Moon of Cheesers

One o’clock in the afternoon.

A conversation I had made me think about flat earthers and cheese mooners, and the ones who deny that astronauts ever landed on the moon. I guess I need more information about this before I can defend the facts of science intelligently from a tide of misinformation that too many people are willing to believe; before I speculate on why this is happening in this country, and what can be done to turn it around. I may consider it a project to do myself, until I lose interest or I sufficiently prove my point. Maybe it’s not worth the hassle. But it’s very frustrating to stand by and watch what we’re doing to ourselves. The actual dumbing down of America is not about our religious values but instead the loss of our knowledge. We accept quackery sooner than legitimate science and we can’t discriminate the difference. It’s as if our food supply was poisoned and everyone suffered a pandemic of psychosis. 

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Travesties

Eleven thirty at night.

It is still 82 degrees in the house after a 100 degree day. The cloudless sky was white with the heat and heaven was a long ways away, unless the kingdom of God is within us, held within inner space and created through human thought. Keats wanted to know if poetry has the power to unite people with a better world, an otherworld of spirit, like the Platonic ideal. If we’ll ever know, the time may be getting close for revelation. So far we’ve seen no sign of the coming of Jerusalem, while the sun from a clear sky bakes everybody to a raisin. Were we dumb to believe in Kingdom Come? For the first two years of my recovery I went to church every Sunday morning, believing to be safe. Over time, the antipsychotic grew more effective and the angels fell from heaven like meteors. Perhaps I was a fool. My knowledge of modern science returned: the earth is now just a ball floating in space, orbiting the sun for a complete circuit every year. No heaven and no hell. I was freed from a silly illusion spread by the Church.

The veterinarian returned my call this evening regarding my dog’s moods: to my dismay she suggested putting him on doggie Prozac and calling the Humane Society for advice. Can she be serious? A dog on Prozac? I absolutely refuse to agree to such a thing. Aesop would be bouncing off the walls and just a mixed up mess. Prozac is a terrible drug for people, let alone for a poor dog. Again I have to take the law into my own hands and reply a stentorian negative. Doggie psychiatry is a complete bullshit. 

Raising Consciousness: a Letter

Also this afternoon I started reading the Theodore Sturgeon novel. It begins right away with content about insanity and terrible violence, so I don’t know if I’ll read further. It upset me because of its ignorance of mental illness and autism. To Sturgeon, psychopathology is just a blanket field for insanity and idiocy. The story was written in the fifties, when I suppose very little was known about mental health problems, especially among the general public. It was people like him who were guilty of spreading misinformation about “insane” people, and who made it something to be afraid of. My mind went from there to thinking about my brother, who still believes everything he sees on television, having grown up during the tv generation. Frankly I can’t stand people who believe television before they accept reality that is right in front of their noses. My brother’s attitude totally sucks, but no amount of talking to him can change his mind. For him, Alfred Hitchcock is reality, and he’s scared to death of mental illness; which means he’s also afraid of me.

I believe that people should unplug not only their tv but also avoid the movies, or at least watch them with a discriminating eye. Trust experience of immediate reality rather than a lying media.

So that was my little stint with “light reading” today. And the rest of the day I spent mostly napping.

I do think that consciousness is slowly being raised for the phenomenon of mental illness, but the progress is painful and laborious because of the myths we have to bust. Our worst enemy, as in everything, is fear of the unknown. People generally fear what they don’t understand, and misunderstand what they fear.

Soured on the Screen

I just had a strange memory from eighth grade: I used to have my own black and white tv set down in my bedroom, with no cable connection. I could get two channels, ABC and NBC. I watched a lot of sitcoms by myself, my favorite of which was probably Taxi. This makes me emotional to think of. I wonder why I never think about what I saw on tv anymore? It wasn’t all trash, or was it?

Four thirty. Even as late as 1999, I still watched some television. Except where they were misinformed about mental illness especially, network tv shows were generally good and humanizing. Yet I can see why I got turned off of the media. My siblings were addicted to the movies, and believed everything they saw concerning mental illness on the big screen. My friend Kate hated the movie Rain Man for its misconception about autism. Specifically, there’s no such thing as an autistic savant. But my sister still takes the Hollywood version of autism for the truth, even after I tried to explain to her the fallacy. And then there are the movies about schizophrenia, which do more harm than good. The Soloist was a lousy film, but again, my siblings believed it before they would try to understand me, the real thing. And whenever a case of violence done by mentally ill people got splashed over the media, my brother was reinforced in believing that all of us are violent. The upshot of all this was that I unplugged myself from everything having to do with television. But of course my family is still hooked on the lies they are fed. All I can do is keep writing what I know.