No Post Day: Time Off For Lighter Behaviour

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Gabriel...


“Heart’s A Mess”; Gotye
…careful, you’ll want to watch it all afternoon.
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.

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Once again I am totally ripping this idea off from Anita Marie, who mostly blogs at Irregular Bones. I spent six hours yesterday preparing and posting a 2,650 word heart-wrenching extravaganza I knew no one was going to read (it’s okay, but if you’re into it… hint: it’s the one below this one), so today I’m just asking a question, then I’m going to pop open a 2L bottle of Diet Pepsi, crank up the “Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs” and plow my way through a few levels of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Ah, No Post Day… truly You are bliss.

So if you’ve got the time my question is:

What blogs have helped you in your recovery from manic depression? OR, if your genes are clean, what blogs would you recommend someone (me) have in their (my) blogroll? Although a ‘Why’ would be nice, it’s not necessary and most kinds of porn are totally acceptable answers.

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…since november fourteenth, 2006.

“You burn things when there’s no going back. How much of
yourself have you had to burn away to be
the person you are today? Because baby, my body
is ash and my mind is still smoking.”

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Posted in crazy people with no pants, Entertainment, Grand Theft Auto, Health, Humor, Humour, Lithium, No Post Day, Punk, YouTube | Tagged | 12 Comments

The Last Part Of The Third Of Five Lists: The 52 Places I Can Remember Calling Home

Posted on October 31, 2007 by Gabriel...

“Last one out of Liberty City, burn it to the ground.”
“Last One Out Of Liberty City”, ‘Hello Rockview’; Less Than Jake (1998)

“My advice, to anyone willing to listen, is to find a notebook that fits into your pants pocket. Use a pen with a cap so it doesn’t explode in your pocket, and start writing down whatever you can remember. Even if it’s a favourite colour. Then, later, write down why it’s your favourite colour…. and pretty soon you’ve got a list.”
Me.

The Third Of Five Lists: The First 52 Places I Remember Living
Close to eighteen months into my recovery I started writing a new journal. After a while I started making lists to sort out my memories, including one of all the places I’ve lived. Without a doubt this list has been the most work of them all. I’ve lived in at least 52 houses, apartments and rooming houses so trying to put dates on each is almost impossible. But getting them out on paper has enabled me to place important, and trivial, events into some order which otherwise were left confused and missing from my memory. Making lists, in my opinion, can be very helpful to someone with manic depression or clinical depression — which distort reality — as a means of putting perspective into our lives. As proof I’m offering mine.

This was actually the hardest of the three parts to put together. Most of the traumatic trials of my life came back to life during this period, they were then combined with some of the most alcohol fuelled tribulations. I was working 30-40 hours per week as a reporter for a large magazine, and spending the same time either mostly drunk or all the way drunk. I was also totally unmedicated… however, I would score the occasional 200 Lithium pills to try and get some kind of treatment. But Lithium and alcohol are a dangerous mix, so my one or two weeks at a time living on Lithium and twenty rum & Coke per night would make me a toxic mess. So, what I’m trying to say is, some of the years maybe a little confused. But the order is right.

1. The first twenty-four places I’ve lived… from 1970 until 1990, where I was borne until my move to Ottawa.

2. The next fifteen places I’ve lived… from 1991 until 1999, around Ottawa until I left for Toronto.

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, Depression, Food Banks, Health, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Punk, Salted Lists, Salted Truths, UmBiPMaD Stories | 8 Comments

Manic Depression Spoiled Me Rotten Because It Turns Out Real Depressions Have Reasons And Causes You Actually Have To Work Through

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Gabriel...

copyright banner salted photo header

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The gardener plants an evergreen
Whilst trampling on a flower.
I chase the wind of a prism ship
To taste the sweet and sour.
The pattern juggler lifts his hand;
The orchestra begin.
As slowly turns the grinding wheel
In the court of the crimson king.
“The Court Of The Crimson King [excerpt]”; King Crimson (1969)

I don’t normally save responses I make on other blogs, other than the “My Comments” section in the WordPress dashboard I rarely track them at all. But something I’ve been doing for awhile is after writing a long response I’ll copy what I’ve written before I post it… so if it gets buggered somewhere as the page is reloading I’ve still got a copy.

Yesterday I made a response on a blog I’ve fallen across a few times over the past year… I’ve never commented on it before, or even really wanted to comment on it before. But they were asking a question about something I had just spoken to my doctor about and my brain was still a little raw.

So I’m dropping it here because it… well, it sums up pretty neatly what I’ve been going through over the past few months as my recovery shifts away from the manic depression and into the clinical depressions. Their question was “Where do you go when you’re lonely?” And this was my answer* (I added paragraph breaks)… feel free to leave your own.

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Classic, Clinical Depression, crazy people with no pants, Depression, Health, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Mental Health, Psychiatry | 11 Comments

Totally Inappropriate Salted Humour Day: Smoking Smoked Smoke

Posted on October 26, 2007 by Gabriel...


Minimal dust operation with disposable bag.

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Living On Cantor Boulevard (28 of 52) In Ottawa…

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Back in the fall of 1993 my brother had just moved in with some ‘friends of friends’. I was desperate to get out of where I was living — my girlfriend wouldn’t come over due to roaches… she actually woke up one night with a bunch of them in her hair — so he got me in there. In the new place there were four of us in a three bedroom bungalow, plus girlfriends, so I slept on a couch in the mostly-finished basement.

At that point in Canada there was a lot of cigarette smuggling. Taxes on smokes made it a lucrative business for the Natives whose Reserve actually straddles the American-Canadian border. So, the scheme was — and some of the Big smoke companies were in on it — export cigarettes into the US, buy them in bulk at the always cheap American price, then smuggle them back across the St. Lawrence River through the Native Reserves and sell then at a higher price to Canadian smoke addicts like myself, who then enjoy discounted smokes.

Thanks to my roommates, S. and F., we always had massive boxes of smokes in our garage because they supplied students at the main College in Ottawa, and one of the Universities with cheap smokes. And hash. Which you can also smoke. We also had a Sega and the NHL Game where you could still make players bleed on the ice. So life was pretty sweet. The only problem was heat.

Heat takes money. And I had none except whatever the government was handing out. My brother was in College, so he was broke. And the street corner / local dealers never, ever have any money, so we scraped enough coins together to pay for half a tank of oil to heat the house. Thing about half a tank is it’s not a full tank. So again, two months later, we had no heat. And Canadian winters last a lot longer than Rocktober to December.

Continue reading →

Posted in Classic, crazy people with no pants, Depression, Entertainment, Health, Humor, Humour, Inappropriate Humour Day, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Memories, Ottawa, Poverty, UmBiPMaD Stories | 6 Comments

For A Long Time I Believed In ‘Father’ But Even The Devil Believes In God… What I’ve Never Had Is Faith

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Gabriel...

“Atheists demand evidence of God through the five senses with the caveat no one can use as proof the world or the universe or a butterfly’s wing.”
Just an observation I made watching a documentary.

God wants friendship
God wants fame
God wants credit
God wants blame
God wants poverty
God wants wealth
God wants insurance
God wants to cover himself
What God wants God gets
“What God Wants Pt. 2”; ‘Amused To Death’, Roger Waters (1992)

I’ve never had any faith. There were a few days scattered over two summers when I had some belief but even the Devil believes in God… I’ve always liked that line. When I was a kid I spent a few summers at an Evangelical Summer Camp, I even counselled there for a summer when I was seventeen. After the divorce my grandmother paid for my brother and I to head down to the Eastern Townships of Quebec, to a really nice camp on a lake with Vermont on the other side. We went as campers four times. Having been raised in a Maoist training camp run by my father my first year at camp, at nine-years old, was my first introduction into Religion.

The first year I was just stunned to be around so many people, I don’t remember actually listening to anything anyone was saying. Plus, I was a bit of a mess. My running shoes fell apart the second day so I had to wear knee-high rubber boots for eleven days. I was also wetting the bed almost every night, by the end of the first week the cabin stank but the counsellor was cool and had everyone air their mattress out. Not just me. But then, in the second week, there was a massive stench which no one could figure out. Ended up one of the kids had caught some fish and put them under the cabin for safekeeping. On the twelve-hour trip home I remember asking my mother who Jesus Christ was… actually I told her who He was… “there’s this Jesus guy and he can turn stuff into other stuff and walk through walls and I’m pretty sure he can fly.”

It was the second year I was at Camp, I think when I was twelve, when I started listening to what the Chaplin was saying. He was a stocky old-school prison Chaplin, the kind of Bible Talking Dude with blue-ink tats and lots of stories he could relate the Bible to us with. A twelve-stepper who looked like John Goodman after he lost some of the weight. I’m pretty sure he converted all the fatherless boys that year. We had an open-air campfire every night, where each cabin had one night to put on a skit and there was singing, then a couple of testimonials and a final prayer. Then, as we were all standing up and leaving Chaplin Dude would remind us that if anyone felt ready to accept the Word of God and take something with Jesus into something and someone over there with something, we could approach him at anytime.

Very few kids actually would, they were all from the same Montreal-based Evangelical church which ran the camp. Other than my brother and myself there were a handful of non-Church related kids. So towards the end of camp — they were two weeks long — I walked up to Chaplin Dude and said I was interested in this accepting process. Thing was, he wasn’t just a one night routine, he was always around playing sports with us, he had two Bible study half-hours a day with Everyone plus one 45-minute ‘in cabin’ thing with just our counsellor and fellow cabin-kids, and Chaplin Dude would show up and speak for a few minutes. And Dude had stories. Drugs, gang banging, stealing, running with Satan’s Choice, assault and prison where he found God and started his recovery. I mean, Holy Fuck.

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Classic, crazy people with no pants, Depression, Father, Health, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Punk | 7 Comments

Part Two Of The Third Of Five Lists: The 52 Places I Can Remember Calling Home

Posted on October 24, 2007 by Gabriel...

“A list poem is one of the easiest kinds of poems to write because it doesn’t require either rhythm or rhyme. But that doesn’t mean you should write down anything helter skelter. Here’s a list of elements that makes a list poem a poem instead of just a list:
1) The writer is telling you something–pointing something out–saying, “Look at this” or, “Think about this.”
2) There’s a beginning and an end to it, like in a story.
3) Each item in the list is written the same way.”
“How to Write a “What Bugs Me” List Poem”, by Bruce Lansky (1996)

“My advice, to anyone willing to listen, is to find a notebook that fits into your pants pocket. Use a pen with a cap so it doesn’t explode in your pocket, and start writing down whatever you can remember. Even if it’s a favourite colour. Then, later, write down why it’s your favourite colour…. and pretty soon you’ve got a list.”
Me.

The Third Of Five Lists: The First 52 Places I Remember Living
Close to eighteen months into my recovery I started writing a new journal. After a while I started making lists to sort out my memories, including one of all the places I’ve lived. Without a doubt this list has been the most work of them all. I’ve lived in at least 52 houses, apartments and rooming houses so trying to put dates on each is almost impossible. But getting them out on paper has enabled me to place important, and trivial, events into some order which otherwise were left confused and missing from my memory. Making lists, in my opinion, can be very helpful to someone with manic depression or clinical depression — which distort reality — as a means of putting perspective into our lives. As proof I’m offering mine.

There will be two more lists after this one, plus the third and last part of this list. Previous lists have included my favourite twenty-five movies and fifteen of my most embarrassing moments. This is the Second Part of the Third List: The First 52 Places I’ve Lived… numbers 25-40, or basically my Ottawa years. This links to the first part: The First 24 Places I Lived. And this is to the original post explaining why I think Lists can help people in their recovery from severe or manic depression: “My Memory Is So Good I Can Say With Absolute Certainty That On June 4th, 1996, I Had Creamed Corn With Chopped Onions For Dinner… It Was Delicious.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, Depression, Health, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Mental Health, Ottawa, Poverty, Punk, Salted Lists, Toronto, UmBiPMaD Stories | 11 Comments