Back in 2008 when the shit storm incinerated the first 20 years of my adulthood, I made an oath while dragging what’s left of a . . . of a bespoke walking stick through four inches of gray ash – some sizeable went aloft and rode a breeze – only to land in some other year; this oath was directed at loss, or better, surviving loss which is always, always more painful than the combustion of mortality which is hard-wired to flee extinction.
Appointed to this life: Two tiny, perpendicular scratches amidst millions of other’s noting everyone’s start and finish on (what we’d like to believe) linear straight-edge of time. And my time – time as living – a selfish amalgamation of loneliness, caution, exposure, intimacy, maturity, judgement, patience, learning, strife, letters, confessions, achievement, and the likely propagation of another generation or the unlikely dog-eared page noting a dead end by a period placed unerringly after the last letter of the last name annotating The End, A Willful Extinction. The simple decision to stop production thus beholden to past generations, or, the decision of propagation thus bound to the future.
We’re putting a stop to this tributary of our bloodline; my older brother never purposely or haphazardly discovered the merits of fatherhood, and I, being of the gay-persuasion fell in-love when fatherhood and matrimony were simply off-limits; thusly denying my partner and I any marginal hope to have children. My partner yearned to have a child, Jack (because I simply grew tired of our constant referral to “It”), but by the time the stork delivered to same-sex households, I, in all honesty, was too old and too tired and too responsible to entertain my partner’s fundamental need to nurture. My father was well beyond my reach; that life, that engaging and interested life, was at least a decade before I consciously understood that I was bereft of any gargantuan, mitt-like hand to hold. And that sadness burrowed deep, deeper than any other heretofore denial ever tunneled. And honesty foretold of my family’s dearth in the health department by my adult-life diagnosis of a mental illness, a disease, not a sickness or an infection or a fever but a disease, not an alien landing, not a vampire, and not a plague, but a disease nonetheless. Mental illness is handled, not treated but handled by this nation’s body politic. It’s a dispassionate and treacherous handling, like the negotiating cop that placated the felon’s demands until one, perfectly aimed .32 caliber round stops the demands. “They” know how to dilute the alleged discrimination; the mistreatment of patients in county facilities; blaming us, the patients, for their on-going ignorance and antiquated seclusion as a “well-informed, empathetic, and public safety response” to the irrational and grossly illogical . . . blah-blah-blah. . . Um, hello, hello? (is this thing on?) mental illness is a disease as bona fide as cancer or chronic kidney failure (except mental illness lacks a “celebrity endorsement).
And yet, we’re not alone: patients-in-general have devolved into a 15-minute generic; that is, the disappearance of importance, the disinterest of ailments, suffering, and cause. Today’s Western Medicine Patient has become an Accounts Receivable entry in the ledger; a doctor’s statistic of efficiency; appointment number 58. We as patients have been reduced to a test result followed by a prescription or passed along like a troublesome foster child to a series of specialists and more tests and more prescriptions.
It’s a cold and alienating model of efficiency and profit, and we, the patients, the commodity are fought over by insurers and institutions chanting “To Hell With Life!”
41.994063
-87.673996
Mania is rich with almost-entertaining stories of bravado, of haphazard action, of disobeying most laws, of discarding sexual partners like “he loves me, he loves me not” petals. But to a Manic, his/her episode could last years resulting in an incoherent swath of personal wreckage whose repetition finally drained even a mother’s irrevocable devotion (tucked in the coffee can behind the flour); The Manic loves a great party yet never buys a round. The Manic’s desperate all in bluff with a pair of five’s causes a stumble, then a slip, finally sinking to Mania’s Skid Row: rancid, broke, estranged, lost, and nameless. Until Sanity emerges from her safe place dragging you past leering, inflated, lobby guards who toss their opinions about each other like outfielders in a softball game.
Sanity does her best to shield Mania from their sickening taunts; too late: liking to the daring distillers in Scotland (less than two %) who cross the authority of majority by bottling their whisky unfiltered and unadulterated, Mania scoops up her life’s residue and bits of character and leaps over the guard stand tackling two and beating the outspoken guard screaming, “However I am, I’m still human!” It is said three guards and a janitor finally regained control and thus depositing Mania somewhere deep within the bowels of Sanity.
HARLAN DIDRICKSON 