Somebody catch me, I think I'm falling.

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.