At this point I think I can safely and
proudly say that I am no longer just an internet madman since that
insanity is now no longer apparently confined to the information
superhighway. That's fucking right, I spent a week in the loony
house and I'm all the better for it. And I'll tell you folks
something, that shit was a fucking learning experience no matter how
you look at it.
Let's start off near the beginning,
though. I am a man who gets spectacularly depressed for no apparent
reason. It just happens in a seasonal fashion. I am a diagnosed
Bipolar II person, which means whenever women now bitch about going
on their periods get ridiculously moody and men don't understand,
fuck you I understand. And I can argue that mine might even be worse
because at least yours stops when your biological clock is up;
there's no cure for mine. And at least your erratic moodswings don't
(hopefully) make you suicidal. Mine do. I have thought about
suicide enough that it's become mundane to me. When I get up in the
morning, I think about what I'm going to have for breakfast, how the
rest of the day is going to go, and how great it would be if I were
dead. And don't give me that look. It's not like I actually
considered going through with it, but the thought was always... well,
there. It was a big pink elephant in the room that happened to be
holding a noose going “I'M GONNA GETCHA EVENTUALLY, YOU LITTLE
CUNT,” and I read that in the voice of an 1800s prospector and now
you did too.
Now Bipolar is basically moodswings.
Bipolar II is basically your moodswings kick your face into the mud
and you hate yourself as a person. If I were to liken how it works,
it would be like if I dropped a rubber ball off of the roof of a
hospital, because we found shit like that fun growing up before we
had the internet. We also thought beating each other with sticks was
fun, but bear with me there's more to this. Now the ground would be
suicidal thoughts and intuitions, and Jimmy's bed on the second floor
would be the baseline since he's confined in bed that's a story off
the ground, which makes sense because Jimmy doesn't know much of
happiness since his legs don't work due to his drunk father
accidentally backing over him in his youth and now he has terminal
cancer at fifteen, but it works for this metaphor so get off my case.
The ball would bounce, but every time the peak would be just a bit
lower below Jimmy's view, coming a little bit closer to the ground
with each bounce. And as the laws of gravity and God hating children
dictate, that ball will eventually stop bouncing and just lie on the
ground, and that's when I would've decided that offing myself would
probably be a great idea. And I used the ground to depict suicide in
this metaphor because Jimmy eventually just jumped out his window and
painted the pavement with his cancer-infected brain matter, but fuck
him because this story's about me.
I did not want my brain matter over
anybody's pavement, nor did I want to confront my problems like a
man, so I did the best thing I could do; I went to the hospital and
told them I wanted to off myself and they should magic a way into
helping me because otherwise I would walk out and jump off the top of
the parking garage and leave them with a fantastic lawsuit that would
probably cover the funeral costs for my family. Now you're probably
wondering “Hey, if you're suicidal, why would you ask for help?
Aren't you attention-whoring?” No I'm not, and here's why: people
attempt suicide because they want help, they need somebody to catch
them before they fall again. They frequently don't have any actual
intentions of going through with it, it's just like they're playing
mental chicken. That's just what psychology permits. People commit
(keyword here) suicide because they no longer want to be alive. If
somebody has honest intentions of their life, there's nothing you can
do to stop them. It's as easy as going to your local Rite Aid,
getting two bottles of sleeping pills, choking them down with liquor,
and then going to lie down and float in a reservoir until your senses
give in and you sink to the depths and achieve that eternal peace
you've always wished for. Killing yourself is remarkably easy, it's
a matter of having the stones to do it. Most people don't. I have
attempted it before, and I did it without a second thought. And
while the voice of logic in my head still told me it was a bad idea, I decided to
get help before that voice was stifled by the erratic and rampaging
emotions that ever so frequently seized control. I went there
voluntarily. Then the Marshall asked me about how we should go about
it.
“Well, the easiest way to get you
into a clinic immediately would be a 5150.” she said.
“Which is... ?”
“Danger to oneself, others, or
gravely disabled. Which means you'll be top priority to go to a
psychiatric hospital and under a 72-hour hold.”
“Okay, let's do that.”
“Alright, you'll be under the
72-hour hold, there's no going back now since it's involuntary.”
she said. This perplexed me.
“...but I came here by my own
volition.” I stated.
“That you did.”
“So it's voluntary.”
“Yes it is.”
“But you just said that a 5150 is an
involuntary 72-hour hold.”
“That it is.”
“...so I'm voluntarily admitting
myself to a psychiatric hospital involuntarily?”
“So it seems.”
“...I must be fucking crazy.”
“Well, we have two places, you can
go to Fremont Hospital.”
“Eh, there's a Taco Bell in Fremont
that gave me dysentery once.” I say, as if there's a Taco Bell that
didn't. “Where else can I go?”
“John George Psychiatric Pavilion.”
“Sounds fancy, where's that?”
“Close to East Oakland.”
I arrived at Fremont Hospital late
Wednesday night. I was checked in by paramedics. Everything on my
person was taken from me. This included my shoes of all things.
Well, I could've had my shoes if I removed the laces. Having things
that I could apparently strangle myself with was a no-no. They asked
me several questions about how I was feeling, why I was there, and
why in God's good nonexistent name would I have them haul me out
there at eleven in the god-damn night. I was apathetic to all of
these questions. They honestly didn't mean much to me. I was tired
and finally away from my family, so I just wanted to go to sleep.
Sleep sounded nice. Sleep always sounded nice.
That's what the suicidal thoughts were
tied to; exhaustion. Never an adamant hatred for what God had
against me, nor a tremendous sorrow for everything in my life that
had gone unsalvageably wrong. Just exhaustion of every and all
events. An all-encompassing and nihilistic emptiness, a long-sought
silence from all the dogs barking inside my head. The sinister
voices in my head that kept me tossing in bed until the sun rose, the
meandering psychosis and paranoia that showed up and did whatever it
wanted, that I could merely watch ruin my life and leave to have me
scramble to scrape up the pieces. It's a lot like being in the
backseat of a car being driven by somebody incredibly drunk, where
there's nothing you can say to that person to make them stop driving
like a fucking nut. So basically Tuesday and Thursday mornings when
my mother took me to school.
So while I slept, I had a roommate.
That was a different experience, I haven't slept in the same room
with somebody else since the last time I had to share a hotel with my
family up in Canada. I was paranoid, high-strung, and was terrified
for my life because I was completely isolated from everybody I knew,
and I had a man who was detained because of a trip on jimson weed
spazzing out in his bed every five to ten minutes as my roommate. As
would be expected, that first night of sleep wasn't as elegant as I
would've wished for. Tomorrow though, I was able to get on meds. Oh
boy oh boy, which meant meeting a Psychiatrist assigned to the
hospital to keep everybody in check. Fun fact: did you know that in
the entire Psychological line of professions that Psychiatrists have
the highest rate of depression and suicide? And man I'll tell you,
my assigned psychiatrist was no different. He always had that
glassy-eyed and perpetually-ill look to his face like he had just
gotten done crying. He looked like a Holocaust victim at Auschwitz
that found out the porridge that just gave him dysentery was made
from his family's ashes by the Hitler Youth. I mean I couldn't blame
the guy; he works in a mental hospital where his job is to get a
brief look into somebody's miserable life and due to his line of
work, his only job is to throw pills at people until they are fixed.
There's a good chance that he'll fail, and he'll see them come back
to that wretch place again, still fucked up and needing help. Then
he'll throw more and hope those work. He can't talk to them; that's
what the clinical psychologists, therapists, and social workers do.
His job is to listen to how miserable they are, and simply watch as
his diagnosis inevitably fails to help these people. I would
probably be back there again eventually if I became a Psychiatrist.
There were three floors to the
hospital. The first floor is for the normalish people, the people
who have had minor psychotic episodes in their life (as if such a
thing exists) and are just in need of temporary care. The second
floor are for the slightly crazier people, and the third floor is for
the people who need to be tied down to their beds, because likely I
would assume their meds would cause them to fly so high into the air
that they would be dancing among the ethereally departed above the
hospital. I was on the second floor, and there were some fucking
characters on the second floor. Some of them were the kinds of
people who made me feel normal. Who made me—an alcoholic internet
terrorist who writes stories about his penis turning into German
ducks fornicating—feel normal.
One woman was very nice and worldly;
she seemed like a housewife in her late forties. She was technically
homeless and was there for setting a grocery cart on fire and they
were concerned for her mental health. I honestly couldn't see why,
she seemed like somebody who just got arrested and was put here
instead of a jail or other correctional facility. But have you ever
had that moment? You know that moment where you're talking to
somebody who seems completely normal, but then in the middle of the
conversation, they just nonchalantly bring something up that makes
you realize that something might be slightly off-kilter? When I was
talking to this woman, she was talking about earlier events in her
life about being a nutritionist, living in Virginia, and how she died
a few years ago and was brought back to life by Michael Jackson and
that she knew the world was going to end in 2020. I screamed
internally “OH MY GOD I'M TALKING TO A CRAZY PERSON” and without
changing expression simply replied with a “Huh,” and the
conversation continued like I didn't even notice. And she brought it
up in conversation so casually, like a past event someone witnessed
that was interesting, but instead that incident was that time they
saved Christmas with Bob and fought off a bunch of dick-waving
vandals who had their donkey show interrupted.
“So how was your day, Lucas?”
“Oh man, I left Ace Hardware and got
stuck in traffic, and while I was passing by a movie theater, I saw a
dude fucking a dog.”
“Uh... that's fucking weird. Did he
get arrested for bestiality?”
“No, because I immediately looked
forward and I almost rear-ended a car being driven by a ninja. Also
Tommy let me smoke this joint he had, he said it had some weird shit
in it called LSD.”
There was another woman who managed to
go around screaming hysterically about how her rights were being
violated because she couldn't leave of her own volition. She also
talked about being possessed by her departed sister named Miss Sally,
and frankly I would believe it because I never felt like I was that
close to evil. She was the sweetest woman normally, but when she
lost it and started screaming, the only thing it served to do was
trigger some semblance of PTSD I have and I would go into my room and
cover my ears as I teeter back in forth like I'm petering off of a
bad trip. Then there was a man who was the most hateful and bitter
person I've ever met. He would openly tell people he was conversing
with how much he despised them and how much they irritated him while
everything he did sought to only benefit himself and to talk about
his accomplishments. The best way I could describe the man was that
he was Eustice from Courage the Cowardly Dog.
Another interesting character was a
man named Miguel. He wasn't a crazy person though. He was just a
fucking thug that got lucky dodging prison or a place like John
George which was basically a throwaway dumpster for the relapsing
nuts that the prison system got tired of dealing with. He tried
breaking out. He almost succeeded. He broke down the door out of
the containment area to the elevator. He overlooked the fact that
the elevators could be merely shut off before he got into one of
them, and that there was a stairwell in the opposite direction that
he could've tried breaking into. He got moved to the third floor and
continued to overlook this fact an additional three times before I
assumed he was properly incarcerated and moved to a more suitable
facility where he would meet Bubba the prison rapist. I don't think
he was mentally unhinged so much as he was god-damn stupid, which
doesn't seem like it would be an easy mistake to overlook.
Now, as a writer, I never really
understood the magnitude behind the term “The Truth is Stranger
Than Fiction” until I began to attempt articulating some of these
events in my head. What occurred in that place was the sitcom Scrubs
if it took place in a mental care hospital. “Some of this shit is
ridiculous, nobody is going to buy this when I leave here. These
people are fucking crazy, shit like this isn't a frequent
occurrence.” Then I talked to some of them about my life and
depressed the Hell out of them and realized “Shit, maybe I do
belong here. Maybe this is something that does happen a lot.”
I think the oddest experience there
was the fact that being an atheist—or at least somebody who really
dislikes how God goes about his business—I met a lot of religious
people in there that I conversed with about their faith. Part of me
wants to go “Obvious joke about religious people being crazy goes
here” but there was one person there who perplexed me quite a lot.
She was a heavy-set woman with extremely short hair and a fondness
for boots. I would make an obvious dyke joke because I'm an
appalling human being, but stay with me because that's not the point.
She was a perplexing enigma of a woman who liked to speak in
riddles, and part of me initially wanted to say she was pulling
pseudo-intellectual shit out of her ass until I talked to her a bit
more. I've been sexually assaulted and personally exposed before.
Talking to her was a lot like that, except it sort of ended up like
those really fucked-up rape fantasies where the victim ended up
emotionally broken and enjoying it. I felt like intellectually, I
was exposed a great deal about my personal beliefs. It was a
metaphorical dance of opposite beliefs that respected each other and
felt remarkably at peace with the fact that somebody was very
different yet so very similar to the other. Yin and Yang would be a
good way to describe it. Hearing this girl go on about how her
mother died and how there was some purpose to her life that she was
able to adequately interpret through what a jaded cynic like me would
interpret as nothing more than stretching coincidences and dumb luck
was a bit jarring, because she was aware of it and didn't mind it
either. And she was baffled by the fact that I could hold an almost
solipsistic and nihilistic viewpoint on life, but simultaneously
enjoy the fact that there might not be something more after I'm gone.
My suicide was a good reason as to why that belief existed.
“You know, I was really out of it
when I tried it eight years ago.” I said. “I came back, though.
Did you know what I saw while I was lost? Nothing. No chorus of
angels singing, no tunnel with a light at the end, no dastardly
inferno and malicious evil, no transcendental ushering into the
grandiose ether of reality. It was nothing. Not even calling it
darkness would suitably describe and encapsulate the cold silent void
that I saw.” And to me, that was nice. For a timid and meek
person to be surrounded by raging noise and paranoia his entire life,
there was something to me that was utterly beautiful about going to a
place that was just silent and utterly devoid of anything else.
That's why sleeping there was the best sleep I had in years. I was
away from the responsibilities the disappointment the burden my life
decided to give to such an unfortunate and ill-suited person like me to handle. When I slept, it was just no thought, just silence.
Life froze while I was in there
because when I left that place after five days, everything went back
to normal. Except I now was taking happy pills everyday to keep the
dogs from barking in my head and I don't have to go to college for
the rest of the semester, which seemed like a good decision for my
family and I to make had I not made it on my own a month ago by going
truant. I figured that maybe this was okay. There's a little bit of
change, but not a tremendous amount. At least not yet. I didn't
expect to go into that place and leave with everything immediately
being hunky-dory. There's still work to be done, and I suppose it's
up to me to make a plan for it. It's not like I could rely on God
for that.
But If God has a plan for some people,
I suppose not all of them will likely be good because the world would
be probably be a happier place. Some people are just destined to
have the deck stacked against them their entire lives, but instead of
being pissed off about it I suppose I've learned to just accept it.
Even God is capable of being a dick, but going around with a chip on
my shoulder won't do me any good. This is the only life I have, and
ending it to stick to the man that I'm not entirely sure exists just
because he has it out for me doesn't seem like a safe bet. I can
either go to that wonderful void of nothing and say “Well shit I
guess he doesn't exist, I think I came here a little too early,” or
I'll be in Heaven and God will say “I SAID I WAS GONNA GETCHA, YOU
LITTLE CUNT” because he was that pink elephant in the room, and
he'll pull a lever and I'll plummet into Hell to do laps in a lake of
fire while my Sunday nights are used to act as Satan's personal
bitch. Maybe fate has it out for me. The concept of “fate” has
always been ridiculous to me. After talking to that woman, it still
is. The concept of there being some predetermined destiny for
everybody, that's something I think you should be in the crazy house
for. Because you can say “well people can change their destiny”,
but then at that point I don't count it as destiny because it's not
predetermined if you can change it. That's fucking cheating. That
doesn't make logical sense to say “There's this concept that this
is unchangeable fate for people, but you can change if if you will
it.” It's like that bullshit math teachers pull in Elementary
School when they say shit like “You can't subtract a bigger number
from a smaller number” even though you learn the following year
that negative numbers exist.
But maybe I'm going about it wrong.
Maybe I shouldn't be thinking logically about something like fate. I
guess that's where the concept of faith comes into play, but piss all
if I have any of that left. But I guess I don't find it as
ridiculous as I did before. I haven't decided if talking to her has
changed my life yet. I suppose we'll see as time goes on. Maybe
like how I met somebody channeling her dead sister and how another
was brought back from the brink by Michael Jackson, maybe this woman
was directed by some higher power to change my life. Like Jesus or
God, or Thor or Harrison Ford.
