ANTIPSYCHOTICS
ANTIPSYCHOTICS
First, a poem:
For Elizabeth V. Aldrich, who I didnāt really knowā
Good nothing. Top of the nothing to you. Itās Nothing in America. Just call me Angel, of the Nothing, baby. Just touch my cheek before you leave me, darling. Weāre having our nothing coffee, our nothing bagel, nothing OJ, reading the nothing funnies in the nothing paper. I have to go, I want to miss the nothing rush hour. Itās Friday nothing, donāt forget later today itās Erisā wake, people will be wearing black as itās the color of mourning. āUā are the letter that allows the word to bypass the if/then logic gate that otherwise forces the whole beginning of the day into being nothing.
āāāāāāā
I feel farther away from God when youāre talking. I said to the preacher.
āāā
āThis is to determine whether or not youāre still mentally ill.ā The exam made me very nervous. My identity, my benefits at risk. If I werenāt mentally ill it would cause such a vacuum in my life that I wouldnāt know what to fill with anything else. Not to mention disability if you want to talk dollars and cents. Some bureaucracy ripping that away from you.
Cronenberg was one of the examiners. They were doing an autopsy on a big breasted woman on the other side of the room, got mad, made me draw a tacky plastic curtain across. Elsewhere everybody was supposed to turn in their pistols. Turned out everybody had one except me. An elegant business goth woman in spectacles had a blunderbuss or one of those shorter pirateās pistoleros. It was like a thick polished pipe. Everyone was impressed.
It was nerve wracking. I never found out what their determination was but it made me want to cling to madness in that way that dreams have powerful unspoken motivations. While they were talking my finger tapped involuntarily and I hoped they saw that and it went into their files.
I remember (talking waking life now) in outpatient at Four Winds the guy with tardive dyskinesia. TD: thatās when an atypical antipsychotic side effect gives you uncontrollable lip and tongue movements that donāt go away even when you stop taking it. This old guy would shuffle into the room late on two canes, sucking spit and loudly smacking his lips literally every three or four seconds. He was a mess, a really cursed sufferer that was just being crushed like a bug on the Lathe of Heaven. It was one of the scariest specimens of suffering humanity I think Iāve ever seen. He couldnāt talk, couldnāt eat, couldnāt breathe. I mean he could, he was alive. But it looked like a living hell.
I take one of those drugs, that can do that over time. For a long time I freaked out over every tongue movement that seemed to be not on my say so. Tongue going on an involuntary tour of your teeth. Your mouth bones. Something about your lips tongue and jaw being not under your control anymore is extra terrifying. āFreedom of speech.ā Ha. Face not your own. A foreign body. A lot of people donāt take their psych medication out of fear of the autonomous mouth. Mental health rights activists challenge the mental health pharmacy industry. The body is sovereign. I make the decisions what goes into my body. I also go around to public buildings setting off fire alarms because thereās a fire hidden away in everything and itās speaking to me to be let out and when the cops show up I fight them and get taken away. Not āmeā but certain mental health cases āobjectors.ā It was all over this documentary I saw. This guyās fears of the side effects carried more weight than the public interest in not having to answer five false fire alarms a week and deal with a demented naked guy skateboarding around the streets causing havoc.
That other documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston: he had bipolar, wicked bad. He seemed happy at times. The closing credits to the movie is this tearjerking song and heās doing this Elvis Presley thing and posing and gesturing really big like heās the King, itās comedic, but his face ā is horrifying. Because itās so dead and lifeless and staring. The body is animated and doing clown shit, but the face is the grave. A mask. Heād been pumped so full of antipsychotics his whole life.
Iāve been thinking about writing autofiction about poverty. About EBT, snap benefits, the recertification process that gives me the heeby-jeebies every six months or whatever. Food stamps. How congress wants to cut benefits. Occasionally Iāll have this spasm like fuck it, I donāt even want to be on them any more if it means they have to look into my finances periodically. Itās enough to where you feel ashamed to make money. Because youāre miserable at accounting and you donāt know how to establish proof of income all the time. Worse for writers writing for the paper freelance and three times as hard when youāre a writer selling books you wrote. The IRS wants to know and your local social services center wants to know, about every nickel you make. I sometimes have these catastrophizing glimpses into the future where Iām living under a bridge in Binghamton, NY: no teeth, big gray beard. I eat at a soup kitchen where nice people try to talk to me but Iām too far gone into the mental to make contact anymore, and I sleep in a pile of cardboard. I donāt talk to my family. Iām mentally ill and living on the streets. I smell demonic. This whole writing thing is gone. I just have a tattered pocket sized Bible with me. Iām stuck in Psalms and Proverbs, like a skipping record and I donāt understand how to read words anymore. Iām afraid to read too much about the minor Old Testament prophets because I might be one. I am one. A new prophet come to earth to give a final message in the end times.
Can you imagine being one of the minor prophets? A plagiarist. Unoriginal. Doing covers of someone elseās hits. You just are brought in like as the opening band the audience screams at and throws beer bottles at because they want to see Fugazi or Muhammad or some big act. Theyāre impatient to get you out of the way. You just hold up a cardboard sign saying YOU HAVE GONE ASTRAY. You have no sauce, nothing spicy to distinguish yourself apart from the crowd of other minor prophets. Like auditioning actors in the waiting room going over lines of prophecy. Whoās going to get the big break. And tell us all something new, something about the large spiritual machinery weāre supposed to be driving but canāt even adjust the mirrors before driving out in traffic to collide with each other. Spiritual collisions, whiplash to the neck. Getting T-boned but spiritually, by life. Minor prophets are in the end of the OT before Jesus Christ come into the book in act two and brings the house down. Before he shows up everybody hurry, thatās when everybody goes to the bathroom during the show, a lull in the programming.
āāāāā-
Hereās something I wrote that isnāt fully formed. It was rejected by Donāt Submit. Aināt that a bitch. The title refers to Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Ridley Scott.
CARPENTER / CRONENBERG / SCOTT
The shuriken on the Escape From New York table were
from Lee Van Cleefās personal collection.
The blood test scene from The Thing made me so sad, the sad look on Palmerās face before heās revealed as the thing. How did it know how to be so human. I guess Palmer was almost portrayed by Jay Leno. Would an alien perfectly imitating a terrible stand up comedian get no laughs too? Garry Shandling was also looked at.
Would a perfect imitation of me know to be crazy. Would it be bullseye.
Your face has to appear at least five times
on public security camera every day.
They canāt install cameras in your house.
Itās a new law. Get you out in the public square so you can be tallied.
The visionās body language translated through my father. You see your parents randomly in the crowd in public, like stray pixels, after you hit a certain age and youāre living independently. Facial recognition in a crowd. People with bipolar disorder with psychotic features are worse at interpreting emotional cues in other peoples resting facial expressions: you always look mad to us.
Iām just this side of the gibberish-boundary.
Come to find out, itās nothing like dying.
Youāll settle for tautologies like
āIt is what it is.ā
Foaming with envy.
Goldblum sending floozies through the teleporter to be his queens.
Just realized today that an ex girlfriend
looked like a young, female HR Giger.
Being in her apartment with her was like
being in an enclosed space with a hostile lifeform.
Hopelessness antennae we are.
The FX budget of delusions is blockbuster.