches, like he’s orating to a class. He has been talking to himself for so long I’m not sure if he’ll really ever be able to have a normal Out Loud conversation again. It’s like he has talked himself into being a True Believer five years after walking into a church looking for the bathroom.

I’ve never met ‘Marty’, I didn’t even know he was schizophrenic until he told me in an email not too long ago. But from what I’ve seen of his blogs, and from the mini-conversations we’ve had online, ‘Marty’ is funny and intelligent. He was able to poke back when poked.

But when we blog, when we write to people we’ve never met and never seen, we’re not really writing to them… we’re writing to who we think you are. To the attributes we’ve assigned to you, I don’t know what makes people I blog with smile or cock their eyebrow. I’ve never seen your mouth move. And ‘Marty’ doesn’t know who I am anymore than I know him.

But I do know when we’re in pain and no one listens or gives us the attention we think we deserve, we moan a little louder, our limp gets deeper… we complain a little louder. Now what happens if you’re a daily drug user, like my friend, or if you’re delusional like people with schizophrenia, and you take the time line to years… it may start at “I’m not getting the attention I deserve” but without the proper treatment, or family or even just friendship, it becomes “there must be a reason why…”. And when you can’t see a rational reason why, then the irrational makes sense because there still Has to be a reason.

When I was untreated and trapped inside the manic depression I could never leave the house, find a bus, get to a clinic, explain myself coherently, get a prescription, bus to a pharmacy, fill the prescription out, go home and take the pills regularly. I could barely brush my teeth.

Right now ‘Marty’ is an untreated schizophrenic who believes psychiatry is wrong, his offline support system is almost non-existent and he has deleted almost all of his online identity. I’ve checked online and couldn’t find any support groups not related to the Canadian Mental Health Association, that doesn’t mean they’re not there, but it does mean ‘Marty’ will have to look through the phone book and start calling…

There should be more we can do…

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Posted in crazy people with no pants, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression | 10 Comments

Mark Dame Bine And Me

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Gabriel...


This is for Bine… she’ll understand — photo by me, April 06, 2008

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Watching the rain, wind and sun melt the snow over the past couple of weeks it’s remarkable how much the landscape of my little village resembles the features of mountains and riverside valleys eroding over millions of years. The many snowfalls over the winter have created a history of the past five months in the layers or strata in the curbside snowbank mountains.

Sometimes we forget to notice the passage of time then it’s shown back to us in the weirdest places and in the strangest ways. But then sometimes we feel the time passing with excruciating detail and the strata of those exposed snowbanks act as a now-daily reminder of how deep and how long our winter was.

The exposed rings in the melting snowbanks also act like the rings of a tree. When there was a drought the rings will be closer together, when there was plenty the rings are further apart. Either way, however, the tree kept growing.

This year it also kept snowing. This year my little village received about fifteen-feet of snow, which while close is not a record. I told Bine about the rings in the snowbanks and she asked to see them, hence the photo.

During the winter it always seems as though the snow will remain white forever. Pure in looks if not content. But snowflakes are borne around particulates, grains of dust, dirt or bacteria in the atmosphere. And when a field of several square miles of snow built fifteen-feet high melts it leaves a lot of dirt and grime behind.

Yes, I’m using melting snow as a metaphor for us recovering. Snow looks pure, but it’s not. It’s really camouflaged dirt which sticks around until something happens to expose its true nature and then you’re fucked with a yard full of thawing dog shit, last years decaying leaves, three barrels of trash and three inches of bacteria filled mud.

The life we lead before taking our recovery seriously feels normal, it looks mostly normal and it can even Be normal. But it’s not. And the longer we avoid the hard parts of recovery the deeper that pile gets and the longer it’s going to take to get rid of… but it can be done and it has been done.

On an almost entirely separate topic Mark, who blogged as ‘markps2’ at ‘psychiatricsurvivor.wordpress’, has erased most of his online identity. Mark is an intelligent and funny guy who’s as fucked in the head as any one of us. Within the past few days he has deleted his WP and Blogger accounts. He always left interesting comments here and I miss him already.

Mark, dude I’d appreciate updates on your snowshoe experiments.

Dame Wiggins Of Lee has also stopped blogging, but hasn’t deleted her account. She has taken her blog offline while she absorbs some Life. I don’t think she’ll be back soon, but I do think she’ll be back later. I think she still has stuff to talk about and videos to post.

I’m taking time to figure out if writing about my life and my recovery is something I want to do on other people’s blogs. I’ve been trying to put together some decent copyright notices, and even modified the image I put at the end of my posts. I got freaked out seeing my brother on a splog so I’ve taken that image off and created something somewhat elegant to replace it…

I also put together a copyright banner (very top) which gives me some sense of security. At least there’ll be an explanation of who and where I am on the splog. If I can get my peace of mind back into the ‘peaceful’ range then I’ll keep going.

If I stay freaked out I’ll probably take Salted private and start blogging full time on Cultural Snafu again. For now I’ve also stopped using “categories” or “tags”.

By the way… Plagiarism Today, a website dedicated to plagiarism and copyright issues, has endorsed my Exposing Sploggers blog. Which is a big freaking deal. I’m expecting another huge endorsement in a few days. I’d still like some feedback, ideas and criticisms… and volunteers.

Any comments about the new header images, the image copyright in the photo and the -30- image would be appreciated as well… if you want a personalized copyright banner but don’t have the software just let me know and I’ll send you one.

And if you find Mark give him a little poke in his belly, he likes that… and let me know he’s doing all right. Deep breaths buddy, deep breaths.

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...thanks.

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Posted in crazy people with no pants | 11 Comments

Here Are Four Simple Ways To Fight Back Against The Sploggers Who Are Stealing Your Blog Content

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Gabriel...


This is my photo and my entire “Weekend Update” post on someone else’s blog…

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Imagine you own a small-town weekly newspaper called The Gazette. Every Tuesday night you go to print, and every Wednesday morning your newspaper is available in stores… then at noon another newspaper hits the shelves called The Gazetteer and it’s a word-for-word reprint of the newspaper you published earlier that morning.

Not only has The Gazetteer stolen all of your work verbatim but your stories are now surrounded by ads, and the revenue from them goes to the dude who photocopied your stuff.

Now imagine you write poetry or short stories or essays online. And every time you published your work on your blog it showed up eight seconds later on another blog. And when you’re ready to approach a publisher they tell you there’s a problem with the Copyright because when they Googled your work it came back attached to another name… or maybe there’s a problem because, in their eyes, your poem has already been published.

In the first example the publisher of The Gazetteer is sent a cease and desist letter and if he doesn’t comply there’s a clearly defined legal process to fuck him up.

In the second example you’re on your own to find and fight against sploggers and blog scrapers for your own work back.

If there was something in the Terms of Agreement when you signed up with WordPress which said half of everything you write is going to end up on another blog run by someone you’ll never meet using your content to sell porn, guns or baby formula, do you think you’d still have pushed the “Accept” button?

But that’s exactly what happens almost every time you click the “Publish” button.

I think I’ve come up with a way to harass the sploggers, their site hosts and maybe even Google into taking the problem seriously… but it will take some time until the site is ready and there are enough people interested in doing something about the problem. I have received some very encouraging feedback already.

However… there are easy things we can do to protect our work from copyright infringement, plagiarism, sploggers and blog scrapers. These are four of the easiest I’ve found so far:

1. Leave a link in your post to your About Page, possibly in a photograph. If your post is scraped your photo will appear on the sploggers’ site with a link to your page. It won’t prevent your post from being stolen, but it will give you some control over their site. In WordPress you can add a link in your photo the same way you do with text. When your post is published on another blog the link will also sometimes pingback to your About Page, giving you a link to the thief.

2. Leave a watermark on your photos… they’re not hard to make, just go into any photo editor and paste some text or symbol on top of your photo and click Save As. The name and address of your blog, with the “circle-c” copyright symbol and the year are good. Make sure you save as a medium “dpi” to preserve the quality of your image, but not high enough someone could create something with it. If you can’t make a watermark just save your photo at a low dpi, 20-30dpi is more than enough for a website. This is a Really Good Idea if you use a Photo Sharing site like Flickr or PhotoXBucket… people steal your photos every day as well as your blog material.

3. Just copy and paste the following statement at the beginning of each of your posts with a link back to your About Page in the text:

— Copyright © 2008 Salted Lithium. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator or on SaltedLithium.Wordpress.Com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact SaltedLithium@Yahoo.Com so we can take legal action immediately.

This Copyright statement will automatically appear on any splogger or blog scraper page which steals your content. Be aware if your RSS Feed is set to “Summary” people will only be able to read the Copyright notice, considering the alternative it isn’t such a big deal.

To get around the RSS problem I’ve created a small banner (top) which acts as a link. It’s easy to create in any PhotoShop program and I’d totally be willing to custom design one for anyone who’d like their own version.

4. You can also use CopyScape and post a Creative Commons notice into your sidebar. You can find a copyright symbol at the bottom of this page. With a membership CopyScape will give you unlimited search capabilities when looking for plagiarized content, but it will give you ten shots for free. A Creative Commons notice won’t stop people from stealing your work, but it does offer some legal protections.

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These solutions are basically for your peace-of-mind… they will give you some control over your post as it sits on their site, but nothing is going to scare off any hardcore sploggers because most of them can barely read. That’s why I’m creating the Exposing Sploggers blog, the idea is to harass the splogger, their web host and Google until they stop.

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Steal This Symbol… this is the universal symbol for Copyright, copy and paste it and put it in your post or in your sidebar or on your photos. It’s natural size is 197px by 197px, but as long as you reduce it evenly it’ll look great at any size. The first version is a transparency, the second includes the white centre.

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...thanks.

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Posted in crazy people with no pants | 6 Comments