When did I get here,

why did I come?

I think it was the Same day that my dad told me that I “need a new life”.  The Words slipped out by accident.  Funny how what’s most accurate is often a fluke.

"Die Pretty (The Writing's On The Wall)" by scarsarestories, January 2011

I decided to put my (limited as they may be, Doctor Heidi Rimke) credentials to work, immersing myself in a Vancouver neighbourhood for my first “street sociology” project, based on participant observation that would never be approved by a University “ethics” (read: lawsuit avoidance) board.  It is probably the most notorious of spaces in the city, and because of the open-air use of crack cocaine and intravenous heroin and cocaine use, as well as unhidden sales of these and almost any drug you can imagine in front of the Carnegie building at the intersection of Main and East Hastings – prescriptions being the most common, but of course second to  ”up, down, and hard” (powder cocaine, heroin, and rock crack cocaine).  While walking through the DTES, down East Hastings Street (a major route that runs through the whole city) surrounding the blocks above and below main, the words are repeated by a good number of the people you pass, mostly men but women as well.  “Up down”  ”Up down” “Hard, Up, Down?” “Up, Down, Hard” “Up Down”.  Takers follow the sellers into doorways or alleys where deals are made, and drugs often consumed immediately.  Though the area is known by the rest of the city as a place inhabited by junkies, it is really, first and foremost, a place where the city’s poor live.  Drugs are secondary to a reality that demands blurring.  This is very difficult for those who have never lived it to understand, but I hope, with this project, I can make a few people think about things differently.

It is the only place in Metro Vancouver where one can find a residence that costs $375, the housing allotment given to income and disability assistance recipients and a cruel joke in a city where my $800 studio apartment is considered to be cheap.  The apartments available are rooms with mattresses and sinks that sometimes work backwards, only from one knob, or not at all.  Anyone who has been homeless, however, knows that this is of little consequence when one’s other choice is the street. Bathrooms are shared by all twenty-two tenants per floor in this building I have been staying in fairly often, as most people I know here just happen to be neighbours, while newer facilities at the same price have private washrooms.  Like so many things down here, where you get in is determined by luck after spending years on a waiting list.  All have free cable and utilities, more than I can say for myself.

I know – I have a nice home.  But I had been spending most nights wandering these streets, searching for something in the streetlamp-light silence of foggy February alleys and strangers that talk, that tell you their story and sometimes their name.  There is a magical hour, when the buses and trains stop running, the only cars that pass are sporadic, either taxis or cops, the sirens that scream throughout Vancouver days stop long enough for relief to wash over us, caught in this space, wishing time would stop ticking just this once and let the peace reign over the noise for more than an hour.  Of course it never does, and up starts the train and first buses, men line up outside the “Union Gospel” complex across the street several  hours before coffee is served, inevitably fights often break out between fellow poor fellows with nothing to do, and there is money to be made with the turn of the day so the “up, down, hard” winds up until the dark hour comes the next night.

I’m seduced by the silence, the hiding in dark, but most by the rawness that residents of the DTES epitomize.  Money comes with so much pretentiousness, even if it’s not much, the dressing up to get groceries, the wicked things women say about one another but never to another’s face, the boiling anger of hipster boys pretending to be calm and grey-haired men just as unimpressed with the police state of the times, the shiny objects that beep and blink status, labels instead of real people speak everywhere else in Vancouver.  I came here in search of something real, and everything on the DTES has a price but the raw frankness is free and necessities are sold cheap.  The line between needs and wants is thin and tricksters will try to trade you one for the other with a missing-teeth grin.  But you can’t trick a trickster.  At least not that often.

The women here fight as hard as the men and if a girl’s got a problem she tells you.  I appreciate this honesty so much, and it’s missing among all other socioeconomic classes and their respective spaces.  If a guy is ripped off or owes money (money is usually the reason for anger, this cuts across classes, it’s the method of dealing with it that changes) the issue is resolved by a fight, followed by slaps on the back, even a hug.  No one laughs or stares at the people that speak “to themselves”, soliloquizing as they walk down the sidewalks, past wheelers, dealers, the chased and the chasers, the buyers, the bought.  The only dishonesty is the passing of make believe drugs, pure baking soda sold in flaps (folded up square papers, a kind of origami, really), and I don’t believe it has ever killed a man – no one fights to the death.  When someone in the community here dies, everyone talks about it for days.

This is the main difference between my hometown of Winnipeg, specifically its downtown core, and the Downtown Eastside: violence involving more than fists here is considered stupid, and people talk about it when someone pulls out a knife.  In Winnipeg people are stabbed to death daily, and nobody speaks.  I don’t care how many times a man tells me “on the DTES someone will kill you for ten dollars”.  This simply is not true.  Anyone that has emigrated here from elsewhere in Canada will agree.  It’s one way to judge whether or not someone’s originally from here.

I suppose I came here because I too am a hungry ghost.  My appetite is insatiable, and I’m a spectre to so many people I once knew, even my own family.  When you talk in a room of people and no one responds you feel like a ghost.  If I try to spend time with friends from late adolescence and early university days I’m treated like trash for being intelligent, for actually having something to say.  Down here, it’s respected.  And a lot of smart people can be found if you look in the right places and keep your head up.

For the sake of comparison and as a point from which to take off, I’m comparing the lives of those I encounter here to how they’re described in this book, by a doctor that has worked here for a long time, but without living here:

Thirty pages into Matés In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts, I am blown away, realizing again a lesson that lately permeates every day – I’m a copy of copied, twice rewritten pages.  Everything I say has already been said and there is nothing special about me or my story.  There is both solace and sadness in finding this out.  I read a line in the book that I had no idea was common, almost identical to something I have been saying since I was a small child, that I am scared of being alone with my thoughts, especially in the insomniac dark when trying to fall asleep:

“At all costs,” Maté states, “drug addicts want to escape spending ‘alone time’ with their minds.”

After reading this, I’m more afraid than ever, so it’s a blessing I am in a place where there is always someone to talk to, and someone who will really listen instead of just waiting for their turn to speak – they know because they’ve been there themselves with a head full of thoughts that need voicing else there be risk of damaging oneself, even if they forget what you tell them by the time the birds start chirping, dogs begin barking, and men line-up chattering while waiting for coffee.

Hell, this is the most expensive city in North America – a decade ago the “best” but the sky here falls quickly along with the rain that washes our dirt down the gutter along with the pain – a free cup of coffee is a goddamn miracle.  As long as you can avoid hearing the preacher who tells poor men that their lives would be different if only they chose Jesus over the quietness offered by drugs.  Freedom’s just another word for losing God’s game, important papers that went missing and wanting more than another day that like each passed one, looks exactly the same.

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• A humorous and disturbing look at the latest male pick-up move…ladies, have you been victim to this lewd act that spans generations, and is apparently the new standard advance in the straight dating world?  Hint: Reflecting the laziness, lack of creativity, and misogyny that characterizes the worst of current North American society, it involves a sudden shift from conversation to pulling something out of one’s pants… 
• My first comprehensive “Street Sociology” project… A look at the Vancouver neighbourhood called “Canada’s Poorest Postal Code” or the “Downtown Eastside”, “Mini-Los-Angeles”, et al. that would never pass an ethics board, risk theorists now being the purveyors of “risk society” and all…
• A review of Dr. Gabor Maté’s In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts - did a medical doctor working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside capture the reality of the lives the of folks that live there??  If you want to read along buy it here, new for ten bucks …
• Big, BIG, BIG News :O

For now, enjoy the beginning of a new Practice of Madness soundtrack.

scars XO

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Thank-you for saving my life.

Yes, that means you.  Y.O.U.!

After losing my friend at Pacific Centre, Vancouver’s downtown mall, in its shiny upscale glory, and having had my iPhone (camera/music collection/calculator/school notes/flashlight/teleportation device/et al. ….boy do I miss the days when someone could steal your phone without taking all those other things, or gank a CD without taking your camera!  ) stolen for the fourth or fifth time last weekend, I figured that one of the hundred or more people (I’m starting to doubt that the sheep are human, that they bleed, feel pain, suffer?…  ) sitting in the “lounge” area playing with or lazily holding cell phones I suppose waiting for a call would lend this attractive, well-dressed young woman their phone for less than one minute (though it is a Sunday and calls are free for cell phone owners on weekends) to call him and find out where I could collect him to leave downtown immediately (I’m allergic to yuppies, hipsters, yippies, or whatever they are calling themselves at the moment, and they gather downtown, anywhere near Robson St. (advertised at billboards lining train tracks as “Vancouver’s Runway”; I would post a picture of one if I had the phone that my latest snapshots held), women with war-paint faces and pantyhose for pants, men with eyes so vacant one may wonder if they are “sleep shopping” after an Ambien-nap.  After a few turn-downs that would have been better without the lame excuses – a simple “no” rather than “I’m using it” when I know what an iPhone looks like and you are staring at the home page panicking or using a foreign accent to pretend a local call would cost you hundred dollar bills that might be clever enough to make me smile if it wasn’t the worst fake accent ever – I stood before the entire crowd and stated, “Excuse me.  I have lost my friend.  My cell phone is in the process of being replaced.  Is there someone that would be willing to let me use theirs to make a fast local call?”

The whole pack looked down at once.  No one spoke.  I started screaming the name of my friend.  This seemed to irk folks less.  When I finally found someone willing to help, shockingly, he was not North American!  Too boot, I’ve been a little irked myself lately.  And not because someone politely asked me to lend them something for no longer than ninety seconds while sitting at a mall surrounded by bags of new clothing and an iPod that matches one of the five Hermès silk scarves in the small bag.  I’ve been irked by the horror thawhsurrounds me, the growing number or impoverished Canadians never mind the state of the world, the multi-million dollar condos that rise above the Downtown Eastside and its gated parkade where five people are sleeping on cold concrete hoping the light shining near the gates will deter thieves who would gladly help themselves to the bikes of people who cannot afford beds, well, at least not spaces in which to put them.  I’ve been irked by myself, by my sister, my family, and I went through my list of “friends” and told those who only show their faces when I have money to go climb a tree (but in a much meaner and wordier way).  Since I’m on the topic, I will tell you a story about family, self-concept, and self-harm, which I will link here when it is finished.  For now, let’s head back to the mall, the one I usually shop at if I must since it is right above a train and does not require stepping outside downtown.  (Anyone have a word for “fear of downtown” to add to my list of technical terms for phobias?  Win an item from Past Lives Beadery if you do!  )

…I had given up on humanity, albeit a small group of friends who, like me, are not at all “normal”: we’ve been institutionalized in various sterile buildings holding cages holding people for a good part of our adolescent and/or adult lives, we are known to scream loudly in public knowing it is futile and crying for the show, others say we are hot one minute and cold the next but never nice and lukewarm.  Not beige enough, don’t own a thing from Banana Apparel or American Republic (if you think I just made an “oops” you can navigate away from this page now), have great taste and lovely decor somewhere under the mess that so and so left because no one cleans up after themselves but us and when we do in the houses of others they do not know how to react, have beautiful faces under the black mess left by crying on Lâncome lashes, have coin filled pockets but cannot spare change cuz we’ve got horrible credit and the wrong kind of bills, we leave messages on each other’s machines that would make most people cry “waa, waa, waa” but instead we cackle all the way home, our parents hate us but not as much as our siblings do, professors used to love us but no longer care because we refuse(d) to conform to their values or visions or versions, friends including those we called “best” decided we were not worth the trouble a year or two after high school, strangers tend to take to us because we are actually interested in conversing (just don’t stay too long), bosses shake fingers even those we do not work for…

That leaves us and our cats.  And we’re pretty goddamn lucky, as each other is amazing beyond “beyond words”, and cats are magic, didn’t you know?

Then, as I did last September when I was drowning in the thick mud of depression I had been since July, I opened my control panel for this blog/website, and there you were.

Eleven of you left comments, the most I have ever received in a week by far!  As usual, they are lovelier than love is, happier than fresh flowers, kinder than Santa Claus.  So I thought, before blabbing about whatever is bugging my brain, I should stop and say thank-you, because without your readership, the little community that is slowly coming together around this website, and those of you who take the time out of a way-too-busy day to leave a comment – a special thanks to you, because your words are just as important as mine, and I keep this site up, writing as often as my schedule allows for pro-bono work, for many reasons and “to create conversation about topics people usually do not talk about” is at the top of the list.  I dreamed that someday I would be a writer for the first time about twenty years ago, and though childhood innocence knows little of money, being a writer has just as little to do with a paycheque now as it did then.

Being a writer, to me, means that my words are reaching other human beings and provoking a reaction, relation, in my wildest dreams revelation.

You have made my dream come true.  If I were to die today, and I do not plan to, but if I did, I would die happy because you have made me something I remember wanting to be almost as far back as I can remember.  School did not do that – not when it was high, not when it was graduate.  My family neither.  Nor Santa Claus.

Readers make a writer, and you have made me a damn happy one. 

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So, you know that photo app that I won’t shut up about?  The amazing iPhone app featuring over 20 lenses, 20 films, and 8 flashes, mimicking analog using digital technology was even used by war photographer Damon Winter in Iraq, winning him a prestigious award (view the amazing photos here) Well, the Hipstamatic community also holds contests for amateurs like me!  This post is a shameless request asking you to vote for one of the prints I submitted to the contest “Fashion. Music. Hope.”. The winning print will be featured on a T-Shirt sold at major retailers. To vote click on one of the links below and use facebook to “like” or twitter to “retweet” (or both!  ).  Here they are, “Eagle Ashes” and, for those with some East Van pride, “Die Pretty”. More soon – scars

http://community.hipstamatic.com/submissions/201913

http://community.hipstamatic.com/submissions/201959

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I happened upon a serious vault of print ads, past and more recent, and most are those that only appear in magazines for doctors – journals but they’re full of ads, they always have been.  I saw one from before 1920 on microfilm once and ads equalled (if not outnumbered articles) far before our current hyper capitalist age. Am I supposed to feel better about their presence dominating so-called “academic” – which is supposed to be somewhat objective, no? – journals being filled with ads for products to give the consumer, the newest and therefore most expensive products, obviously they must be better.  Alright, I must not go for the tangent as the ads are, like the Japanese non-DTC ads (they are directed at psychiatrists, strictly) quite different from the DTC ads.  This reminds me of the way both “chemical” and “Brand” names are just made up by teams of psychologists and other “experts” – come on, Abilify…Effexor… the more subtle like rispiridrone…

(and now a rare glimpse at what my psychiatrist is really thinking about me… )

(dare I suggest that if Van Gogh had been on antipsychotics, he wouldn’t have painted anything?…  )

(and one for the docs!    )

“Pfizer Sushi” …

(I vote for more pharmaceutical ads featuring naked chicks)

(Internet Addiction [to be "officialized" in the DSM-V] was around long before the Internet, of course – this is SCIENCE after all…  )

<speechless>

(this is not the set for the sequel to “2001: A Space Oddyssy, but an exhibit on Abilify at a convention for psy-experts)

And now… The ritalin/prescription stimulant (Dextroamphetamine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, et al.  ) files – Highly amusing and appropriately bizzare…

(a hardhat on head and a lasso in hand… I think this fellow has been taking more than his prescribed dosage… or maybe this is normal, and my conception of normal just that off…??  )

(oh that’s why so many long-haul truck drivers take speed!  Is that a coffin in the second small photo from the left?   )

(aw, pills for mommy and baby to share, aren’t they adorable…  )

(or whacked on speed)

Stelazine: Stelazine (Trifluoperazine) is used to treat anxiety or psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.

(um, I thought this was a drug to treat schizophrenia… apparently it also cures married men of the annoying obligation to speak with their wives…     )

(but “borderline personality disorder” has nothing to do with schizo…  oooh, I forgot, this is a psych med, and unlike other medications, they can be used to treat almost anything.  Especially antipsychotics… “adding <antipsychotic x, ex/ Abilify> to a cocktail for depression, bipolar disorder” …basically anything listed in the DSM, is very effective.  Effective how?  It turns annoying patients with multiple complaints into speechless, complacent zombies?  Better ask a doctor!  )

(they forgot to mention the drooling bit!  Nothing more relaxing than a good drool…  )

(that is one of the most concise delusional descriptions of the psych ward I have ever heard!  )

(I thought “neurotic” was the opposite of “psychotic”, psychosis being the Hallmark of schizophrenia, which this drug was synthesized to treat… I think it’s time to stop asking questions.  <sigh>  )

(what was that about the decline of culture signalling the demise of a society?  Not that pills aren’t just as remarkable as one of the classic literary works ever produced by humankind, or anything…  )

(am I the only one very, very confused by this ad?  )

(hehehehe “back-ward”, j’ya get it, j’ya get it?  )

(this one is way over my head, too.  I’m not a doctor though…  )

Stop using trifluoperazine and call your doctor at once if you have a serious side effect such as:

• twitching or uncontrollable movements of your eyes, lips, tongue, face, arms, or legs;
• tremor (uncontrolled shaking), drooling, trouble swallowing, problems with balance or walking;
• feeling restless, jittery, or agitated;
• high fever, stiff muscles, confusion, sweating, fast or uneven heartbeats, rapid breathing;
• feeling like you might pass out;
• decreased night vision, tunnel vision, watery eyes, increased sensitivity to light;
• seizure (black-out or convulsions);
• nausea and stomach pain, skin rash, and jaundice (yellowing of the skin or eyes);
• urinating less than usual or not at all;
• pale skin, easy bruising or bleeding, fever, sore throat, flu symptoms;
• joint pain or swelling with fever, swollen glands, muscle aches, chest pain, vomiting, unusual thoughts or behavior, and patchy skin color; or
• slow heart rate, weak pulse, fainting, slow breathing (breathing may stop).

Less serious side effects may include:

• dizziness, drowsiness, anxiety;
• sleep problems (insomnia);
• blurred vision, headache;
• dry mouth, stuffy nose;
• constipation;
• breast swelling or discharge;
• a missed menstrual period;
• weight gain, swelling in your hands or feet;
• mild itching or skin rash; or
• impotence, trouble having an orgasm.

This is not a complete list of side effects and others may occur. Tell your doctor about any unusual or bothersome side effect. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

Medications made with you in mind!

(special treats for non-compliant patients – “Cheekers”, “traders”, “Saboteurs”, and the like)

(Who would try to shirk their Thorazine dose?!  )

(Let me guess – Loxapine?  The stuff that made me forget my name, and admit to the Vancouver Police – such that my permanent record is flagged and any complaints I make are treated as “likely just delusions” – that I have schizophrenia, one of the few DSM-IV-TR diagnoses that I haven’t ever been branded with by a doc?  Of course, this statement must be read with great scrutiny…   )

(Toilets: Many a psych ward’s most dangerous fixtures…  )

(mmm…now in “red” and “blue” flavours!  )

Why Take away when You can add on instead?:

Drugs to combat the side-effects, i mean, extra-pyramidal symptoms, of psych meds, such as Parkinson’s, tardive dyskenisia, tics…you know, a harmless little twitch now and then!

(since psychiatric drugs, as we know, take a nice lot of the “human” out of the individual)

(indeed, the ads that only run in medical journals…  )

(Drug-induced Parkinson’s during young adulthood…sounds like a sure cure for depression/anxiety/paranoia/etc. to me!  )

Psychiatry’s oldest and most reliable market population: The Deviant Woman

(Nothing does a woman more good, more quickly than a little speed, er, Ambar [methamphetamine HCl] )

(couples may also benefit from a daily dose of uppers, or two)

(of course, once you’re on speed you need a sedative to maintain sanity, adorableness, antilethargicness, the ability to “cope”, and all the rest)

(Aha!  The solution to our current crisis of the sisterhood: women are not bonding over pills like they did during the suffrage movement and second wave feminism…  )

(what do you know, more pill-popping could also repair our broken families!  )

(not money, but A.D.H.D. is the cause of the majority of marriage failures, didn’t you know?   )

(I’m no narcissistic nut, I’m just undermedicated)

(time for some creative conditions to account for higher prescription rates… 1) “Battered Parent Syndrome”  )

( …2) “menstrual dysfunction”…  )

(because everything a woman does is really for the benefit of a man)

Last but far from least, the market population that may soon rival women in regard to psychiatric drug consumption: the child population  (Fascinating how the syndromes of childhood that we imagine to be recent actually seem to merely redefine behaviours that were problematized in the past!  What an interesting thesis this might make, and one that the social sciences and humanities research council of canada would likely be more than happy to fund, if it weren’t for conservative universities like, say, simon fraser university, blocking such projects.  I digress!  Never fear, Could ever be able to call or consider herself to be an actual sociologist <*cough* Prof h. Rimke *cough*>!  Did you forget to take your meds?  )

(no, this is not a joke…  It’s all part of a brave new childhood that is largely going unexplored by media/researchers)

(hooked on phonics… and “o-lan-za-peen”  … I certainly did not feel like playing soccer, or moving, for that matter, when I took Olanzapine.  Oh well, maybe it works different for kids, I mean, no one really knows, right?  )

(Oh yeah… 3) “MDB” or Minimal Brain Dysfunction)

(hm…this one helped me through grade twelve…guess it does the same for third graders… )

(once upon a time, before political correctness had to bugger everything up…  )

(mmmmm…haldol…  )

(this stuff cures daddy issues)

(because we all know “DIFFERENT” is just another word for “WRONG“)

(“stimulant antidepressant”…   )

(this is the lasso dude, after taking Ritalin for five years, isn’t it?  )

(oh, to be “regular”…   )

(it depresses depression!  man, why don’t they just put this stuff in the water?  )

(I have always liked corners.  What is wrong with corners??  )

(the damn pills even cure a bad hair day)

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As the time has come for some change in my personal and public life, I think the time has come to begin piecing together a new “soundtrack” to accompany my writing on this blog.  I have gotten positive feedback about the tunes I play here, a soundtrack not only for the pieces of writing that come up over the period of a month or a few, but also a soundtrack for a period in my life, and perhaps one in yours, as well!

As I do have pay, monthly, to keep the music playing, and as traffic has increased lately, costs have risen, I am going to do what I usually do when I change the music: provide the last playlist for download – however, I must limit the time during which I make it available, as allowing you wonderful people to download the tunes takes up quite a lot of bandwidth.

(I realize that we are in the middle of a recession/depression, and I enjoy maintaining and writing for this blog so much, that I have financed it on my own so far.  Allow me one second here to beg…now would be an ideal time for you to donate anything you can – $1.00 is just as much appreciated as $20.00 – via Paypal, by clicking on the “donations accepted” icon on the right-hand sidebar.  If I do start receiving donations, I would like to honour the incredibly generous souls who do so, by creating a page featuring the names of donors, as well as sending all those who donate a free gift from my online/Commercial Drive, Vancouver-based handmade jewelry business, Past Lives Beadery.  If you cannot donate right now, please do not feel bad – I am constantly torn as I would love to donate to many causes, the most recent being Wikipedia, but am not yet in a position where I can afford to do so.  I adore all my readers, and donating certainly does not change the way I feel about one subscriber over another.   )

Here is a listing of the tracks, available for download below:

1. Bat For Lashes: “The Wizard”
2. Bjork: “The Modern Things”
3. Bob Dylan: “Ballad of a Thin Man”
4. Bright Eyes: “Poison Oak”
5. Emily Haines: “Pretty Head”
6. Emily Haines: “Our Hell”
7. Feist: “I Feel it All”
8. Faithless: “Addictive”
9. Fiona Apple: “I Know”
10. Laura Marling: Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)
11. Leonard Cohen: “Stories of the Street”
12. P.J. Harvey: “The Garden”
13. P.J. Harvey: “The Desperate Kingdom of Love”
14. Radiohead: “Life in a Glass House”
15. Radiohead: “Scatterbrain”
16. Regina Spektor: “Carbon Monoxide”
17. Sneaker Pimps: “Waterbaby”
18. Tori Amos: “Curtain Call”
19. Tori Amos: “Police Me”
20. Wilco: “Hummingbird”
21. Damien Rice: “The Blower’s Daughter”
22. Tori Amos: “Shattering Sea”
23. Ani DiFranco: “Welcome To” (live)
24. Cocorosie: “Angry Sea”
25. Tori Amos: “Me and a Gun”
26. Tegan and Sara: “City Girl”
27. Elsiane: “Paranoia”
28. Scarsarestories: “Airline Safety”
29. Lykke Li: “Time Flies”
30. Metric: “Help I’m Alive” (Acoustic)
31. Regina Spektor: “Daniel Cowman”

Again, for this weekend only, you may download the music you have heard here over the past couple of months for free! 

I will make an exception if you miss out this weekend, and write to me (a comment on this post shall suffice) requesting a download at a later date.  At the same time, I cannot make exceptions for everyone, so try your best to download the tunes this weekend, if you so desire.

The Podcast Player, provided by Cincopa Media Platform, is quite straightforward – you may click “download all” at the top, to download all thirty-one tracks, or you may scroll through the tracks, selecting which songs you wish to download.  Without further ado…here it is:

Bonus: In honour of my lyrics-obsession, I would like to share with you some of my favourite lyrics from the songs on this list.  I would be overjoyed, if you did the same, in a comment reply to this message!!

3. “You have many contacts/Among the lumberjacks/To get you facts/When someone attacks your imagination/But nobody has any respect/Anyway they already expect you/To all give a check/To tax-deductible charity organizations./You’ve been with the professors/And they’ve all liked your looks
/With great lawyers you have /Discussed lepers and crooks/You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books/You’re very well read/It’s well known.”

4.” Then when you turned away/When you slammed the door/When you stole the car/And drove towards Mexico/And you wrote bad checks/Just to fill your arms/I was young enough/I still believed in war”

6. “Our Hell is a good life.”

7. “I don’t know what I did before/But now I know I wanna win the war…Who will be the one to break my heart I’ll be the one to break my heart…The truth lies.”

8. “I’ve got a demon for a wife/She delights in your pretty face and she hates my life/Takes notes on how to provoke past grief/makes my teeth decay with the loss of my self/Belief”

9. “So be it I’m your crowbar/If that’s what I am so far/’Til you get out of this mess”

10. “And I’m cleaning all the crap out of my room/Trying desperately to figure what it is that makes me blue/And I wrote it in a letter to you/And it’s twenty-two pages front and back but it’s too good to be used/I’m out now/It’s too hard/I’m out now/It’s too hard…”

11. “One hand on my suicide/One hand on the road”

12. “And there was trouble/Taking place”

13. “Oh love/You were a sickly child/And how the wind/Knocked you down….There’s another who looked from behind your eyes/I learned from you how to hide”

14. Somewhere I’m not/Scatterbrain/Lightning fuse, powercut, Scatterbrain

16. “I wash the streets from your skin when you come home/I wash the streets from your hair then you leave again.”

17. “Then you ram your hand in your bag for a little friendly/Substance…You climbed/China’s Wall.”

18. “Perhaps the answer/To the question/Lies in the question/Perhaps/You should read my thoughts/Line them up with soldiers”

19. “Remember to remember me/Standing still in your past/Fading fast like a hummingbird”

20. “Life goes easy on me/Most of the time/And so it is/The shorter story/No love no glory/No hero in her scar”

22. “Welcome to/Taking the good stuff down off the shelf/Welcome to/The art of conversation with yourself.”

24. “Yes I wore that slinky red thing/Does that mean, I should spread?”

25. “I cried so hard that you pushed me/Further away/Screamed so loud you called the/Police on me”

28. “And I get weak, I get weary/I miss sleep, I get moody/I’m in thoughts, I write songs/I’m in love, I walk on”

30. “All the survivors singing in the rain/You gave me a life I never chose/Wanna leave but the world won’t let me go/Wanna leave but the world won’t let me go”

I sincerely hope you have enjoyed the stories the past few months have brought.  I am very, very excited about the new stories that will manifest within the next few, and the few after that…

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{Note: I have made this post “sticky”, due to its level of importance as an announcement, both to my readers, and for family and friends that check up on me here at POM.  In other words, this post will appear first on the “index page” (http://www.practiceofmadness.com), though I will continue publishing new articles.  New articles will appear below this post, in chronological order as usual.  So, if you’ve already read this, scroll down to the next post to read my most recent articles.  Cheers!  scars }

I was sitting on my bathroom floor the other night.  A couple of “friends” had left some syringes in my kitchen “junk drawer” about a month ago, and I had taken them out – not for the purpose of injecting drugs, but for the purpose of self-harm.

I was injecting myself with peroxide and bleach, in very small amounts, and digging through my hands and feet with the needles, tracing my veins with little holes, tiny puncture wounds, until I had created a map, and until my hands had swollen up with balloons.

What the #&^% was I doing?!?

It took a break from reality to figure it out, as it often does for this young (and quickly growing older) woman.  What was I doing, back on the bathroom floor that I spent so many high school days sitting on, breathing in noxious chemicals (“crystal meth”  ) ?  As I was dissecting my own body, I ended up dissecting my life, my psyche, and the map on my hands became a map back to myself.

My visit “back home” for Christmas was devastating. I do not know what was more Hurtful and harmful: A Hate Crime, during which this White Woman With Blonde locks was raped by a first nations man three times her size for two hours, or the revelation – upon her departure ten minutes after my arrival at the family home, and her arrival ten minutes before I was due back at the airport for the sole purpose of screaming at me and making me feel, just as she had last year, like a complete “failure at life”.  I would venture to say the latter, as during the sexual attack, I waited for it to be over, and eventually, it did end.  My sister’s decision to pick a few times out of a 20 year-relationship – the few times that i was at my weakest, and did not show her the pure, unconditional love and generosity that has absolutely characterized my relationship with her since she was born – has threatened to tear my life apart. I wait for her to reevaluate our relationship, and I’ve been waiting for over three years now.  Yes, this is what truly derailed me.

So, for lack of a better way of putting it, I was acting out a bit of an “I am whatever you say I am”, bit.  I was responding to my family’s persistent decision to view me as an out of control drug addict (a quick anecdote: after my best friend in Winnipeg, Sam, who has known me since I was fifteen, drove me to the Emergency Room after my attack, I had to fill a $400 prescription, that I will soon be reimbursed for by the B.C. Government, and thus be able to pay my dad back, who “fronted” the money.  I walked into my dad’s house, apparently without being heard, coming “home” after the grueling and rather gruesome experience of a going through a post-rape examination and rape-kit at the ER, and filling this prescription for anti-HIV medication, to find my dad screaming at his wife in the kitchen about how he wanted to know about what this $400 prescription was that “Sam and I were snorting or smoking, or whatever, at his place”…I walked into the kitchen and slammed the bottle of pills down on the table – I had been trying to save my family the stress of having to know about what I had been through the previous night.  And when I told them, there were no “I’m so happy that you are still alives”, no “you poor things”, not even any “you did the right thing by going to the emergency rooms”.  There was only concern about the pricetag of this prescription, that may well prevent me from getting HIV or another horrible virus from the horrible monster that raped me) …so, back to a few nights ago.  I did purchase some drugs, though they all ended up lost or down the toilet – I had no idea what I was doing with these substances, I find them boring now, I was done with them a long, long time ago, but my family’s insistence that my experimentation with drugs almost a decade ago, makes me wonder if I “am, whatever they say I am”.  The needles, instruments of death, are not me either.  And I was not trying to “get high”, I was trying to make this woman, who my sister seems to think is deserving of great pain, feel that pain, to an extreme.  When my hands grew numb and I realized that I could be doing permanent damage that would prevent me from doing the one thing that I truly love doing, indeed, my very life-blood: writing – I knew that I had to stop.

But I had not yet figured out why I had been doing this, or what was to come next.  Luckily, I caught one of my best friends online as I tried making a few phone calls at 1:00 am, proclaiming that I had lost touch with reality and was hurting my body.  Everyone else was sleeping.  Everyone else “has to go to work” (I think small retail chains can suffer a little when saving one of your so-called best friend’s life is the issue at hand, but I also know that I was let go from a job for trying to save someone, so though firm in my opinion, I understand the employee’s dilemma).  I talked out my immediate circumstances with my dear friend, and only then did I come to the epiphany that I was trying to be the despicable person that my family (very falsely) thinks I am, and that I was trying to make the person that my sister, the sister that I raised after my mom died when she was six, and I thirteen, feel the pain that she deserved.  I was being the person, and playing the roles, assigned to me by the people that are supposed to know me better than anyone else in the world, but do not, are incredibly far from knowing me even close to as well as how well my friends know me, because they have never given me the chance to show them who I really am.  For some reason, the labels they have chosen for me provide them with comfort.

It is for this reason, that I am “cutting the cord” for some time.  After my ICBC settlement cheque arrives, and I settle my recent bills with my father, I am going to do some travelling, and I am going to write a book, and I am going to enroll, not in law school*, but in a one-year journalism program, and perhaps a photography program afterwards, as these are my dreams, and law school is someone else’s dream.

*The reason why I had decided to return to the academy to obtain a degree in law, was that I saw it as the only way that I could compete with my very perfect sister, who has done everything that my dad wanted his children to do (live at home until they had earned medical or law degrees – she’s chosen medicine, so I chose what was left).  I thought that if I did this, maybe, just maybe, the father that I love so dearly would, for once, be as proud of me as he is as my sister – more importantly, that he would show me the respect that he shows my sister.  However, on that fateful night (I believe it was Monday, perhaps Tuesday) I realized that I was, once again, choosing a very demanding career in order to please other people.  We all know how well that went last time!!  (if you are not familiar with the story, I suggest you scroll all the way to the bottom of the “Academia is Nuts” gallery that I created a link to in that last statement, and then click on older posts, once again scrolling to the bottom, to get a clear picture of how I discovered that the “academy” and I just do not mix.  Oil and water.  And I, I am blood.  Dragon’s blood, and salty sea water, with a sprinkling of rue and lavender.

Part two: I have decided that it is time for me to write a book.  In preparation to do so, I need to take a trip, all by myself.  I have been wanting to travel to SouthEast Asia for over a decade, and this is my opportunity.  Thus, I am going to ask you, dear readers, a couple of questions. (And of course, I will continue writing for this website, every day or every other day when time allows.  It is the one thing in the world that I am most proud of, prouder of than my thesis, or any number of theses and academic papers I could ever, ever write):

(polls)
 

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Q: what should a twenty seven year old who doesn’t know if she should live or die do to shock her to life?

A(s):

1. What Is a Massive Stroke?

   www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-massive-stroke.htm

   When a stroke is considered to be massive, it can result in paralysis of one side of …. I know him well and he would not want to live if he were a dependent invalid. … My 19 year old daughter suffered a massive right-side ischemic stroke which left … say may have attributed to the shocking occurrence of her having a stroke.
   

2. Amy Winehouse found dead at her London flat after ‘drug overdose …

   www.dailymail.co.uk/…/Amy-Winehouse-dead-London-flat-drug-ov…

   fficial&client=firefox-a#">Block all www.dailymail.co.uk results

   26 Jul 2011 – ‘On arrival officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was … A spokesman for the late singer said: ‘Everyone involved with Amy is shocked and devastated. … A section of the road where the singer lived remained cordoned off tonight. … ‘Because the drugs will get her if she stays on this road.

3. Yes…Young Women Can Have Heart Attacks! « Power to Change

   powertochange.com/life/youngattack/

   The 40-year-old woman arrived at the emergency room of her local hospital displaying a … When the nurse returned to work the next day, she was shocked to discover that … strikes a young woman, she is likely to suffer debilitating damage or die. …. The doctor will know what to do and armed with that knowledge you’ll be …

4. Marc and Angel Hack Life – Practical Tips for Productive Living

   www.marcandangel.com/

   3 days ago – … they do it? Over the years I’ve studied the lives of numerous successful people. I’ve read their books, watched their interviews, researched them online, etc. … Here are twelve things they do differently that the rest of us can easily emulate. … Growing happens when what you know changes how you live.

5. Why Isn’t Random Hooking Up Scary Anymore? | Women’s Health …

   www.womenshealthmag.com/health/safe-sex

   12 Sep 2011 – “If you’re with multiple people, you can‘t get your heart broken,” she … Because there will always be the next sex session to look forward to, … Being a big fan of Winston Chruchill, I know he did not die of an STD as …. It is sad to me being a 27 year old women that my peers are risking their life long health for …

6. Difference Between Oxycontin and Oxycodone | Difference Between …

   www.differencebetween.net/…/difference-between-oxycontin-and-…

   After having my 6th surgery and hoping its my last, but I do fear of getting old and not … When will the medical profession listen to their patient’s?! I have been taking oxycontin for 9 year’s and i know my body well..every … digestive system not counting the pain I live with every single day of my life. …. July 16, 2011 • 12:27 pm …
   

7. How You Can Tell Your Best Close Friend You Love Them

   kathrynvercillo.hubpages.com › … › From Friendship to Relationship

   You should consider what might happen to your life if your friend decides that he/she doesn’t share your feelings and doesn’t want to be … Just revealing your feelings for your friend to deal with can be shocking and overwhelming to the friend. …. wow good advice for me lol a 13 eyar old gril needs to know this stuff ! ..love it …
   

8. TOP 20 HARRY POTTER PLOT HOLES – best, most, greatest of …

   shareranks.com/2622,TOP-20-HARRY-POTTER-PLOT-HOLES

   So if the Wizarding world know of Voldie downfall for most of the day how … So they left a one year old baby in a blown up, burn up house for 15 to 20 … And, also, “Hagrid doesn’t Travel By Magic” isn’t a plot hole. … You can explain it by saying he happen to be on his way to visit the Potters … Anyone ever hear of ‘shock‘?
   

9. Reasons Why A Husband Does Not Want To Have Sex With His Wife

   www.squidoo.com › … › Relationship Help › Understanding Men

   If a wife does have a weight problem then her husband should try and help her loose …. Not one time in 27 years has she had an orgasim and without that, where is the …. There is no way you can live in a sexless marriage your whole life. … I take that as she doesn’t care either, or she’s hoping I die soon so she can cash in.
   

10. Multiple Personality Disorder – body, process, life, characteristics …

    www.scienceclarified.com › Ma-Mu

    Trauma: An extremely severe emotional shock. …. I have survived all of her usual drive away tactics for six years,but is there any … Feb 27, 2009 @ 12:12 pm … He WILL not take medicine because he is afraid that he will die, and also him … out of control when i tell him what he said he said that he doesn’t know what i am …

I suppose if another young woman happens to perform the same seach, she’ll end up here now.  Hi.  You’re not alone.

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“One day I took off my mask and I noticed my face was missing!” – jaap scheeren

 

I picked up one of those $20.00 art magazines that I would love to subscribe to when I was in Winnipeg – I dearly hope that when I am making enough money that I can do so, I still have time to do what I do with them (after using them as most use magazines): make collage art.  I cut out pieces of other art, sometimes with painstaking detail, and add a few elements of my own, like black paint, saran wrap, a violent RIP, glow-in-the-dark modge podge and fire, to name a few.   I’ve never tended towards calling myself an “artist”, though collage is kind of to fine art what remixes are to music, I think primarily because of my younger sister’s oft professed hatred for artists, or at least “people that call themselves artists“, my Aunt Karen being the prototype for her bias.  But my sister also got me to start wearing bras again for a few weeks, when she came here to visit me almost three years ago, and was able to put an end to that.  Bras hurt though (torture devices, in my opinion, underwire is the equivalent of foot .binding in current North American society.  European women seem to be a little more liberated.  I don’t even own one anymore.  There are undershirts for women…  ).  I digress.  Maybe I’ll take out a DeviantArt account one of these rainy Vancouver winter days that lack school or employment of any traditional kind.

A couple of weeks ago I leafed through the magazine and ripped out quotes and images that I thought might be useful in a new collage project, or at least those that I thought were interesting.  I did not have a theme yet, though.

Today I went through the pieces of paper, and the quote above reminded me of last night’s post.  Faces and masks – in sociology and social psychology these are key concepts: the different selves that we reveal to certain groups or individual others.  We all wear masks to some degree when we’re out in the world – I think this can definitely become pathological, spawning the classic Caulfield “phony”, but that it is also necessary for survival in a society where plenty of others are looking for people to take advantage of (that’s when I put my scary mask on) – and may even wear them at home.  I sure was, during my decade of codependency.

I feel I am becoming much more who I really am, now that I live alone.  Taking my mask off at home has led to some alterations to the mask I don when I leave my apartment.  I’ve become more outgoing, which at first seems like quite a contradiction, but makes sense if socializing is thought of like food that we must have at least once in a while.

I discovered so much about myself that I did not know the first time I lived alone – for a brief two months upon moving here to Vancouver, before I allowed codependency to cast its spell on me one more time, for good measure.

Over the past ten months I picked up where I left off I guess, save for the two months that my dad was here – not that we are “codependent”, but my reason for being adamant about not having any roommate was that I did not want my emotional state to be affected by anyone else, and Goddess knows we all wear masks that we put much effort into making around our parents.  I do not think I’ve learned as much as I did during that one summer, but I figure learning about oneself is like learning about anything – there is a “honeymoon” period at the beginning, during which you feel like you could read about topic “x” forever.  Then midterms arrive.

So, I decided that the topic for my new collage will be that post, and then I realized that it would be another self-portrait.  I started wondering if all my collages have been self-portraits.  If so, how very, very interesting, looking at them in chronological order…

<em>all collage art by scarsarestories<em>

(in the first one you couldn’t see my face – I was hiding under the blankets hitting the snooze button…unless I was the child…in this one I’m peering out from under a blanket!  completely unintentional…

Here

Lies

The

Vast

Empty

Expanse

Of

An

Existence

Without

Art

That

Was

Part

Of

My

Intense

Codependency.

Another

Interesting

Tidbit:

During

This

Time

One

Collage

Was

Made:

The

One

Time

(so far!  )

That

I

Dated

A

Woman

We

Made

A

Huge

Collage

Together!

Sadly,

I

Did

Not

Take

A

Picture,

Thinking

It

Would

Last

Longer.

But,

Alas,

It

Was

Torn

To

Shreds

By

My

Ex-Boyfriend’s

Mother,

Who

Excused

Herself

Saying

“I

Thought

It

Was

Garbage.”

I

Usually

Hang

My

Garbage

On

The

Wall,

Don’t

You?…

The

Woman

Who

Wrote

The

Hilariously

Absurd

Letter

That

Lies

Aside

All

The

Ones

I’ve

Written

In

The

Letters

Of

Complaint

Vault.

Okay.

In

Vancouver

Now, not yet in a codependent mess of a “relationship”…

And, I never realized this, but when I moved in with my final ex-boyfriend, I must have… thrown out my own collage?  Really?  Did he throw it out?  I do not remember.  Huh!

After

We

Broke up, I started making lots of collages, which were unfortunately, after being put together to make one big collage, destroyed, this time by angry former roommates and friends (the fake hippies/neo-cons wearing harem pants, sporting dreads)…

(to show a few of my rather disturbing masks at the time)

This

Year

I’ve been making jewelery and taking lots of pictures and decorating my apartment and experimenting with paint…sometimes in combination with each other:

…so maybe I’m a damn artist.  My sister already hates me, why not?  And she just happens to hate me because of my inability to don a mask when I was with her on a few occasions that have dirtied the rest of the memories she has of “us” (in and around that fateful year, 2005, from what I can discern, at least – my sister never, ever speaks of her feelings, well, unless unleashing rage upon someone), I suppose, the same way it’s hard for my dad and me to remember my mom when she wasn’t sick, it is hard for my sister to remember me before I was …well, her age, with a lot of pills.

All I really know is that I agree with Tori,

“If I die today I’ll be a happy phantom, and I’ll run naked through the streets without my mask on…”

It’s a pain to come off as normal all the time.

Now I’m going to go cut myself out of paper.

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But I hate the genre of “self-help” as you now know if you did not already, and there does not seem to be any “road” (nor a cross, <giggle> ).  Rather the landscape before me looks like someone photoshopped my days using the “dissolve” function, full blast.

I think that for many, many years – a decade, to be precise – I was a willing participant in a series of “serious”/”long-term” relationships that were incredibly toxic.  My co-participants were men – and I’m not even attracted to men that way (which I now, at 27, finally get, though I have no idea how to ask a woman on a date  ) – who, to varying degrees and in various ways, had some “serious” issues, such as, though certainly not limited to, drug addiction, misogyny, untreated severe mental illness, and rage – indeed, strip away all bias regarding things these men did or did not do to me and/or my family and friends during the course of our respective relationships and these men had something in common other than dating me: they were deeply disturbed.  No way around it.

I do not think I at all on purpose chose disturbed men, unless on some unconscious level.  This allowed me to do something though, something that was my life support, to analogize, something that cannot be said in one word.  It allowed me to be almost entirely consumed with reacting to and surviving a series of crises, whether I was “taking care of him”, “trying to change him”, or “helping him”, my mind was constantly concerned with making it through the day or week or month amidst a little earthquake, a “situation”, and one that you do not want your employer or professor to know about, though at times revealing my messy “personal life” to the people in other spheres of my life was necessary (often marking the beginning of the end of a job or registration in a class or a friendship).  However you choose to frame it, my life was one pretty predictable phone call away from a “family emergency”.  There was always something on my mind, and this allowed another something, less unpleasant but more complicated (to understate quite dramatically), to never be on my mind.

Me.

Myself.

I was able to completely ignore his girlfriend.

Now, a decade older than seventeen, a degree later, a cross-country move after, here I sit.

And I don’t know what to do with a very nice life.  Since my hysterectomy, pain is no longer hanging around to distract me from me, either.

I think the reason I became depressed so severely that I stopped functioning last summer had something to do with this – a different kind of pain replaced the screaming in my abdomen, not because I missed my uterus or the potential ability to conceive, I just became incredibly disillusioned with the world as I looked at it undistracted, and it took a near-death experience (" >the car accident) to shock me “sane” (at least functional …and basically content with my immediate circumstance, though there are of course things that I hate about society, I will not allow them to own me!  ).

I had even stopped writing for the first time since I was able to use a damn pen.  Look at the gap at the number of posts I made, here on this blog, last summer compared with other months – use the “ARCHIVES BY MONTH” widget on the right hand side near the top of the page – one last July.  And I bet it was a guilty “filler” post.  Let me check.  Oh, wrong!  But depressing and jade[d] as the earrings I could not drag my butt a block down to sit in the sun on a blanket with to pay for my existence.  And so wrong in its simple conclusion.  No, I was not able to shake it off by signing up for “Les Be Friends” on meetup.com, though the few times I did drag my ass[ets] out the door I met some lovely people.  They were not depressed, though, so what could I talk about with them and what could I really bring to the group, a walking corpse?  That’s no fun for anyone.  I remember when my old TV was stolen at the beginning of August.  My position did not change.  I lay on the couch staring at the wall while my magick garden was turning to dust.  The thought of listening to music made me want to die like everything else, but this time I knew I couldn’t kill myself (which of course made me want to die, made me wish I had terminal, stage four cancer or end-stage anything) and that made it hurt in a whole new way.

Then, after two months of being treated like I did have end-stage something by my Aunt, who even doled out my pills for me, while I slept sixteen hours a day, cried for two, smoked pot, hated myself for gaining forty pounds, hated myself for caring, hated mirrors and clothing nonetheless, and hoped I would not be asked to go on a walk, I found myself mid-air, staring in the non-existent eye, and I did not want to go.  And my life did not flash before my eyes for the next seconds that were each a minute long, during which I braced myself to be impaled with some feature of the environment coming through the windshield and said, “Oh my God.”  My last words damn well were not going to be “Oh my God”.  Not that I had time to think that, but really.  I did not want my story to be over and it was not because of or for any other person.  We rolled over a cliff but stopped rolling just before the treeline so something never came through the windshield, and when I realized that I could shimmy my slightly pudgy self out of the wreck, I  felt something strong for the first time that whole crappy year: relief.  Relief to be alive.

It certainly was not for my Aunt; I made the conscious choice to run away from the smoking remains of the rented van that contained her, actually thinking of my young age and the years that I had yet in front of me in comparison to those that lay behind her, Goddess forbid.  It was the future that flashed before me, the great empty expanse of my future.  Staying alive was more important than finding something sharp for her to cut herself out of the blows-up-in-movie-wreck of.  My kitty, my baby, meowing at the top of the cliff, became my focus.  But for a good 60 seconds or so it was just me.

And I don’t know what to do with her.

I guess I do a little bit.  I decorated my apartment when I came home from my very unsuccessful trip “home” for Christmas – one I never would have made had I not been in that crash, and one I will never make again as that “home” resembles the remains of that rental van.  I really, really like my apartment.  There is no one else to say what should go where or what colour the towels should be.  I really am fond of my little life with my kitty, so naturally I’m terrified of losing it – the shelter and my cat.  Sometimes I unlock my door, open it, and look for an eviction notice.  And I rushed my kitty to the emergency pet hospital after she ate a crumb of garbage that contained bleach and pills (I know, I know, I will never put pills in the garbage again).  But so far, so good.

So what is it that I’m complaining about?  I guess I’m not complaining, but I am observing a woman that has not had a device with only music that she likes (do they all make you put it on your iPod, too?  What’s up with that, just for good measure?  Or were all three men that controlling?  ) – no death metal or gangsta rap or slit-my-wrists-for-me-please in between artists I like – since she was a sixteen year-old girl and blasted it louder than I would ever play it now unless I was really drunk, while I put on my uniform and got ready to drive to high school with my dad and sister, after asking my grandma not to make my bed for me, but she never listened.  Yes, my bed is unmade as I type.   No, I did not make it for the photograph.  I just forget sometimes.  And I keep absolutely absurd hours. 

The sixteen year-old girl doesn’t quite know what to do with the twenty-seven year-old woman all of the time.

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Folie à Deux (English pronunciation /foˈli ə ˈduː/, From the French “a madness shared by two”  ) or Shared Psychosis is a psychiatric syndrome characterized by symptoms of a delusional belief being transmitted from one individual to another.The Same syndrome in more than two people may be called “Folie À Trois” (3), “Folie à Quatre” (4), “Folie à Famille” (“Family”, to translate directly), or “Folie à Pleusieurs” (Madness of Many).  Recent Classifications Include the dsm-iV listing – shared psychotic disorder – and its icd-10 Counterpart – Induced delusional disorder.  However, Research tends to use the original name (“Folie à Deux” et al.  ) which was first conceptualized in 19th century french psychiatry.

Though I have been affected by this condition many times, personally, I was unaware that it was conceived of and classified as such until a friend sent me a link to this fascinating documentary.  Click to watch the full-length (approx. 45 mins) BBC feature, though it is not required reading watching to understand this little article, as I am going to discuss criticisms of “folie à deux” and my own experiences that I thought were mere instances of being embarrassingly suggestible.  I very much recommend watching it at some point, and it is now up on the “featured documentary” page.  The film has a little something for everyone, as it begins (in true Foucauldian fashion) with two sisters throwing themselves into traffic, one suffering some lovely compound fractures , before revealing who these women are, the “true crime” genre tale entwined in their episodic madness, and leaving the viewer with some tough questions to answer regarding crime, punishment, and psychiatry.

One might imagine the primary question that individuals appeal to when a violent crime is committed during the course of an instance of folie à deux:

Does this condition actually exist, or is it simply the stuff of mythology and fiction?

The answer to this question is easy and laughable for anyone who has been subject to a folie, that is, one who has taken on the delusions of someone else, and recovered, feeling rather silly upon looking back, unhindered by myopia.  However, for those who have not experienced this – in the same way that the majority of people who have never gone through any form of psychosis first-hand have deep problems with the insanity defense – it is difficult to grasp how anyone, especially someone “in their right mind“, could be that affected by someone else.  And I am not yet sure how to make people who have never strayed from sanity understand.  I wish I had an analogy that made some metaphorical light bulb glow, and perhaps one day I will, but so far I am stumped.  All I can do, therefore, is speak of some of my own experiences, hoping that some bit of my storytelling will strike a chord that folks can relate to.

You see, before I learned of “folie à deux” today, I carried much unresolved anger at myself for being “highly suggestible”, and for taking on certain beliefs belonging to those who I was, at certain times in my life for various lengths of time, in the near-constant company of.  Now, when I say “beliefs”, I do not refer to core ethics/values, like my views on abortion, racialization, and prison abolition – these remain constant even when they differ from my partner or parent’s views drastically, and are often points of conflict. See, these topics are not the stuff of psychoses.

Paranoia is.  When my ex went a little mad after going off Epival “cold turkey”, he started to have delusions about my landlord.  Not only was he a scary bastard (which he was, doing things like ripping a closet door off with his bare hands after I had angered him by “creating black mold growth” in the suite I lived in at the time, on the lower level of a house built in 1910, but he was also a dad and had been friendly without exception until my ex started doing things like writing on the walls with sharpie pen ) but he was trying to initiate an affair with me, and had perhaps been successful!  I was accused of this a few times, but after I was able to convince my ex that I had no interest in my pot-bellied, going-on-50 landlord, the main concern became the fact that he was dangerous.  Some threat had been made, had it not?

And so, one morning, when I should have been teaching for four hours, I had security at Simon Fraser University find me a safe room, after giving them my landlord’s description.  My ex had driven me to school on the back of his motorbike – public transit was not safe.  I had to cancel my classes and stay in that room all day, the door locked and the ex returning periodically with “updates”.  He even got his dad, who he saw a few times a year, it seemed, involved.  When dad came to visit my self-made quiet room, he remarked, speaking of his son, “He sounds exactly like he did before he had to go to the hospital last time.”

I do not recall how the day ended or how it was determined that we were “safe” to return home, but for the course of the day, I honestly believed that my landlord was so angry at me for creating mold, never mind my ex’s teenage rantings in sharpie pen all over the walls, that he was coming for me, coming to beat me up.  I was truly terrified, even though I knew otherwise that the graffiti, eh, artist, was on his way to the psych ward and made little sense.  How embarrassing.

Or, maybe not!  Get this – the “syndrome” is primarily diagnosed when two (or three, four, or many, like the residents of Jonestown back in the 1970s – cult members who ended up committing mass suicide) people are living in isolation, and have very little contact with any others.  This quite accurately described my living circumstances when I took on that paranoid delusion fed to me – I was living in a new city and knew no one, and as usual, did not make friends with my classmates.  Thus, I spent almost every waking hour not teaching or in class myself with my then partner.  The specific “type” of folie I experienced would be called “folie imposée”, and when a pair in such a situation is admitted to a hospital, one of the two – the one that has been influenced as I was – almost never requires medication to regain an accurate perception of reality.  More recently, I was furious with myself – it happened again, and I must be the easiest person to influence this side of the Rockies, I scolded myself and thought about how my “book smarts” failed to translate into “real life”, and how foolish I had been for ever thinking otherwise. 

Silly me.  This case was much more textbook, and as time and self-loathing passed, I knew that the situation had been a strange one, though I couldn’t quite explain it.  Now I can!  When I went to stay with my Auntie R. in the Kootenays (a mountain range in the interior of B.C. and less than an hour plane ride away) at the end of August, deeply depressed and in need of help with daily tasks, I thought I was incredibly blessed to have literally just been contacted by my reclusive aunt for the first time in fifteen years and asked to visit her for a length of my choosing (the “my choosing” part was quickly upended after my arrival), a former psychiatric nurse and fellow “bipolar” diagnosée.

We lived, for nearly two months, in absolute isolation.  She had but one friend who we saw a total of two times, once for twenty minutes and another time for five, and lived in the basement of a dying man – whom she acted as a caregiver for – who I was kind of afraid to talk to.  We slept in the same bed.  Aside from evenings sitting outside when it was warm outside for the first month, we literally spent all waking hours together in that room, unless we, together again, went “downtown” to the pharmacy or to buy groceries.  Every day was exactly the same, Trent Reznor!  My only alone time was the hour, if that, during which she cooked dinner and ate with the old man.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time you know that I did not even write during those months – writing being my lifeblood for many, many years.  My Aunt even took over the job of doling out my meds, which still has me a little mixed up, as I forget to take them on time if they are not right in front of my face.  Enough about the setting – on to… the madness.

My Aunt has been involved in a legal battle over the estate she (should have) inherited when her partner, a rather wealthy man, died of cancer five years ago.  The executors, involved in other unsavoury activities in the “wild west” of BC’s interior (the populace is comprised half of retired hippies, and the other half rednecks.  The rednecks are, uh, businesspeople, while the hippies smoke the products of their labour, and are easily pushed around, sometimes even recruited to do the bitch work of the other fellows, who throw around a lot of talk about people disappearing as they polish their hunting rifles.  Need I say which camp my Aunt and her rather naïve partner belonged to?

My Aunt’s life has revolved around trying to find a lawyer in the area who is cheap enough and unafraid enough to take on the estate-thieves for many years.  I guess this would drive anyone a little batty.  And intensely paranoid.

No, not paranoid!  She was apt to be killed in the night at any time, and when I arrived, the level of danger – yes, just like this:

Indeed, the arrival of a young woman who was, at the time, sleeping for most of the day, made the spies – someone had moved into the house above ours on the mountainside for the sole purpose of spying on us, which included setting up a phone tap, while another one stalked my Aunt when she visited the Sally Ann – very angry.  Two are stronger than one.  And almost all of these signs that one’s phone is tapped were met.  Well, at least the important half.  Then, after a proper lawyer was hired, a mutual friend of the old man and my Aunt’s widowed partner called asking about buying a rifle.

Clearly he was saying, GET OUT YOUR GUNS!

I lived in a near constant state of terror that someone was going to break through the basement door and kill us for almost the entire time I stayed with Ruth.  I found a large, heavy object (that turned out to be the battery pack for an old cordless drill) – actually, I grabbed it one time that we thought we heard someone enter upstairs – and kept it on the shelf beside my side of the bed.  The word “paranoid” was an insult.  Others just could not understand, but if they were with us, they too would be aware that our lives hung in the balance day and night.  I jumped at the slightest sound.

At least I knew my depression was lifting, I suppose, as I seemed to care quite deeply about survival.

I called my father a few times, trying to impress upon him how serious “these people” were.  He always asked, “what people?”  He JUST DID NOT GET IT.

So it turns out I am not of less intelligent or weak constitution, but I am prone to folie à deux.  How do I know this was the reason that I was afraid for my and my Aunt’s life?  I suppose I will never know that my beliefs were all just part of a delusion that I came to share with my Auntie R., though in the article that comes up first when you “Google” the phrase “folie à deux” a case of cohabiting adult family members, living in a rural and somewhat isolated community, and sharing delusions about their neighbours, is one of the three instances listed.

And no, I still do not like labels, but I do like understanding my own tendencies, because only then may I change those that are maladaptive.  If anyone knows of a therapy group for those predisposed to “folie à deux” in the Greater Vancouver Area…

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I was terrified when I read the petition, put out by the “Friends”, that was apparently getting them where they wanted with city council.  Why terrified instead of just angry?  Because of two words next to one another – illegal protest.  If the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the document that separates Canada from a totalitarian dictatorship, holds true, there is no such thing as an illegal protest.  One of our key freedoms on the list of nine items that I was required to memorize in high school (is this still a requirement in Canadian High Schools?   ) in more than one grade, is The Right to Peaceful Protest/Assembly.  Of anything.  This is why old men, and the odd old woman,

One of the usual suspects

are allowed to wear sandwich boards with statements like “Abortion Causes Breast Cancer” on them, carting around a stroller containing plastic molds of pieces of a mangled, assumedly “aborted” fetus, are able to harass every woman that walks home from Broadway/Commercial Station on Friday afternoon, as well as those who happen to be on their way to the abortion clinic across the street.  It is also why the “Occupy” movement is allowed to march down the streets surrounding the business districts of Canadian cities holding signs expressing thoughts about the unfair nature of an economic structure where 1% of the population owns 50% of the wealth, and 99% of our citizenry struggles to afford food and shelter. 

Grandview Park, historically, has been, previous to and including the civil rights movements for black people and women and gay people of the 1960s, a meeting place for such protestors (not the anti-choice folks, the “Occupy” kin – “liberals”, “socialists”, “commie pinkos”, or whatever you want to call us) and a starting point for marches promoting the rights of people like workers, the poor, survivors of domestic abuse, and psychiatric patients.  It has been the place in Vancouver for us folks to meet and organize.

When I arrived in Vancouver in 2009, I saw a sign for a march I was supportive of and interested in attending, or at least observing, at least once a week.  The place listed on these posters was always the same: “Grandview Park“.

When my family came to visit in June of that same year, I proudly took them to the park one day as an outing.  The park was full of life of any type you could imagine: young and old men and women selling handmade goods or garage sale-type items, families with children using a play structure, teenage boys skateboarding (trying to pull off extra scary-looking moves as my sister and I passed, sometimes looking suave and sometimes falling down with red faces), homeless people sleeping or talking, their shopping carts filled with their worldly possessions nearby – carts were also left there for the day indicating an impressive level of trust that theft would not take place, hipster-types in their twenties or thirties smoking pot away from the hub-bub at the far end of the park – often passing a hacky sack around as well as a J, and people like my family and me, my dad wearing ripped jeans and I wearing a long skirt with running shoes, taking it all in with smiles on our faces, sitting in the shade of huge hundred year-old trees and conversing.

I did not realize that I was taking the park for granted by assuming that its presence, and purpose(s), would not change more than society itself changed.  I did not think I was being ignorant by sitting in the grass and enjoying the shade, believing that it, too, would always be around, and without paying homage to the soon-to-be cut down trees.  I did not think that my own friends would look at me like I was the crazy one when I started talking about how scary it was to see the phrase “illegal protest” on a mainstream pamphlet produced by a political action group when, in 2010, these first started circulating.  This literature and similar signage gave six reasons why Grandview Park was in dire need of a massive facelift.  “Friends of Grandview Park,” I laughed at the first posters I saw, assuming that they would elicit nothing but creating a larger divide between neighbours.  The closure and renovations began a month later.

The six points, which included the aforementioned juxtaposition of words that bothered me so, so much, were as follows (directly quoting the literature produced by the “friends”:

1. Chronically overrun by illegal inhabitants.
2. [Used for] drug dealing and hard drugs, like heroin, crack, and crystal meth
3. The chosen location of illegal protestors
4. The design of the playground encourages loitering of non-families
5. The unsanctioned use of tennis courts by the bicycle polo club … tennis courts are no longer available for parents to teach their kids how to ride bikes.
6. Poor drainage

If you’re asking yourself, “can you get any more offensive?”, you’re asking the same question I asked when I read the list for the first time, and the question that still comes to mind when I reread it, almost two years later.  In case you’re not at all familiar with Vancouver, this park and my neighbourhood, though in “East Vancouver”, are quite far from the “Downtown Eastside”, or “Canada’s Poorest Postal Code”, known for its shock value as people use hard drugs in plain sight there, shooting up or smoking crack in doorways of abandoned buildings.  You can walk there, but most would take the train and bus transfer, or the downtown bus, as most do not like walking for hours at a time (I do, but I know I’m rather alone in this).  No, Grandview Park is not Pigeon Park, though our “friends” would have us believe they are from the “same pile”.  Really, the two could not be more different.  You see, the “friends” either do not go to Grandview Park but make wild generalizations and speculations about the place from the “safety” of their Lexus Crossover Vehicles on the drive home, or they are shamelessly lying in order to get city council to meet their demands.  I’m guessing that both methods are at play here.

First of all, “hard drugs” were never sold at Grandview Park.  Marijuana was.  It was a place where teenagers could buy some pot if they were interested in experimenting without having to go downtown where hard drugs are sold.  Neither heroin, nor crack, nor crystal meth were sold or consumed at Grandview Park.  I would know – I’ve either been intimately involved with users or the substances, themselves, listed – all three – and they certainly were not present at Grandview Park.  I am just as sure of this as I am sure that there is no such thing as an “illegal protest”, nor “illegal protesters” in Canada, unless they are throwing Molatov Cocktails at the police.  These types, anarchists and hockey fans, were not the type that met at the park to protest either.  Almost all of the protests I saw at the park were organized and attended by new immigrants to Canada.

Imagine, you manage to escape a place where you would be killed for protesting the government, only to find that you arrived in Canada a little too late, as your dream of a new home is on its way to making it impossible to protest the government as well.  Perhaps in less violent ways, but at least violence is honest.

Then there was the phrase that pissed me off almost as much as “illegal protesters”.  Non-families.  Excuse me, but what the eff is a “non-family”?  How are couples that choose not to have children, or gay couples (with or without children – many gay couples with children seemed to frequent the playground, undeterred by us non-families, but, of course, gay people and other marginalized groups are usually just a little more enlightened than the people staring at them from their luxury vehicle windows), or longtime roommates, any less of a “family” than a woman married to a man and their 2.4 biological children?  What do the rest do that the latter “nuclear family” does not?  Okay, fine – the sociology of the family may be a bit of a stretch for the average doctor or business executive or loud-talking, face-on-a-bench, real estate guru – the types that live in the multi-million dollar homes with their offspring and vote for Stephen Harper and form groups like the “Friends”.  But here’s a question that all of the above should be able to answer – what the <bleep> is threatening enough about loitering non-parents to deter families from sharing the playground?  Are the teenagers that your little angels are soon going to be really that scary?  Hipsters and gay people, too?  Yes?  Hm.  You must spend a whole lot of time being scared.  Can I ask one more question?  Please?

Why do you live in this neighbourhood if you do not like to share space with street-vendors, lesbians, skaters, immigrants, and the odd punk?  There are plenty of other neighbourhoods – actually, this is the only neighbourhood where us “non-family” and “illegal”  types are able to be ourselves outdoors without being shooed away – there are Kitslano, the West End, and Point Grey, never mind North and West Vancouver, where everyone is just like you, very safe.  Why on Earth did you decide to live in East Van?!?!

The last two points on the list are so silly they needn’t be discussed.  There are parks on every other block around here, as well as streets with very little traffic, so why would you need a tennis court to “teach [your] children how to ride bikes”?  Aren’t tennis courts supposed to be for… playing tennis?  Again, correct me if I’m way off.  As for “drainage”, I never noticed any problem with flooding in the park.  And if it were to flood, wouldn’t that be good for you, “friends”, as it would get rid of all the homeless, er, “illegal” folks, sleeping in the park?

That was a year and a half ago.  Documents like this one [fgpflyer_march] and posters protesting the “Friends” were defaced.  Apparently this new breed of yuppie and “friend” bears sharpie markers, as speech bubbles with the words “crack” and phrases like “heroin rules” were placed over the heads of human figures on posters created by those who wished to debate the them.  Evidently they are also clever and brave.  However, I doubt this kind of nonsense had any effect on the City’s decision to spend over a million “renovating” Grandview Park.  I think that one thing swayed the decision of local politicians.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Here is the product of all that money, time, and political action!  Finally, here it is, “friends” and friends alike, a Grandview Park for the 21st century:

Well, there sure is a lot of pavement on which to teach a kid how to ride a bike.  No more tennis courts.  Nor large trees.  The oldest, biggest, trees in the park were all chopped down, for the sake of visibility, I suppose.  See the playground?  Me too.  This way, the police can see any “non-families” abusing the structure with their presence, and vice-versa – those who dare loiter can see the cops or rich mothers giving them dirty looks.  And all that comfy grass that might as well have been a bed, inviting homeless illegal residents to set up shop?  Gone, gone, and gone!

Wait, if homeless people are now being called “illegal”, wouldn’t it logically follow that homelessness is illegal?  Finally?  Homes for everyone?!?

No?  Oh.  Sounded too good to be true, no worries.

One last thought: I have no idea how the new concrete park is going to prevent “illegal protesters” from using it as a gathering place, but I guess that has yet to be seen.  I took these photos from the bus, so I did not see the list – I’m assuming there is a list posted – of updated “park rules”.  I will go look tomorrow.  If it uses the phrase “illegal protest(ers)” I am writing letters to every politician in the country.  I hope you are, too.

How I wish that I had pictures of the old, pre-reno Grandview Park.  But I didn’t think there was any rush to take some.  It was tree-filled, humanity-filled, conversation-filled.

Now the park seems to be nothing more than a place to “keep moving along” through on one’s way home.  I cannot help but wonder if it will become a place where those hard drugs the “friends” named actually are sold, the same way that the former marijuana buy spot in Winnipeg became a place, after it was “renovated” and fenced-off, where I have been asked, only after the “improvements” were finished, if I want to buy meth.

No, I don’t.  Nor do I want to go to a concrete park.  No matter how well it drains.  Looks like one large gravestone to me, though it’s blank, the history buried beneath simply erased.

Are you happy with the results, “friends”?

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However, there are other public transit options that technically run “all night long”, though their scarcity and strict timetable requirements make the term “Night Bus” very, very confusing.  No, it’s not just you!  I shall attempt to simplify transit for us insomniacs, protestors of mechanical time, and sometime-residents of Montreal, the prairies, or both (I fall into this last cursed category.  The only time I will ever use pity-provocation to receive “special treatment” is after last call has been announced at midnight, usually around when I arrive at a pub on the rare occaision I feel like overpaying for watered down drinks and crappy service).

There are twelve “night buses”.  They follow routes that are numbered kind of likewise during the day, specifically…

• N6 – Downtown/West End

• N8 – Downtown/Fraser

• N9 – Downtown/Coquitlam Stn

• N10 – Downtown/Richmond

• N15 – Downtown/Cambie

• N16 – Nanaimo/Renfrew

• N17 – Downtown/UBC

• N19 – Downtown/Surrey Central Stn

• N20 – Downtown/Victoria

• N22 – Downtown/Dunbar

• N24 – Downtown/Upper Lonsdale

• N35 – Downtown/SFU

For example, the SFU night bus is called the 35 rather than the 135, the Downtown à Commercial Drive (well, Victoria – here in Vancouver we have a fetish for giving the same street several different names that come into effect after a certain cross-street is met, another perk of navigating the city whether by bus, car, bike, foot, or magic carpet) night bus is called the 20 just like it is during the daytime, and the Downtown à UBC bus is absolutely unrecognizable, as the 99 becomes the 17.  Awesome.  If you are new to Vancouver, you will soon, if you haven’t already experienced this, be blown away by Translink’s impenetrable “logic”.

So, though it’s annoying as all hell that the Skytrain does not run at night (would it really cost that much more to operate an unmanned monorail system for a few extra hours out of each twenty-four?  I, for one, would be happy to pay, say $10.00 more for my student or disability assistance discounted bus pass (both are around $50/year – one of the few positive things I have to say about Translink.  Back in Winnipeg it cost over $50.00 per month for a student bus pass, and public transit there is so horrid that only 10% of the notoriously obsessed with saving a buck populace take it) to be able to take the train from 1:30 am – 4:30 am.  I could go on a rant about preventing “impaired” drivers from jumping behind the wheel, or lay out my plan for  mandatory transit passes for all residents of Vancouver based on income, but I will not.  …annoying that the train does not run, but you can hop on a bus.  If you happen to catch it when it comes, every 1 – 2 hours.

I was very shocked the first time I stood at a “night bus” stop, all pleased with myself, before I realized how foolish I must have appeared to the other cars on the road – almost exclusively cops and taxi cabs – before I pulled out my cell phone (schedules posted at stops – like as a print out! Imagine! – were taken down before the 2010 Olympics.  I guess they were unattractive to wealthy foreigners …all from countries where public transit is much more highly evolved than it is in North America, as well as where cell phone plans cost $10.00 per month instead of $50.00) to see when my Night Bust (Freudian type-o!) was scheduled to arrive.  In over two hours, at 4:48 am (the N20 headed downtown).  I don’t know about you, but I call that a very early ride to work, not a friggin’ night bus!!!  I spent $10 of my last $30 on cab fare that night.  I needed to be in the company of other human beings that badly for some emergency of a reason or another.  Unfortunately, whereas Commercial Drive used to serve this purpose, it no longer does.  (But it’s still the only “hipster certified” neighbourhood in Canada, so my rent money is definitely well thrown away!  )

I successfully took a night bus once.  It must have been the “17” as the route was somewhat similar to the 99 B-Line.  Here’s the good news: It was the most memorable, most bizarre, most conversation-laden, bus-ride I have ever taken.  And I’ve taken a lot of buses in my time!  Thus, if you do have the chance to meet up with a night bus, which requires perfect timing – something I usually lack after 2 am, I don’t know about you – take it!!!  Not only is it cheap, but it’s free entertainment of the highest order.   Anyone out there have some Vancouver Night Bus stories to share?  If so, please, please do in the “comments” field!

Here is the link to the schedules for those N20s, N35s, N17s, and the nine others.  Pitiful nighttime transit that has often cut important visits short or resulted in visits carrying on into the wee hours of the morning, and consequent “late for work” fiascos.

Oh Nofuncouver, we have a train that goes to the airport.  This seemed like a grand idea for about five seconds – before realizing that it you are able to afford a plane ticket, you are almost surely traveling to the airport by Taxi.  And on that note, let me end with a tip that beats the confusing night bus schedules: if you live in East Vancouver, near or nearish to the Drive, insist that your cabbie take Knight St. when driving you home from the airport, not Victoria.  Now that is a guaranteed $10 in your pocket.  The night bus is far more enigmatic.

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Hi Aunt R.,

"Girl, Disappearing" (Self-Portrait by scarsarestories, Trail, BC, September 2011)

Rogers Wireless is direct debiting money from my account after sending me letters stating that I owe them in excess of $1000 for walking away from my contract.  I have, of course, called them and launched a formal complaint, however, I was not able to get anywhere with them re: more immediate refund.  Since the last conversations I had with Rogers from Trail were largely mediated, if not entirely taken over by you, my dad would very much like if you would call them and try to get somewhere with them more quickly.  I told him that I doubted that you would do this at my request, considering the negative space that the two of us are in right now in terms of our relationship (I am in a very positive place, in regard to my life as an individual, and have found that the turn of the new year has spurred many positive changes already!  I would love to hear if you have felt any of 2012′s effects, yourself!  This last statement comes from a completely pure and sincere place of intention.  When I reread it, I saw how it could be misconstrued as some kind of demand that you’ve reconsidered your stance on taking responsibility for the car accident.  The accident was the farthest thing from my mind when I posited that question…I hope you know, in your heart, that this is who I am.  I know nothing of the games women play with one another, aside from not participating in them myself.  I am very weary of trusting that you know this, though, as hindsight is 20/20, and one of the most memorable nights in Trail [conforming to the tenet that negative memories are usually stronger than positive ones] was the one when, upon me mentioning what had always been my plan – to return to Vancouver, to live, in October – you accused me of “lying“.

I may be many things, but I am not a liar.

).  Anyhow, he would appreciate if you would call Rogers, as you are authorized, if you recall, to speak about my account, to remind them of the supposedly “recorded” phone conversation we had with a customer service agent who stated that I was free to walk away from my contract with Rogers, on the basis that they did not hold up their end of the contract I signed with them by failing to provide me with a proper SIM card to make my device work, this last call taking place about a week before I received the third and final SIM card (standard size, not “micro”, and thus not compatible with the iPhone) from Rogers, which led us through the doors of the shop where I took out a new contract with Bell (and one that I have been infinitely more happy with!…no hidden fees, and all around a much, much better deal; fewer dropped calls just being icing on the cake).

I have two other things that I would like to mention.

1. I managed to increase my ICBC settlement by 25% without a lawyer, or, if one (I choose to see it this way, for one!  *giggles*  ) sees it from another perspective, “representing myself“.  This has been a big accomplishment, especially considering my future career goals.  I still do not understand how you see a government insurance settlement that does not impact you negatively, and which did not involve any negative description of your driving on the evening of October 20th, as a way in which I am “profiting off my blame”, blame, that I have repeatedly told you, was resolved a few days after the near-fatal crash.  R., when I speak of your need to take responsibility for the accident, I am only hoping you will do this for yourself.  I think it is the only way that you will find closure about what happened that day.  Blaming a horoscope (re: your letter, “bumpy ride” forecasted in one of your horoscopes for one of the weeks surrounding the accident) is as silly as blaming me and my cat.  You should not have gotten behind the wheel of a car that day – my dad has taken responsibility for this, as have I.  Neither of us should have let you drive that day.  It was glaringly obvious that you were in no condition to be on the highway, especially in a rental vehicle.  I don’t think cats have the ability to take responsibility for their actions, but Penelope is paying for her recklessness, in throwing up while you were driving, causing the unacceptable distraction you describe, in spades – not only is she missing half a leg, but she does not trust like she used to.  She, just like a person does, exhibits signs of PTSD, for example cringing when a new person tries to pet her.  It breaks my heart all over again every time I see her do something like this.

2. When I held the burning ceremony required to cleanse myself and my home and garden of the negative energy you brought here with the words contained in your letter, something happened that I was not going to share with you, but it has been scratching me, and I feel that, for altruistic reasons that you might not be able to understand right now, I must tell you now.  Once the words were turned to ash, two flames emerged.  The flames separated.  One was distinctly my flame, and one distinctly yours.  I do not know how much you, yourself, have dabbled in the Wiccan arts, but this was clear.  The flames danced about for some time, and then yours went out rather quickly and unceremoniously, while mine flickered for a while, threatening to go out, but then, instead, grew bigger and stronger.  Ruth, I see this only as a sign that you need to take better care of yourself.  My dad told me tonight that in order to fix your foot, they may have to rebreak one of your toes in order to properly reset it.

Immediately, I knew why your foot is not healing as it should.  I am not psychic, and I do not know how closely you are following doctors’ orders about how to care for your foot at this point.  But take it from a young woman who cut her arms down to the bone six years ago – had I not, painstakingly applied antibiotic ointment to the wounds three times a day for two months, changing the bandages each time, and then worn silicone strips bound to my arms with itchy “sleeves” provided by the hospital for an entire summer, I would have suffered infection, and, as my psychiatrist in Winnipeg is always quick to remind me, I probably would have lost at least one of my arms, to prevent infection from going to my brain.

We may hate Western medicine, but we have to follow doctor’s orders to a T when taking care of broken parts.  The night of the accident, you signed yourself out of the hospital without seeing the doctor.  You only went back to the ER after my father insisted on it.  Such behaviour reminds me of mine as a teenager, who thought I was invincible, and could take handfuls of pills of any sort if I wanted to “explore deeper parts of my psyche”.  I am not trying to compare the intention, but the place it came from – a belief that I was fucking Kryptonite.  Well, we are human, all too human, and very susceptible to decay.  Please, please follow every annoying point on the list your doctors and nurses have surely given you on how to care for your foot.  DO NOT EVER STRAY FROM THESE INSTRUCTIONS, NOT FOR ONE DAY, NOT FOR ONE MOMENT!  Although we are not getting along right now, I know that we will find some common ground, hopefully sooner than later, and I EXPECT MY AUNT RUTH TO BE AROUND FOR MANY, MANY YEARS – SEVERAL DECADES, IN FACT – BEFORE ANY DECAY SETS IN.

You must not act carelessly as you did that night at the Castlegar ER.  I am positive that if you had seen the doctor that night (it is quite a serious move, to sign yourself out against medical advice) you would not be going through the struggle with your foot that you are now.  IT IS A LESSON, NOT A REASON/EXCUSE TO WHINE.  SO STOP IT.  BUCK UP AND LEARN.  What a wonderful thing – an opportunity to learn.  Do not let that flame disappear from sight while you’re looking elsewhere.  Keep your goddamn eyes on the road!

Love,

scars XO

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Anyhow, this young man had a dream recently that made his heart pound, about getting in a car accident on the job, as he works as a driver for the wealthy.  He hates his job, and will finally be able to afford to begin school with his savings next year.  I tried to reassure him, telling him about my endless dreams as an unprepared student entering an exam room, that occur even when I am not a current student in my waking life.  My father, too, still dreams about failing to perform in a certain English class as an undergraduate, over forty years later.  I told him I thought that these dreams were not omens, but just reminders to be careful, in his case, or not to take past success for granted and to prepare for all exams, in my case.  Yes, that the purpose of dreams is learning.  I had no idea I even believed this, but I think it is my theory on the topic, rather simple, hey Freud?

In my father’s case, the dream is a little more ambiguous, and thus, it’s meaning is a little deeper (I correlate the two characteristics for one reason or another…   ) – he has told me about his feelings of regret that do not predominate his thoughts when looking back upon his career, but sometimes do arise, as he began a few paths to slightly more interesting careers than the one he ended up in, as a computer systems analyst, before he enrolled in the college program that carried him towards a screen that he would spend 33 years staring at, other options including architect and English professor.  Some part of him, however small (I hope it is very small, because I think that working as the person that oversaw the payment of all farmers in Western Canada, as a systems analyst for the Canadian Wheat Board, a dying socialist institution, is both impressive and interesting and historically significant) feels like he did actually fail.  Why does he “need” to have this dream?  Well, I think it has played a role in his decision to take the time to read more books, and to continue learning no matter what his age may be.  So my theory holds true in this case.  One does not have to attend classes to learn about anthropology or astronomy, a couple of topics that have piqued his interest and led him to the check-out counter at a bookstore in recent years.  I am impressed by my dad in new ways more and more often as we both grow older, and this, in and of itself, is impressive.  Old dogs can learn lots of new tricks.  In fact, many doctors believe that exercising the brain into one’s later years by doing things like reading regularly and continuing to learn, always, plays a large role in preventing Alzheimer’s Disease.  I learned this from my dad, too.   First, I had to learn how to get along with him.

I do not recall any particular dreams I’ve had about my dad, scanning my memory without great depth, though when I was living in the “haunted” apartment (whether I, or the building, was haunted, remains to be determined) on Sherbrook Street in Winnipeg, almost seven years ago now (damn!  ) I heard little girls screaming “daddy!” as I laid beside my sleeping ex-partner for sleepless night upon sleepless night.  I never thought about this third possibility, when questioning why it was that in this apartment, and only in that one place, did I experience significant, regular, aural hallucinations (the two reasons I came up with being that the apartment was haunted or that I was experiencing psychotic mania, a symptom of untreated – actually, really badly treated, as I was taking my prescribed 600 mg of Effexor and 1200 mg of Lithium whenever I remembered to, plus a handful of benzos once or twice a week – “bipolar disorder”.  Perhaps – as everyone, not just people that a doctor has called “bipolar”, experiences – the psychosis resulting from severe insomnia is a kind of alternative to dreaming: an infringement of the dream world upon the “real world” that can be very frightening, especially to those who have been taught since early childhood that such experiences are not only “abnormal”, but are associated with “madpeople” like John Wayne Gacy and Brian Jones (of Jonestown).

I think of this as I write because of the whole point of this post – what my Vietnamese friend really found fascinating When it slipped out of my mouth.  Though the question about why we dream has captured the public imagination as much as it has the interest of Some scientists for a very long time, Another even more mind-boggling question belies it, one that is rarely mentioned.  I’m guessing it is rarely mentioned because the scientific community is a little embarrassed that while we have sent people to sleep in space, we still have not answered this question:

“Why do humans (need to) sleep?”

That’s right – aside from “resting one’s muscles for a while”, the scientific community, specifically behavioural neuroscientists, who are concerned with these kinds of questions and the possibility of finding answers, or rather theories about answers, does not have an answer as to why human beings need to sleep, and to do so for a long time – one third of one’s life, if the “8 hours per night” doctrine is to be followed (I laugh with you, fellow insomniacs).  That’s a lot of resting one’s muscles.  Think about long-distance running – sixty seconds of walking is considered a decent length of a break to take from running in a marathon.  The ratio does not add up, and neuroscientists agree, there must be a better answer.

Some have theorized that the reason humans need to sleep, is that We Need To Dream

I wish neuroscientists would drop the “expert complex” and whatever else is preventing this question from entering the public consciousness (tell a friend if you happen to read my little blog out here in cyberspace!  ), as the musings of laypeople are just as likely to contribute to science as people with doctoral degrees in physics, chemistry, or biology.  I say this with confidence because after spending eight years in the academic community, it was often first-year students who made statements that led to the most innovative possibilities for new research, or new answers to old questions.

This question brings “to sleep, perchance to dream” to a whole new level, doesn’t it?  This is very possibly the reason why we need to sleep for such a long time, and it is scientifically sound, as a key element of sleep science is the importance of REM sleep, the phase during which dreaming takes place, and the phase that, without, we do not wake feeling rested.  Even though we do not remember many (the vast majority, if you’re anything like me) of our dreams, we have them every night, unless our sleep is disturbed or “disordered” – the best example I can think of is if we are under the influence of alcohol.  I’ve had some weird dreams after drinking, but the cycles, including REM, get messed up as a drunk ‘n dial.  A chart here, near the end of the article, demonstrates this.

I think that the question “why do we sleep” is much, much more important and interesting than that of “why do we dream”.  If we sleep to dream, imagine the possible future applications of neuroscience.  Watch the movie Paprika.  I still cannot figure it out.  I’m assuming you’ve seen Waking Life.  If not, no worries, but watch it, too.  I don’t have to say the word “inception”.  But I did.  (Ellen Page, not Leonardo DiCaprio or his typically “beautiful” wife in the film.  )

(photo by scarsarestories, image by anonymous)”]

Sleeping Goddess in the Electric Light [on my wall

I better wrap this up.  I hope I provoked a little thought with this post.  How about this – next time you have trouble falling asleep, instead of worrying about the next day, about your ability to perform at work or school without much sleep, ask yourself, “Why might we need sleep?”

Perchance to dream…

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I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—–

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——-

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot ——
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—-

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air

(Oct 23, 1962)

Oh, Lady H., isn’t it us from first line to last?  Now, I will release our story, as best as I can tell it after learning what I did from you last Thursday .  No, I do not have any delusions about being anywhere near Sylvia Plath in talent regarding usage of the English language.  So, it might not be The Bell Jar, but it’s something I have been blown away by during the past three days, in between necessity and frustration and speed, I think we are quite special, and that the story must be told:

Last Thursday, about two minutes after I updated my facebook status to: “Where is everyone?  I’m lonely… “, I received a text from Lady H., who accompanied me to the Tori Amos concert a month ago.  She had not seen my embarrassingly pitiful statement on facebook, it was to be a night filled with such synchronicities.  I do not recall what she said, but I replied with a comment about Lindsay Primmer’s Eighth Birthday Party, which was quite the event back in Grade Two, primarily because she had a swimming pool in her backyard, and secondarily because she was mean and knew exactly how to use the fact that her parents were wealthier than the rest of ours to manipulate and crush little souls.  If she happens to read this, perhaps, Lindsay Primmer, you have outgrown your nastiness.  I hope so, as the world needs another mean woman like it needs another hole in the ozone layer.  In Grade Two, and Grade Three, when our catfights often ended in bleeding arms, the product of scratches with little fingernails that looked eerily similar to my scars.  I didn’t start biting my fingernails until Grade Five, when I decided to copy the boy sitting next to me in homeroom that bit his.  I didn’t stop until I moved to Vancouver.

I digress.  So, Lindsay Primmer began making a list of people she was going to invite to her pool party (I don’t even know if her birthday was around that date, or if it was just an excuse to make a big fuss about the damn in-ground, kidney-shaped pool, where I once thought I was going to drown after hitting my head on the diving board on my way in, and where many dreams about drowning have taken place, mine, and I’m sure those of other classmates) weeks before the Saturday afternoon on which it was held.  It was rather redundant, as she was inviting all girls in the class, but, of course, it was a fabulous tool of manipulation.  She was Santa Claus for those weeks – better be nice (read: kiss ass) or else you’ll get crossed off the list!  I don’t know what my Lady, nor what I did to get crossed off, but we were the only two girls righteous enough (at the time I didn’t know what righteousness was though, even though I may have done many righteous things, I was seven and usually they ended in tears) to get crossed off that list – permanently!!  Others earned their way back on.  Neither of us were willing to stoop that low.  However, when Saturday came around, we were not happy.

I remember sitting with my mom and dad in my backyard and being able to hear the gleeful shrieks and splashes five houses down, at the Primmer residence, surrounded by a white picket fence (of course!  ) that I would later deface with permanent marker (who knew those smelly markers that teach kids to sniff permanent pens and glue are actually permanent?  ) – first single words, and then, after being pushed far enough by Lindsay, writing on the gate in bright, cherry red ,”Lindsay Primmer is a BITCH.”  I was too young and was too young in an innocent enough time to really know what my words meant, but I knew how angry I was, and what I can still remember is how fast my heart was beating as I struggled to finish the entire sentence.  This was after being chased off the Primmer yard by her dad with a shovel when I and a couple of boys attempted to steal some garden gnomes, and no one dared join me.  I pulled it off without getting caught, but when my dad would tell me about seeing Lindsay’s father outside very early in the morning, as he walked to the bus that went downtown to his workplace at the Canadian Wheat Board (ah, the false but blissful liberty of the Clinton/Chretien early-nineties…  ) , painting over my words with bright white on that stupid tacky fence, any feelings of accomplishment were replaced with guilt.  Alas, the cruelty of being kind, even as a child.  Eventually I think I fessed up to my responsibility, which I’m sure was already known as I have rather distinctive handwriting.  My parents were not that angry, though, and only now do I know why.

Tori Amos does, though.  The other girls were those demi-gods, not tortured little Goddesses in waiting like Lady H. and me.  I started to cry, sitting in a lawn chair in between my parents, and they decided I should invite Lady over.  I was excited for her to come – strange, the way I can remember my feelings so much better than words or events.  I guess they were my strongest sense, even then!  I didn’t remember anything else though, but luckily I am 27 now, so Lady H. and I have reunited – once and for all, if we know what is good for us – and after I mentioned that two-decades-ago party last Thursday, she dropped everything and called me to tell me about the life-lesson my mom taught her that day.  Then she came over – well, after we went out for mojitos, doubles (of course).

Evidently it went like this: Little Lady H. came to join me in wallowing about our non-invitee status, and that was just what we did.  My family couldn’t afford a pool, so it wasn’t like we could try to outdo the noise coming from down the street or anything.  We watched a tape of The Babysitter’s Club – the show, based on the books we were both obsessed with – with my mom, but we were so angry and upset we could not enjoy ourselves.  Then, Lady told me, my mom announced: “You know what girls??  We don’t need Lindsay Primmer!!“  Apparently, though, I did not dissolve into laughter as I would today at such an announcement.  Instead, I ended up fighting with Lady, who decided to go home and ran out onto our front porch in tears.  Seven year-old projection.  Ouch.

My mom went after her.  And she taught my dear friend a lesson that she still holds onto tightly today.  I wish I could remember the sound of her voice as well as Lady H. does.  See, the thing is, Lady moved away sometime before Grade Five, so she never knew my mom when she was ill.  I finally understand why my dad cannot, when begged as I often have, to tell me something, anything, about the woman who gave birth to me.  She was so lovely, but her illness was so devastating, and its length, including a summer of false-hope “remission”, so long, that we who witnessed her then have much trouble recalling the her that was before the her consumed by cancer cells.  My dad is not guilty of anything more than I am – I remember the day, driving home from piano lessons with my mom, that I realized how difficult it was becoming for me to remember what she was like before she was sick.  I kept these thoughts to my self, just like the tears I learned how to pick out of my eyes before they fell down my cheeks so as not to scare my little sister, or my mom, or, perhaps worst of all, my dad.

The first time I ever saw my dad cry was in the same van, driving home from school, when he told me that she had breast cancer.  Cancer.

Cancer.

That was the first time around, when hope was a full glass and nothing – so said the experts, ignoring my mom’s complaints of numbness in one arm, the arm on the same side as the lump, oh, no, just a coincidence, or maybe a fear so vile it had manifested itself in a physical symptom, yes, all in a woman’s head, like so many things, all in her head – and we would arrive home to a strong woman who reassured us that because she was not ready to die die, to die, not ready, she wouldn’t!  A lump, like so many lumps in so many breasts, removable.  Scary, but scary like a bogeyman, not a serial killer, a noise in the dark, thunder, not footsteps.  Not ready, cancer, to die, I’ll be okay, because, cancer, not, die.  And she fought until the very last week, as did I, gripping the glass that still had a sip left in it, there would be something the doctors could do for her.  She was still my mom, and my mom had outlived each other time she was told, by the same doctors, to prepare for death, almost ten years to the day, when the a doctor called my dad and I overheard their conversation and realized that she would die, that the glass was really empty, breaking glass in the dark, silent sobbing, feeling so stupid.  Exactly one week later, she was gone, and with her, our memories of the amazing woman that we assumed would always be there, beside dad in bed, in photographs, in the garden.  Photographs fill boxes in the new house, much bigger, photographs that we have yet to look at, that are sometimes spoken of by dad, of scanning them and making albums for each of us.  We cannot remember her hair.

“Picky-picky is precocious.” Mom said to Lady H. one other day.

“What’s precocious?”

“Picky-picky is precocious.”

She never looked it up and neither will I.  The definition of precocious is a calico cat named Picky-picky, after the name of Ramona’s cat in those books, ironic as she was anything but picky – Picky-picky would eat pancakes, and Picky-picky was precocious.

Back on the front step mom told the crying girl with dark brown hair – the dark brown that is pretty, not mousy like my real colour, or how I remember it before I dyed it for the first time, right after she died – “You can call your parents and you can go home if you want.  But I want you to stay.  People fight, people say things they shouldn’t and people hurt each other.  But then life carries on.  It’s not worth it, staying angry.  So you can call your parents if you want, but I wish you would stay.”

And she stayed.  I soon joined them on those steps and we stopped being angry at each other or the rest of our class, five houses down.  But I missed those words, and when we met ten years later when she got a job at the bookstore where I had already worked for two years – the last two years of high school – I heard from another girl that she was trying to get me fired, telling my manager that I was always fifteen minutes late (the latter part was true, but the former was bullshit, but I was only eighteen and did not hear her say that it was a waste, to hold grudges against people who we love, people who are the same as us, people who read about Ramona and baby-sitters even though they may not have backyard pools.  Another girl told me she had called me “materialistic”, and that was the end!  I was living with Josh and my entire income was spent on his wants, though I did not even realize it, this was why a comment about some pants I bought in Montreal (I did not ask how the topic arose) compared to my life with Josh, not much of a life, when the store had to buy me three shirts, just me, to meet new dress requirements when instituted after Heather Reisman bought the Chapter’s chain and we started selling more “giftware” than fiction, “we are doing this for everyone who cannot afford to buy new clothes”, one of the managers told me one afternoon as I ate my ramen noodles for the eightieth day in a row, everyone, I was, that time.

Plus we both fooled around with that guy who worked in the magazines section upstairs.  Though I wouldn’t know for ten years.  Ten years that went by so much faster than the ten before them.

So, Lady, I think we better stick together for the next ten, and ten more, and if I do not die like the woman we sang “You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings” to and appreciated our ode like it was that of Bette herself, for she died when she was twenty years my senior, I think we should stop counting and just remember that there are countless women and even more men that we do not need, but we need each other.  Because we just do.  A Cancer and a Scorpio, raised by a Pisces.  Living by the ocean, now.

Because I do not want to be lonely next Thursday, but I am very picky, picky about who I allow to come over, about who may share my time.

Because we only have so much, so we must spend it well.

And with you – and you, you, and you – I am well.

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Tori Star Whisperer Live 2011

Tori Purple People 2011

Tori Father Lucifer Live 2011

Tori Baker Live 2011

Tori Baker Running Live 2011

Tori Leather Live 2011

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“Kumbaya is the future, because it’s how we’re wired. We’re social monkeys, and we’ll form a community given the least excuse to do so.

Combine mass communication technology with that hard wiring and you’ve got a potent combination.”

Amen!  I do not share links all that often, do I?  However, I was sent an e-mail with a link to this article – “Kumbaya Blogging” – that has brightened my day, and helped to erase from my mind my Aunt R’s recent comment – she has decided she wants to be my enemy because I am getting a small settlement from public motor vehicle insurance here in British Columbia (ICBC), pennies compared to the loan she borrowed from my father to pay for the lawyer that is going to retrieve the $10 million estate she inherited a few years back before it was stolen from her by the executors (how she allowed this to happen I do not entirely understand   ) as she believes this connotes “profiting off my (false, as " target="_blank">my cat and I made the marijuana-fiend speeder swerving all over the highway from the instant we drove onto the exit ramp – ) blame for her driving us off a cliff at 120 km/h – that this website makes me sound like a “teenage meth thug”.   It is not often that I bring numbers up, as I am rather the opposite of a braggart, but is that why over 1500 people now subscribe to this blog via e-mail?  Really?

“Kumbaya Blogging” is a great read both for other bloggers, and for anyone who is at all confused about my intentions for continuing to publish my writing on this website.  Although, I would read my own explanation, “What is Practice of Madness“, first.  That means you, too, VancityVamp:  you may be exempt from work and poverty and consequences for making fun of people who are on welfare, but not from willful ignorance.  For that there is no excuse.  Not even pain.

However, despite a wee bit of a hangover and last year’s traumatic events still fresh in my mind, and a very scary phone call about the status of my student line of credit being forwarded to a “loss prevention department” because the insurance company that was to provide disability assurance on interest payments has conveniently forgotten about my existence, none of which are jiving with Combavir, the anti-HIV pills I must take for a month after being attacked, I insist on remaining positive today.  I met my best friend for the third time last night.  We seem to do so every ten years – first at 7, then around 18, now at 27 – and she is adamant as I am about the values that this little community I call Practice of Madness were founded on.  I’m going to write about us now. 

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I also have a question: do you think that as we get older, we become more afraid, due to the life experiences we have cumulatively endured, or less fearful, because we become more rational thinkers?

Here is an example of the misunderstandings that can result from not doing so, and a little discussion of phobias to follow, as the comment was on this post, “Fear of Cotton Balls = Sidonglobophopia“.

Comment:

I do not appreciate your smart ass comments! I actually do suffer from this and have for years! I can assure you it is a real fear! As real as someone being afraid of clowns, the dark, or even the fear of death!

My Reply:

Excuse me? I was laughing at myself for being afraid, as my boss was of cotton balls, of the texture of corrugated cardboard. Please read the WHOLE article before reacting. I was so afraid of fire that I did not light a match until age 16 when I started smoking cigarettes. The other reason for posting this was because there is no other webpage that defines this phobia, and I wanted to increase my SEO. Indeed, I am straight up – one might say I am afraid of dishonesty…now I wonder if there is a name for that…or one for being afraid of reading an article in its 500 word totality before reacting…

I have found the official names of some of my other fears, so, whether for interest’s sake or empathy’s sake or rage’s sake, here they are!

1. Androphobia – Fear of men (not after I speak to them for a good 30 seconds or so and discover they are not rapists or creeps of another breed, but before entering conversation with a fella?  Terrified.  )
2. Agliophobia – Fear of pain (if you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you know all about this one, probably more than you would like to. I am now on methadone because once the source of my excruciating pain – compared by many to childbirth – my uterus, plagued by endometriosis was removed in May of 2011, I could not bear the pain of withdrawing from my pain medication)
3. Agraphobia – fear of sexual abuse (after being raped by 4 or 5 – I do not know if I was date raped by one or two men when given a date rape drug – men, I’m scared to be out after dark because a rapist may be lurking in the shadows…   )
4. Ankylophobia – Fear of immobility of a joint (After my seizure, and as a chronic sleep paralysis sufferer – I can still recall the first time I woke up but could not move or scream at age 10 – oh yes!  )
5. Apiphobia – fear of bees (I love bees, but I’m terrified of being stung, as I never have been, and I’m sure, in my rational mind, that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as many other painful things I’ve been through, but until I do get stung, I shall remain terrified, as fears belong to the irrational realm.  So, I really should find a term for “fear of stingers”, as I’m much, much more scared of wasps and those big black flying ants that have stingers sticking out their butts the size of big-toenail clippings!!!  )
6. Atychipphobia – fear of failure (The cause of many depressions, and much running)
7. Carcinophobia – fear of cancer (I bet this is one of the most common phobias.  When my mom was dying of cancer and I started getting migraine headaches in grade 8, I was convinced I had a brain tumour, mainly because of the “blind spot” that is part of the “aura” preceding a migraine attack. I didn’t dare complain because of my mom’s condition, so it was not until I was a young adult that my family even knew I suffered from migraines.  I blame much of this fear on those medical disease dictionaries for laypeople that used to be in the home of each nuclear family before the emergence of the Internet.  Almost any symptom (ex/ swollen lymph glands) was first and foremost listed as one of cancer)
8. Chronophobia – fear of time (I will leave this one be as it would become an M.A. thesis if I delved into its causation)
9. Chronomentrophobia – fear of clocks (Because time just passes much too quickly.  I used to cover up all the clocks in my room as a teenager when studying.  Now that I live alone, my only clocks are those on appliances.  Yes, I am chronically late.  )
10. Clinophobia – fear of going to bed (see number 9)
11. Cnidophobia – fear of stings (ooh, here we go.  Bees, I take it back, but do not want to renumber this list so you’ll have to trust me   )
12. Decidophobia – fear of making decisions (anyone who has ever seen me look at a menu or try to pick a movie knows all about it)
13. Dentophobia – fear of dentists  (I have an abnormally small jaw – I had to have four teeth pulled on top and on bottom so that they would not grow in on top of one another – so that dental dam raincoat thing used to make me gag, and then panic, unable to breathe, when I had significant dental work done as a child – bad teeth run in my family.  Plus the sound of a drill.  Dear God.  Last time I had a dentist appointment, all I recall of it was my dentist angrily  shouting “If you keep closing your mouth, we’re gonna have to turn down the gas!!!”  Now, also a product of my small jaw, but more so a product of hegemonic masculinity played out in sexual relations, anyone have a term for fear of blowjobs?  They don’t call it a “job” for no reason, ladies and gents!    )
14. Gamophobia – fear of marriage (I know I will not marry myself, it’s the heterosexual institution of marriage, and the definition thereof, that I fear)
15. Homilophobia – fear of sermons (Oh yes, both sermons given by random members of the general public, and those given by priests.  Last time I was dragged to a church by one of my father’s überreligious sisters the dude on the pulpit screamed about the church being “A ROCK!!!!” for about three torturous hours.  She lives in Alberta, Canada’s Texas   )
16. Kopophobia – fear of fatigue (I bet most bipolar folk are, and, in addition, I have an aunt who was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome just as she got her law practice off the ground.  Oh Minerva, please don’t let this happen to me…   )
17. Macrophobia – fear of long waits – (patience is NOT one of my, uh, many virtues   )
18. Metrophobia – fear of poetry or hate (what a bizarre coupling!  I fear the latter.  I think it began when blogs dedicated to hating on me began popping up.  Then my sister began to hate me.  Indeed, I hate hate)
19. Myctophobia – fear of the dark (I share this fear, dear commenter.  My new rainbow LEDs are nightlights for adults.  $39.99 at IKEA)
20. Neopharmaphobia -

fear of new drugs
( Suprised?  
Ever since
 I was given Loxapine upon my most recent
psych-related hospitalization,
almost exactly a year ago…
I couldn’t even
remember my name for five days, during which I was kept in seclusion, and during my few waking moments, could hear individuals being admitted for violent psychoses taking their time to “go down” after being injected with antipsychotics…  )

21. Nucleomitophobia – (since visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial at age 13, and seeing the bricks where a woman sat, waiting for the bank to open, and her shadow that remained, as she was vaporized when the “little boy” exploded)

22. Plutophobia – fear of wealth (fascinating etymology!  Every time some money comes my way, I start having panic attacks)

23. Pyrophobia – fear of fire (not so much anymore, but as a child I was terrified of fire.  During a mushroom trip – the one during which I decided to take on the persona of Diana, the huntress, for the day, dressing in a blue linen dress from folk fest that had about 10 pleats all jagged like that little pill Alanis sings of beginning at the mid-thigh – I realized it arose from seeing far too many of those signs on the backs of hotel room doors instructing guests what to do in case of fire.  I was cursed with the ability to read at a very young age.  Number one on the instruction list was always, in CAPS, “DO NOT PANIC!!!”, yes, replete with exclamation marks)

24. Seplophobia – fear of decaying matter (I will throw dishes away if they have been forgotten at the back of the fridge and turned into science experiements.  Usually I will shriek first)

25. Spheksophobia – fear of wasps (Again, sorry bees!  After living “north of Portage” in Winnipeg in August one year, when the garbage bins in back lanes start to steam in 40 degree weather, and wasps swarm as you wait for the bus, my fear increased dramatically  NB: If anyone has a copy of that Effexor ad where the woman is pictured with wasps swarming around her head, I will pay you for it.  $50-$100 range.  I make $888/month on disability at the moment, just to give you an idea of how much I want it)

26. Syngenesophobia – fear of relatives (read the last few posts and you will begin to understand why.  " >Especially this one and this one)

27.Textophobia – fear of certain textures (this is as close as I can get on a word to describe my fear of the texture of corrugated cardboard.  And wooden spoons…my first year roomies used to chase me around our apartment with them after learning of my fear!  Not nice!   )

28. Theophobia – fear of gods or religion (the latter, as it seems to be the cause of most wars and the horrible acts that lie therein, as well as the reason for inaction when such horrible things happen)

29.Traumatophobia – fear of injury (a fairly new one, due to " >near fatal car crash)

30. Vaccinophobia – fear of vaccination (as not to receive a barrage of hate mail, I will just direct you here.  Also see “Top 5 most commented posts” on the left sidebar)

Nice round number!  That was fascinating research, finding these, as well as others, like “fear of the figure 8″ (octophobia) and “fear of large things” (megalophobia) came up.  Now, be assured, I am scared if not terrified a great deal of the time, so please, do not think I am making fun of anyone else’s fears.  Ever.

scars

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I finally had my television turned back on today…my credit is so poor that my TV, Internet, and phone service is in my father’s name – if it were not, Telus, my new provider, would require a $900 deposit from me, to be refunded in 6 months, even though my months bills are a fair $91.44.  My already horrible credit (my first rapist, and also my first boyfriend, first spouse, and the first man to ever tell me I was pretty, maxed out a credit card I had been given by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce when I was seventeen.  I told them I was employed, which was, indeed, the case, but I vividly remember the bank teller casually telling me, “Ah, that’s alright, we can just skip that part [referring to information about one's employer], just a signature here, and… here!” before mailing off the application that would result in the delivery of a credit card with a $1500.00 limit  to me, still living at my dad’s house, in ten days.  I paid off my bill in full for six months, and then I began dating Josh (for the second time – he had already raped me, telling me that he was thrusting his large penis into my dry, chapped, vagina, because “every woman secretly wants to be raped!!!”

What a guy, born with the knowledge of the thoughts that resonate from the minds of all women, and being given this gift, this ability to enjoy raping women so much that it would become his hobby after we broke up – raping my friends, raping men – thus fulfilling those secret desires that lie deep in all of our minds, right ladies?  :eyeroll: :eyeroll: (I cannot speak to whether or not men share this dirty little secret)  He raped me one week after I returned from my first year of university at McGill in Montreal, Quebec, during which we kept up a long distance relationship, which we did a damn good job of – I managed to get pregnant (I had my first abortion at the first abortion clinic ever to open in Canada, the Morgentaler Clinic, where to be let in you had to pass $375.00 in cash, it had to be cash, to an agent behind bulletproof glass).  I told my dad I needed money for some expensive dental work and he did not question it, at least not to my knowledge.  If he did, I’m sure he thought I was using it to buy drugs, as he assumes I’m doing when I need extra money for items such as bathroom mats and laundry detergent today, ten years and two months later.  Yes, that’s it, father, I was just born with a penchant for putting things into my body that make it feel good for a short while and then really, really bad, sometimes for weeks, so bad that I, at seventeen when I was coming down off crystal meth, wished for death just as much as I feared it, as I felt my heartbeat pounding (you must be able to see it beating from the outside, I have to get out of here.  This here, the next here, there, everywhere, anywhere, and always nowhere).  He grew fond of giving head to his male roommates while I was away. But we were the model couple, in and out, until he dumped me a week after my return.

After a short period of sadness, I had the most amazing summer with my girlfriends – Jima., Maybe, and B., as well as our French male counterpart, Marc.  We moved in together before school started in the fall, as I had decided to leave “The Harvard of Canada” for the U of Winnipeg after my dad told me that if I continued to go to McGill, he would have to sell his 4000 square foot house (at that time inhabited by two people, him and little sister).

Oh well, I cannot find a job here in Vancouver that pays $60,000/yr for spending most of the day surfing Facebook like my roommate from first year, Katrina, and my “best friend” from high school, Anna Koz, have, just because it says that they graduated from McGill on their resumé, with a respectable 2.2 GPA at that!  I won a gold medal at my graduation from the University of Winnipeg, a gold medal, prize for best thesis, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Master’s Grant, valued at $17,500, though it was spent on medical bills rather than research on medicine.  I am not employable.  I digress.

“I hear many people say, if they hadn’t had drugs they would have killed themselves.  Do you feel that way?” a sympathetic Dr. Drew Pinsky asks a sex worker in the background, on the television.

The woman is every woman that has been raped multiple times, and there are millions of us, likely, billions, considering the large populations of China, India, and Africa, where rape is a daily expectation for many women who must walk several hours to fetch water for themselves and their children, along paths where men wait, fondling themselves in the brush, ready to threaten the next woman that passes by, ready with a machete to use as a tool of fear, a tool to make her do any sick request him or his compatriots demand.  Ready to make her make sounds of pleasure.  Ready to make her take it in all three holes.  Ready to make her call him, “Daddy”.  Here, in Canada, the questions are the same.  I know because I’ve heard them, over the past seven years I’ve heard them countless times.

“Well, I was at a party and my guy friends raped me,” the woman on the television begins her story.  The lack of emotion in her voice is disturbing, as I imagine the lack of emotion in my voice must be when I speak of my most recent rape.   More disturbing is the lack of surprise on the faces of audience members.

It has become not only acceptable, but expected, for women to be raped by men that they know, whether boyfriends or not.  Why are fathers not disgusted with their sons for thinking this is acceptable? Why are women not buying machetes of their own and cutting off penises?  Why did he choose me, did I look like a woman who was used to being raped, aside from the appeal of my white skin and blonde hair?  Why was I surprised that it happened again.  I do not think anyone else was (my family being the people I was with at the time).  Not only because of their general disinterest and the lack of emotion on their faces, but because of their comments that not only implied, but explicitly stated that I was somehow to be blamed.

“My best friend shot me up with cocaine, and after that, I started doing anything I could to get money for more.  My boyfriend, I thought he loved me, was pimping me out.  I was so happy with him, I was so in love.”

I remember the night in September, 2003, when I, drunk and being led back to Penner’s apartment for night, which of course would include sex, just like the sun rises each morning, said “Just tell me you love me already.” to my first rapist who had started calling our apartment a month earlier, and slowly and quickly worked his way back into our lives.  He was still beautiful, and I still did not know I was much more beautiful.  I did not know that he was ugly inside, a monster, a psychopath, a misogynist, a phoney, a plagiarist, a pimp in his own way.

The topic of the episode of Lifechangers, Dr. Drew’s latest show, that I do not have time to sit down and watch, is about how rape survivors trust people.  It would seem a raped woman would trust no one, but instead, we trust anyone who shows us kindness.  Some sick combination of Stockholm Syndrome, patriarchy, and dependence lead us to trust the worst people we could possibly select.

Then, the people that are supposed to really love us, our families and our friends, draw away, call us crazy, begin to hate us for making the same mistakes again and again and again – getting ripped off, conned by a snake oil salesman, a nice looking young man who makes a smart-sounding business proposal, a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a sheep in wolf’s clothing that looks like the opposite kind of fellow to us.

I don’t know which proposition I find more ridiculous: that we “put ourselves in situations” where rape is likely, or that there is no reason for us to be such poor judges of character, or the impossibility for those people that care so much, the fathers, the sisters, the best friends, to understand why we would want to get out of our heads for a little while, even with the assistance of a substance that could kill us – it’s not from a doctor, it could be rat poison of all we know!

How could we care so little?  How could we care at all.  How could we hurt our families again, and again, and again.  

“Jesus, Christ, scars, what the hell is the matter with you?!?!?!”

I swallow the large white caplet in the bottle marked Combivir.  It hurts as it inches its way down my esophagus.

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