from Alabama to Texas where i promptly go to jail, part 1

A little context. the day i went to jail was November 19th 1994. I got to my mom's house perhaps it was the 23rd. approximately 3 days in jail. overheard one guy in jail say that 3 days dead is 7 years in hell. sounds right to me. Let's take a digression a week or so previously i was in a small city in Alabama. i'm unclear which one but a quick consult of a map cd let me know but for now i was as lost in person as i am in recall, and asides from subtle clues that i was in the deep south and not in Houston Dorothy. So earlier that day a guy picked me up at a diner where i had my tarot cards out, hoping to make some sort of contact. Guy drove me to a bar in said small city in Alabama and wished me well. i set up my tarot and offered readings. I guy i read for said he wasn't sure but that i might be able to stay at his house. We walked a long ass way to who the hell knows this hitchhiker dude who is having a chill time, while the guy i am with is worry that his weird roommate wont let me stay. I guess his worries worked cuz the roommate was weirded out by me and said no. this is where it gets weird. The Guy take a slice of paper and draws an automatic map. it involved crossing a graveyard, and turning right at the crown. I have a bag of change of clothes, but i've been in my man in black uniform a couple of days. I walked out of the cemetery as a small cluster of college types all burst into laughter. 1 of them happens to be looking at me as i emerge from the graveyard, dressed all in black, i said "Nothing happened." and walked away while he tried to tell his friends what that just missed. i got to the crown, which was a liquor store sign. i turned right and a house was obviously the place. weird music played and i suddenly felt really shy. i sat on the curb and had the nerves. "I have this map, you see…". a couple came out and asked me WTF but in a kindly way. i guess the party was winding down, i was offered a a spot on the patio, with some bedding. The music could have been Nurse With Wound, it could have been ethno-musicological recordings. Currently i am listening to the last Throbbling Gristle record before their breakup and re-union and who knows how things stand now that Stinky is dead. But Heathen Earth is haunting and beautifull, recorded before a select audience. Cosy Fanny Tuti is my greatest inspiration as a guitarist. (short list: Mary D'Nellon of the Virgin Prunes, Robert Quine of the Voidoids Marc Ribot who i first heard on a Tom Waits album. Only really heard Keiji Haino recently, but i would have spent retarded amounts of money on overpriced imports if i had known.) watch this space for the actually events leading up to a story that has a point. i have my own way of reaching the point but stick w/ me and we'll get to jail in Beaumont TX, we'll get out, we'll even get to my mom's house and finish this piece off w/ the poem i wrote about coming home after going all the way. It ends "Well, that's not funny, me and my frenz, dig, we're going home."

SF Bluegrass & Old Time Festival After Party

i love all kinds of music, but don't have much knowledge about current bluegrass, but once hitchhiking in New Mexico got a ride from an astronomer who was stopping at a bluegrass festival up the mountain a ways - it was green, the stage was taken by family group after another, each one more heartbreaking than the one before. They mostly wore hand sewn 'uniforms' outfits i guess is the right word. costumes. Simple or dressy, the music was magick. here in the City i take in a lot of local music, my friend Bob formerly of Fluff Grrl died last sunday. I just got back from a trip to Harbin Hot Springs as a guest of an employee who also happens to be the poet laureate of Lake county, an interesting twist of fate for a guy i knew 'back in the day' when we were scruffy spoken word artists who didn't deign to write down our moments of glory, or i didn't - i spoke off the cuff, called it a poem and generally got away w/ it for almost an entire decade. When i get up tomorrow i am, under the advice of a Tarot reader, going back to work on my novel, or writing at the very least. I am the epitome of the sensitive artist, psuffering entirely imagined anguish, my friend Emrys has over a hundred short films of me, a lot of it is meant to be funny, some of it is extremely offensive to somebody if not everybody, but the point of the whole shoot was to undergo a transformation. i'll not send you the link until i know you better. i don't think there is anything in the whole ouvre that i couldn't watch w/ my mom, tho my sister who is the kind of devout christian who didn't let my nephew see the Harry Potter films, or read the books would be horrified at some of the ways i disrespect religion in some of them. I have been away from home a lot recently, over President's Day Weekend i went to the Pagan Convention they hold every year, for many years now in the Doubletree Hilton in San Jose. for some reason i forgot my pain medicine, and a lecture on Gender and Spirituality may have sound good when i first looked at the schedule, but once the time rolled around i wasn't in teh mood.

A friend Blake who is an atheist, bipolar like myself, and actually being the person with the right perspective who cd tell me that he didn't think i was on the right medicine. I took his advice and told the psychiatric nurse practitioner i didn't want to take the anti-seizure drugs any more, and was willing to give time released lithium a try, even tho regular lithium had sucked an epic amount of my personality away. as my lover of the season told me, I was over medicated. My 'she's not a doctor and i don't want to write out psychiatric nurse practitioner everything, but Alice is half chinese and the other some european i haven't quized her on the details of her ancestry. Alice is fresh and young and beautifull, is lulled into thinking as she has been taught that is best to adjust meds gradually and a much more aggressive previous pyschiatrist had gotten really good results. it took months of crying everyday to admit a willingness to take an anti-depressant again. we decided that from my insurance co.'s formulary that LexaPro was new and worth a try. i tried lowering the dose cuz it seemed that i was rather manic, cut the dose didn't work, so we tried increasing this. Voila! no more tears.

i am much more at peace, but after listening to me ramble the last half hour my roommate Lizie said "Get your manic ass to bed." it takes my pills about 4 hours to force me to sleep, but i surrender most nites w/out the epic insomnia that haunted my life until recently. i credit the homeopathic treatment i received for 'racing thoughts' made of coca. yes, that coca, but the Dr. describes it as a whole plant extract. i don't know how, but he's an old hippy looking guy who is an M.D. and a homeopath and i don't say his name anymore cuz he keeps giving me proscribed remedies.

A rant i deleted from a well meaning aphorists wall - and i forget what kind phrase with hidden venom set me off

when it comes to taking the stairs and an assessment of the state of my arthritis your phrase might add a few years of being able to take the stairs in my gradually decline until i am old enough to be a candidate for knee replacement surgery. in that context i find your quote usefull. it might be, if applied consistently - nay, relentlessly! it might prove to a state achieve-able in my bipolar cycles - a state that when i am in it, might be the fulcrum from which i can move myself in better mental health. but i have a cyclical disease that is poorly understood, and most medicines used to treat were developed for seizures, or are weird little medicines in the category Atypical that have a long list of effects, that if you are the lucky combination of factors they admit they don't understand that you will feel better. the house of cards came down when i started taking a new asthma medicine whose number one warning was 'may cause suicidal ideation' and the may turned into "and that whole list of other psychiatrist symptoms thrown in just for kicks!"

in other words i flinch reading your statement. it feels cruel, and unforgiving towards the damaged and ineffective. it seems to have an inner architecture of isolation and the competitiveness that seems to be a compulsion of the western mind, and widely felt by all - competition in the sense of an word that comes between compassion and cooperation, one kind of behaviour exhibited by living creatures. as a man who had dreamed fantastic dreams as a young man, stripped from me by mental illness and a cruel world's response to that expression of my inner world was incredibly violent. i am permanently damaged. Like in Spinal Tap "if you want to get louder you go to 11." i have long since hit the 10 barrier. we got 10 on the pain scale as a daily experience. later today i return to physical therapy. parallel to the cruel world that commits acts of violence upon my person if i persist in saying crazy things - is a world of healers some of whom have enough craft to allow the natural compassion to manifest in my body as acts of healing. but the healing is slow, and the vulnerable are a constant target.

i appreciate the phrase as it operates as way of encouraging the faltering. it hurts my feelings to imagine the way people might express that sentiment who are not coming from a place of heart felt expressions of Service - "does this help?" is the stance of good hearted people, but the cruel and heartless use similar, more hatefully phrased, like the charming euphemism for firing that alcoholic who was good in a pinch and for god's sake he has a family: trimming the dead wood.

sorry to rant. in fact i wont. i will repost to my page and not polute your page w/ dissent: i feel that you post this because you think it might be inspiring. having had poor health my entire adult life - entirely invisible poor health, asides from the hippy extreme to which i have let the freak flag fly you mostly wd see a robust guy in his late 40s who looks pretty damn good for his age.