Colonoscopy

Two fifty. Almost time to go to my appointment. A date with fate in a black taxi. I’m not having a good day. This tablet is freaking me out. I posted a rant about how I feel to my blog. It’s been a long day and it isn’t over yet. I feel the way most artists do when privacy is menaced.

One o seven. I need to figure out what is really bugging me lately, and I think it’s my coming colonoscopy. I complained of an invasion of privacy, and a camera up the butt can be no other than that. So I might as well talk about my feelings rather than let them infiltrate all my other thoughts. I feel that a colonoscopy is not only an invasion, but also a violation, even though I know it’s supposed to help me. Medical procedures, from a psychological point of view, are often strangely sexual. I feel the same way about psychotherapy. The bottom line is the word rape, and the word violence is related to the French viol, for rape. Once, when I was psychotic, I was in a bathroom of a phlebotomist and saw lingam and yoni in all the plumbing. The faucet looked like a phallus, the basin like a womb. I wonder if everyone has that experience subconsciously? Likewise, the fiber optic tube of a colonoscopy resembles a very long phallus inserted up the rectum and into the colon. So that whoever invented the procedure was probably anal sadistic, to use a Freudian term. I’m likely making too much of a fuss over a little thing. Everyone over fifty years old undergoes this operation, but still I must confess that I’m not mentally prepared for it…

The Plan

Aesop and I slept like spoons for a while. I dreamed that my brother was in terrible shape from alcoholism. His body reeked of ethanol. He was emaciated and weak. Basically he was like me before I stopped drinking. I call to mind a story I wrote when I was in high school. The antihero was a confusion of the identities of my brother and me. For a long time I believed that Jeff and I were like twins, sharing the same alcoholic fate. In recent years however I have broken this icon and discarded it. The tale I wrote was lost in the fire, which is just as well. A year ago I hardened my heart against my brother. We had an argument over my birthday gift, which happened to be an Amazon Fire tablet. As if significantly, the house fire ensued two months later, and the Fire tablet was in the wreckage. Also in the ruins was the Carl Jung anthology I had just purchased. And I haven’t spoken with Jeff since then. I could be rearranging the story in hindsight to make everything fit. Then again, the order of it could have been preplanned— and not by my conscious mind.

Renaissance People

For once, the sky is clear and a little green, with the sun a big fireball of orange. I haven’t thought much about how it’s wintertime, or about global warming. Some people of a social science persuasion deny that it’s happening. Or they rationalize it, saying the earth goes through ice ages periodically anyway, regardless of human beings. Why don’t people pool information from all disciplines together and agree on things? Instead, psychologists bicker with hard scientists, likely because they lack the mathematical ability. Don’t the different camps of knowledge have something to learn from each other? When will some Renaissance Man or Woman come forward and pronounce the truth for everyone? Surely someone with an encyclopedic mind exists and can do this for us? Who will it be? And how much time do we have?

Mental Chess

Warning: Sexual content

Quarter after three. In a violent erotic fantasy, I turned the tables on Sheryl the therapist. It was a necessary step for my sexuality. The catalyst for it was reading some brutal William Faulkner. Sheryl had me convinced that I was submissive and gay, but I finally turned it around in fantasy to myself being dominant and straight. It was up to me to undo the damage done by so-called therapy. No amount of further therapy with women would’ve helped. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many male therapists in my area, no one to teach assertiveness anymore. With me and Sheryl it was always a power struggle. Towards the end she was losing control over my sessions, and that panicked her. She was a mean sort of person, disliked by her coworkers. I didn’t like her either. Her project was to dominate and subvert her clients and be a little Hitler. She played mind games with people. I only saw her for ten months, but it was enough to get me messed up for time to come. The final analysis is that sexuality is entirely a state of mind and of power, of dominance and submission, of male and female. Strength begins with the mind and not necessarily the body. Perhaps masculine and feminine are merely states of mind, of spirit or principle. One is active and the other passive. I’m not sure. But I’m done with mental chess with little Hitlers.

Musing Aloud

Six thirty. My burrito was good. Aesop wants his water refreshed. I told him ten minutes. Just now I gained my 212th follower. The nightfall feels comforting to me:— Hail, venerable night! From the dawn of humankind the rhythm of the night is ever tuned to dreams and phantasmagoria. For me it’s an inward turning, a peering into the well of the self. Even though waking, in the darkness I dream. I can imagine my Great Aunt Nina doing her Rosicrucian in a dark room with a candle and a mirror. And indeed I’ve felt the presence of a ghost in my machine before. It observes everything I do and misses nothing of my surroundings. It is objective and keeps a tally of the moral merits of anything I do. It is the being that dreams. It basically is conscience, as with Edgar Poe’s William Wilson, the murder of whom constitutes the murder of the narrator himself. The doppelgänger is killed, so now the man is free to gamble and drink himself to death. Poe suggests the vital compensation provided to the ego by the unconscious. Severing this relationship spells doom to the individual… And so night comes, setting the stage for dreams to make their visit. Do dreams speak the truth, though it never be admitted by us? It’s a running moral commentary, a ceaseless newsreel of deeds and misdeeds. Although such observations were first made centuries ago, I can’t imagine the utter breakdown of human conscience. There’s always someone awake to keep people fair and honest. The morality of human nature will never perish, despite the abuses of the unjust. Compensation always comes around… Merely thinking aloud again.

Platonism for Real

Two o’clock. The psychosis has departed to leave me reflective and a little sad. I feel like the lyric to a 1995 King Crimson song, “One Time.” It basically wishes for a one time reprieve from everything that is bad in life and hopes for an open hand. I like the song just for its honest expression of depression. If it weren’t a progressive rock tune, it’d be the blues. Now I wonder concerning the relationship between depression and the more severe mental illnesses. It seems to me that our natural state is to be happy, or anyway, happiness is our duty to society. Perhaps the farthest thing removed from joy is schizophrenia, and yet I never did anything to deserve it. Genetics is genetics. How amazing it would be if biology could be entirely psychologized. If the physics could be reduced to a state of behavior, an attitude of mind— to a verb rather than a noun, it would revolutionize the field of behavioral health. And this may be the trend anyway. On the other hand, could any schizophrenic person ever function without medication? Imagine finding a way to modify gene expressions just by altering the behavior. What we call “spiritual” could be the underpinning for mood, and in turn, mood could give rise to material reality as we know it. Then the songs we play and sing actually form moods into concrete existence. Therefore, depressing songs like “One Time” may someday be eliminated as unhealthy and counterproductive… Just thinking aloud…

Maverick?

I don’t trust anyone to know anything important, so is that the basis of the schizophrenia? I once trusted my psychiatrist’s opinions, but when he insulted me I left him. Implicitly I still refer to him for answers. But it also turned out that he was withholding information from me regarding my meds. The antipsychotic I was on eventually gave me arrhythmia and occasioned a hospital stay. Then I began to perceive Dr T— as a dictator. Ever since, no authority figure has been stable for me. Kate disapproved when I wanted to fire him— but by and by I left her too. I’ve been just a maverick after that. The only truth I know is rooted in my past with the two of them, and it was scientific certainty… Dr T— was my shrink for twenty five years, then when he called me a homeless bum on three occasions I finally rebelled in a big way. Perhaps I did the wrong thing, and my sister would take his side just as Kate did? I only know that all the certainty in my life has been shaken to the foundation, and the only one who can repair the damage is myself. But there’s an exception to the things going wrong, and that is the sobriety I’ve managed to pull off since firing my psychiatrist. Is this just a coincidence?