First Truths: Larry, The Escape From My Father And My Twelfth Home In Nine Years

Posted on June 9, 2007 by Gabriel...


Orange juice behind plastic and glass; June 07, 2007 – Photo by Me.

When the Truths being offered are complicated and frightening we tend to grasp on to what we believe to be true and never let go, no matter what evidence is offered. I stopped holding on to the lies and started gathering evidence a long time ago.

First Truths: Dealing With The Clinical Depression
When the Manic Depression has been treated, with it in remission, it becomes possible to finally deal with the Depressions which have been masked by the Disease. I’ve never been treated for my Clinical Depression. At least not properly. There are certain events, a lot of events, which I’ve ignored since I was a child. Certain abuses that were done to me, and certain abuses I’ve inflicted on others, that have never been dealt with… have never even been talked about. My doctor has suggested making a list we can work from. Here goes…

In 1978 my mother escaped, literally, from a completely devastated marriage with my brother and myself. It involved lies, subterfuge, a train ride and panicked phone calls. We moved from a relatively urban area to a very rural and depressing place. I had one friend in the old place. Having moved to and from more than ten homes in four cities over eight years that was all I was able to make.

One morning Larry and I were playing in his driveway, that afternoon I was 600 miles away. A few weeks later I was starting grade three in a new, huge school. My urban school had, maybe, 200 students. My rural school had over 800. And this school had bizarre rules about lines and walking in rows.

On my first day, or what I remember as being my first day, I was marching in a row with a hundred child strangers, when I saw Larry. I was absolutely convinced it was him walking towards me across the wide hallway. I was a stranger in a strange, strange land, and there was Larry, my best friend. He had followed me. So I broke the row, I walked across the hallway into incoming traffic. I smiled into his face and hesitantly said “Larry…” and the kid looked at me as if I was swinging a dead cat. It wasn’t him and I was crushed. I had to acknowledge that everything was different. I was eight and I had been defeated.

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...thanks.

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Posted in Classic, crazy people with no pants, Depression, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Memories, Poverty, Punk, Salted Truths | 4 Comments

UmBiPMaD Stories: Taking The Razor Blades Out Of My Homemade Cookies And Other Lessons Of The 209 Chocolate Milk Jugs

Posted on June 4, 2007 by Gabriel...


This is a diner in a mini mega-mall near my little village.

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There is no system of philosophy to spin out. There are no ethical truths; there are just clarifications of particular ethical problems. Take advantage of these clarifications and work out your own existence. You are mistaken to think that anyone ever had the answers. There are no answers. Be brave and face up to it.
Donald Kalish (1919-2000), American Philosopher

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I’d like to know / what this whole show / is all about / before it’s out
“I’d Like”, Piet Hein

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“…I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers…”
“Irresponsible Hate Anthem”, Marilyn Manson

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UmBiPMaD: Unmedicated BiPolar Manic Depressive Stories
It’s an acronym I came up with in 1992, back when I didn’t understand bipolar and manic depression meant the same thing. I spent at least eighteen years of my life having a disease which was untreated so I’m going to start writing a little more about this period in my life. Some of these will be funny, some won’t.

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I’m pretty sure I broke my foot last week. It wouldn’t surprise me, it’s been that kind of month. I’ve been depressed for a little more than a month and I still haven’t gotten around to learning about how to deal with my normal depressions, or how to deal with moving past the crap which gets me depressed.

I’m not a violent person and I hate conflict… I will go way out of my way to accommodate people. But I also can’t deal with the things that piss me off, or the things that get me depressed or weigh me down. If… okay… when I was a kid — from about nine-years old on — I spent most of my summers with my grandparents in Montreal or on their hobby farm in the Laurentian Mountains. My grandmother was a fucking lunatic and my grandfather never seemed comfortable around us, so my brother and I survived those summers. So one year my grandmother finally agreed to let me take drum lessons — this was something I had done while we still lived with my father, in between accordion lessons. So I was freaking ecstatic. I could not believe I was going to get to play the drums.

Then, the night before I was to have my first lesson, the teacher calls. And my grandmother calls me to the phone. And the teacher says: “Gabriel, I’ve overbooked the lesson. Now, you can come tomorrow and start your lessons. But there’s another boy who won’t be able to play. It’s up to you.” So I apologized — yes, apologized — to the teacher, and she called me a good kid and promised that next time I’d get to take drum lessons for sure. The drum thing isn’t what I want to talk about, I’m over the drum thing. The point is I wasn’t older than eleven and this thing where I accept a situation so as to not damage someone else or make them disappointed was already a pattern.

The drum thing probably isn’t a good example… when I was on the phone with the teacher I tried to let her know that I wasn’t crushed, but it was a lie. There. When I’m partnered with someone for a project and they fuck it up I’m always taking blame away from them, absolving them of guilt, by saying “hey, I probably fucked up somewhere as well”. So I take the loss, then I pile on crap that’s not really mine, then I can’t work it out because it might get back to Whomever that “hey, Gabriel actually thinks you did a fucking horrible thing”…

Okay, fuck the drum thing. Shit happens, instead of saying “why, yes, you really fucked that shit up” I react to said shit by taking shit on myself, then I get depressed because I don’t know how to work my own shit out. So what happens is I end up with a collection of 209 empty chocolate milk jugs because my mind freezes in place. Then I get frustrated, and a little more frustrated and then really fucking frustrated and then a forty pound wooden table gets in my way and I kick said forty pound table with my bare foot, and the table spins 300 degrees, and my foot has been tingling and numb and uncomfortable and cramping and a little swollen on top where the cut is for almost a week now.

My brain cramps. There’s a form, very important, I was supposed to have this form submitted last week. All I have to do is fill out a few stupid details and fax it off then sit back and my life changes for the better. That’s it. But I can’t do it, and everyday I don’t send it means months and months of my life being unchanged and shit filled. I think about it twice a day. Right before I go to bed, and when I mark my medication period on my calendar. But I can’t fucking fill it out. It’s like everything is jammed up because I can’t deal with the depressing shit that has happened recently, which always brings up depressing shit which has gone unsolved before this and before that and waaay before that…

I was fired, back in 1998, from my first “big city” reporting job. It was complete bullshit, but the new Managing Editor didn’t like me so I was out the door. I managed to get a pretty cool new job — starting up a cultural magazine — almost right away, but my brain had stopped. I hadn’t worked out the shit from the job I had been fired from, and that just brought back all of the unresolved stuff from “before.” So I stopped bringing my milk jugs back to the store for the deposit. I just threw them into the storage room off the kitchen. Eventually my roommates said “dude… what the fuck?”, so a few weeks later I spent a few hours picking them up and I brought them to the store… four garbage bags at a time. There were 209 1L jugs.

It has taken me a week or more just to write this post. It took three weeks to write a post about George Bowering for my other blog. It’s like a physical wall in my mind that I have to break through, but I don’t understand or have the techniques available to me in order to break that wall through will… I have to wait until I can find a hole to crawl through. The wall is still there, I’ve just managed to get around it… I haven’t dealt with the issues which came up five weeks ago or so, I’ve just managed to find a way to ignore them along with all the others.

All I’ve managed to do is to break my foot (I think), and now my table wobbles. Oh, and the really expensive printer / copier / scanner that was on the table, the one not on warranty, that’s pretty fucked up as well. I was depressed before the Manic Depression kicked in, and I’m still depressed now that I’m Medicated and the Manic Depression is out of the way. I’ve never taken responsibility for my Clinical Depression… besides ignoring the things which have happened in my life to my life, my way of dealing with those Things has been to just change direction. I think… maybe… that I’ve been taking responsibility for other peoples faults because I’ve never taken responsibility for treating the faults done to me, or those I’ve done to others.

I mean, I’m pretty sure I have a fractured foot and yet I can’t get my ass to an X-Ray machine because part of me believes I deserve to be limping because of something someone else “did” five weeks ago… what the fuck is that?

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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, Depression, Living With Depression, Manic Depression, Memories, Ottawa, Poverty, Punk, UmBiPMaD Stories | 26 Comments

UmBiPMaD Stories: Food Banks, Roaches & Potato Soup

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Gabriel...

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If Hell is so Evil, why does it punish the Wicked?
Just A Question I’ve Asked.

“…it’s just the ability to reason that wears so thin / Living and dying and the stories that are true / The secret to a good life is knowing when you’re through.”
“Time Bomb” Rancid, 1995 ‘…And Out Come The Wolves’.

‘What do I think he’d say? I think he’d say “Son, it’s time to give up like I did, now get out there and put a bullet in your brain”. That’s what I think he’d say.’

UmBiPMaD: Unmedicated BiPolar Manic Depressive Stories
It’s an acronym I came up with in 1992, back when I didn’t understand bipolar and manic depression meant the same thing. I’m going to start writing a little more about this period in my life. These will be stories, experiences, from my unmedicated days… some will be funny, some won’t. I wrote this one a few months ago and it kind of got lost in the shuffle.

During my early unmedicated years, just after I had moved to Ottawa, there were a few months during which I survived with no money at all. Usually when I received a welfare cheque the money would last five to ten days, after which I would usually have enough groceries (re: pasta and butter) to keep me going until a little later on. But there was just enough weirdness in my live so that on one particular occasion I received my monthly cheque two days early and had completely spent it even before the month even started. I had paid my rent and bought a small gift for my girlfriend and, taa-daa, it was gone.

I had, to this point, been using Food Banks only very occasionally. The problem with using Food Banks is getting the food home. It costs money to take a bus, and I don’t think at that point in my life (1991) I had ever paid for a cab. So if I went to a Food Bank I had to carry everything home. That meant walking through downtown carrying about thirty pounds of food using only second-hand plastic grocery bags. In the summer that also meant sweating like a mule, with about six thinning plastic bags in each hand — the little handle rings digging deep into your fingers and palms. Every step was another prayer that none of them would break because there were no backups. There were a few occasions when I had to hide food behind a building so I could go find a grocery store and beg for some fresh bags (some of those bastards actually asked to be paid for them).

It’s a little easier in the winter because you can wear gloves, so there’s no crippling pain from those fucking plastic handle-thingees digging into your skin. But the sidewalks… the ice, the snow buildup. Suddenly you have to worry about slipping and falling and really, really hurting yourself (no hands to protect yourself). And after the fall you get to sort through what food you take home and what you leave there because at that point there is no fucking way you are just walking away and leaving all of it laying in a snow bank while you search for more bags. Not with a back three inches out of alignment and a chipped elbow.

The non-seasonal hardest part is the embarrassment. It’s summer and here you are, dressed up in your least offensive t-shirt, your once proudly spiked hair now pasted to your forehead, sweating your way through crowds of air-conditioned business people, university students and your basic downtown crowd, carrying twenty plastic bags — none of them from the same store — of badly packed assortments of day-old donuts, crusty bread, ready-to-mould veggies and cans of crap no one would ever buy (you ever see someone carrying eight assorted cans of baked beans down the street in a transparent bag from a women’s clothing store who wasn’t just coming back from a Food Bank?). It can be easy, once in a while, to stare back defiantly (“Yeah, that’s right, keep staring and I’ll jam this flaccid browning-from-age carrot straight into your fucking colon!”). But not nearly all of the time. Most of the time you just don’t want to be seen. So most of the time you find excuses not to go.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bipolar, crazy people with no pants, Food Banks, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Memories, Ottawa, Poetry, Politics, Poverty, Punk, UmBiPMaD Stories | 13 Comments

God Save The Queen, Because I Was Too Broken To Do The Job

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Gabriel...

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Elephants // aren’t any more important / than insects // but I’m on the side / of elephants // unless one of them tries / to crawl up my leg
“Elephants”, John Newlove

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Young man, / Seize every minute / Of your time. / The days fly by; / Ere long you too / Will grow old. // If you believe me not, / See there, in the courtyard, / How the frost / Glitters white and cold and cruel / On the grass / That once was green.
“The Frost”, Tzu Yeh

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My mood, the way I’ve been feeling over the past two or three weeks, is not her fault. I think she is blaming herself for it, I think she has stopped responding because she is blaming herself for it… but I don’t know, because she’s not responding. If she were I think I’d tell her my mood has more to do with the size of my bar of soap than her decision she’s not in love with me.

Things between us started to fall apart about three days into her visit, and it was probably my fault. I was starting to fall just before she arrived, so when she got here I was suddenly responsible for making sure she had a good time and that meant… fuck fuck fuck fuck… look, our relationship was never going to work and I think we both deluded ourselves into thinking it would. You were damaged and I was damaged and I became a possibility, a potential way out of your life for you and for me it was… I’m still not even sure what it was supposed to be for me. I do know, however, that what I felt was real and sincere.

The causes of the mood I’ve been in for the past month and more, go back to my being unmedicated… I’ve been listless and feeling drained and nostalgic and feeling worthless because that’s how I’m supposed to be feeling. When we are in this stage of recovery we realize just how far time has moved without our contributions.

My world has been narrowed over the past three years until it includes my parents and a couple of close friends. Which is what happens when we’re recovering. We can’t be involved in the day to day events of a large group of people because their shit just gets mixed with our shit, creating a massive and festering mound of shit that we lose ourselves in. The blind can’t only not lead the blind, but they can’t lead the deaf or the mute either, and they definitely can’t lead the sighted and the “normal”. And that’s what happens… that’s what we try to do. We, the people with the real problems, lose ourselves in the mundane relationship problems of people who have the resources to deal with their own pile of crap.

So, the deeper into our recovery we go, the more we have to distance ourselves… not isolate ourselves, but pare down the list of people we can be around. And this means losing touch with people we care about. Because we have a disease that forces us to believe we can run really, really fast. And in order to recover from that disease we have to be idle long enough to realize we weren’t running fast… our legs may have been pumping but there was a huge wall in front of us keeping us from moving.

So recovery is us standing still while everyone else moves forward, and a couple of months ago I really started to learn how far I had been left behind.

At the same time she was coming to visit I was starting to find out about marriages and kids and friends and ex-lovers and former girlfriends. Then her own issues started to affect her and caused a depression while she was here, which pissed me off and exacerbated my mood. Then, after she had left, my monetary situation took a turn for the bizarre when my landlord handed me bills he had forgotten about.

Suddenly I was time warping back to my days living close to the street where food and soap were luxuries and that magnified the differences between my situation and those of the people whose lives had continued while mine had come to a halt… not just a halt, but had stopped — because of the disease and that fucking wall — eighteen fucking years ago.

Suddenly I was twenty and living in Ottawa with no money and not really knowing where or what I’d be eating halfway through the month, while everyone else was close to forty and working in a shitty job with a mortgage and a significant other who occasionally smelled like someone else. Suddenly I wasn’t normal again. Suddenly I was using a bar of soap that’s paper thin and eating noodles which cost .19cents for a package of MSG.

So her decision to focus on her recovery is the right one for her and her sanity — especially considering the last few paragraphs — but she should know that it’s not the cause of how I’ve been feeling. Maybe 20 percent. And my friends having moved on with their lives was maybe 12 percent. And my bar of soap was probably 10 percent. And the lack of food in my cupboard was probably 28 percent. And my taking the wrong pill and losing a weekend was probably 15 percent. And my grandfather getting older was probably 11 percent. And missing both the Lost and Heroes Finales was, maybe, 4 percent.

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...thanks.

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

Ten Things I Did Last Year, Eight Things I’ve Stopped Doing This Year, Three Revelations And A Ten-Year Old Holding A Gun

Posted on May 23, 2007 by Gabriel...

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The reason I write / is to make something / as beautiful as you are. / When I’m with you / I want to be the kind of hero / I wanted to be / when I was seven years old /
a perfect man / who kills.
“The Reason I Write”, Leonard Cohen

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She sits with / tears on / her cheek / her cheek on / her hand / the child / in her lap / his nose /
pressed / to the glass.
“Young Woman At A Window”, William Carlos Williams

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Ten Things I Did In 2006…

01) I Quit smoking on January 21st, 2006, after 18-years of mostly Player’s Light Regular. I used the patch for four weeks, then willpower since then. I still feel a need for one.

02) Stopped biting my nails… who knew they were so useful when they’re allowed to grow?

03) Started speaking to people for the first time in four years… who knew they could be so useful?

04) Started walking outside again… I actually turned a browner shade of pale for the first time in a couple of years.

05) Got a new computer, I thought it was time since the last one was a 14-year old 486 running Win3.1.

06) Got hooked to the Internet and cable at home, both for the first time.

07) Erased three years worth of rewrites and research for my book while moving files from my old computer to the new one… (see number five). This was in August? Sounds right…

08) Grew a real beard for the first time… although this was done because I was so depressed my heart physically heart and I was unable to move for a couple of months (see number seven).

09) Started three blogs in an attempt to show whether I could still write… or wanted to anymore… two of them are still around. (Salted Since November 11)

10) Shaved my beard because I could finally move again. But mostly because it was Christmas and it was kind of expected I’d show up without the beard.

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Eight Things I’ve Stopped Doing So Far In 2007…

01) Started dating… kind of. And I guess this one should be “stopped not dating”.

02) Stopped dating… her anyway. Well… actually, anyone for a while. Probably for a little longer than that… she told me it was one of those “not in that way” relationships.

03) Stopped walking outside… unless I’m in need of milk or another 2L bottle of pop.

04) Stopped pretending to eat healthy, back up to 2L/day of pop again…

05) Stopped talking to people. Unless absolutely forced to.

06) Stopped answering my phone. Unless it’s late and my defences are down.

07) Stopped shaving, so I have another beard. Yay. I’m using the excuse that it’s a “Playoff Beard”, but you should probably go back and read number two. Actually… it’s probably 65 percent a Playoff Beard.

08) Started posting on Salted Lithium again. But I guess this one should really be “stopped not posting on Salted Lithium”… because I’m not sane yet (this has a little bit to do with 2007 number two, a lot more to do with 2006 number seven, and a really, really lot to do with a couple of emails I’ve received lately… which I’ll get to later).

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Three Revelations

Last Spring I Found out that while I’m on “Permanent Disability” there’s nothing the credit agency can do to force me to pay anything, so I am now free and clear to laugh at their feeble attempts to harass me.

I found out three weeks ago that I’m not sane yet (please see 2007, number eight).

Two weekends ago I moved twelve tonnes of stone and found out that I can lift, and walk with, more than 300lbs at a time. Something, apparently, I’ve done several times in the past without realizing it… weird.

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A Ten-Year Old With A Gun…

I have no idea who the kid with the gun is… but I’d listen to what his thought balloon says, he looks fucking crazy.

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...thanks.

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, Health, Humour, Lithium, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Memories, Mental Health, Salted Lists | 36 Comments

Manic Depression Did Not Rape You And It Certainly Didn’t Kill Your Dog

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Gabriel...

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…Call it what you like, / that nightly jaunt I took, analyze it / as you will, there must have been /
some benefit I gained from it — otherwise /
I’d have come down long ago.
“Only Child”, ‘Edwin Brock’

Manic Depression didn’t kill your dog. Manic depression didn’t rape you. Manic Depression never picked up a gun. People are not their cancer and you are not “A Manic Depressive”, you “Have manic depression”.

You are not your disease. It’s a trap that we all fall into eventually. After I was diagnosed I was “A Manic Depressive” for the better part of eighteen years. Being “A Manic Depressive” gave me excuses that could easily explain why I was who I was. I would tell people “I am A Manic Depressive” and they’d be uncomfortable for a little while and that was it. The reaction was there was no reaction because people have no idea what A Manic Depressive does, or have any idea what Manic Depression does to us.

But it was an excuse I could offer — from one ignorant to another, and it worked because calling yourself “A Manic Depressive” or “A BiPolar” sounds like it should mean something Important. Unlike most diseases manic depression has been romanticized, captured in paint and in song, so people — including us — do not fear manic depression. So the people around us do not fear for us. So the people who care about us, the people who care for us, just shrug their shoulders and give no reaction because those people have no idea what manic depression even means… because I had no idea what manic depression meant for the first eighteen years.

For too long we’ve deluded ourselves into believing manic depression was either something to be perversely proud of or something to be desperately ashamed of… but the mystique is a lie, it’s just a fucking disease. Why do we have such a hard time convincing ourselves and others about the horrible effects this disease has on us when there are a million fucking web sites and blogs about Manic Depression and every Pharmaceutical company sells an anti-depressant or a mood stabilizer, and there’s certainly no shortage of websites dedicated to selling the pills or telling us why those pills are evil… so, with all of this information so available, why is this disease so misunderstood?

Manic depression did not divorce your parents. Manic depression does not care one little fucking bit about you and your life. There’s nothing personal about Manic Depression… untreated, however, manic depression will prevent you from dealing with all of those issues.

The damage to who you are from those rapes, those divorces, those episodes, those instances, those happenings will fester and grow for as long as you refuse to get treated for the disease. What is personal is the crap you haven’t had the ability to deal with since the disease took over. Manic depression didn’t force your girlfriend to miscarry, but unmedicated the disease will prevent you from dealing with The Things That Happen in your life. You have to stop believing Manic Depression is a definition so you can get the Disease out of the way so you can start dealing with the depressing shit that has happened in your life.

Take the fucking pills… consult with your doctor, ask her questions, check websites for information about those pills… educate yourself so you can answer the questions that will come when you tell someone about the Disease. Bring your family into an appointment — NOT so you can discuss the personal shit that has been festering for one, two, eight, eighteen years, but so they can be told about the severity of this disease and about what they can do to make your recovery easier. But, most importantly, Take The Fucking Pills…

It is not easy. The only family member I have who understands this disease is my cousin, and he worked as a nurse in a Mental Health Facility and we’ve only spoken about it once. Since the diagnosis in 1989 I’ve brought my mother into four appointments. Each time she ended up in tears because I “blame her for everything”. Which I don’t. At least not since I was sixteen. But no one has read a book, no one has read a pamphlet, my younger brother has read some of this blog but that’s it… I spent most of eighteen years living as close to the street as you can get without getting rained on, and no one could read a book to help. Fuck, I even bought “An Unquiet Mind” and handed it to my mom and step-dad.

Look… recovery is easier when your family, related or not, gets involved. I’ve lived with enough alcoholics, drug addicts and mentally ill people to recognize that getting family involved is key to a faster recovery. The more you do this on your own, the longer it’ll take and the more of your life you’ll waste not dealing with The Shit. But, and this is so perverse, after you’ve taken the initiative to find help it’s you that has to take the initiative to get your family involved. Your family has watched the horrors of manic depression every time you cut yourself or were violent or they stood beside you while two nurses pumped your stomach… they have the experience through watching and trying to survive your insanity, but they don’t know how to react to your recovery other than to say “well, he ain’t crazy anymore.”

Last thing… none of this matters without you taking the pills. Finding treatment that fits and sticking with it is the key, but take the fucking pills.

...thanks.

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Classic, Clinical Depression, crazy people with no pants, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression, Mental Health | 33 Comments