Started the
day revisiting Grandpa Munster at the hospital where he landed after a dizzy
spell took his legs out from under him while having a pee, and his noggin
collided with the porcelain toilet. Both beast and fixture survived the affair
but the docs who patched him up took the opportunity to mention that he has
pneumonia in one lung (as usual; he’s on antibiotics reliably two weeks out of
every eight) and that he has acute kidney damage due to chronic
dehydration but which is not irreparable.
“That’s what
happens when you drink nothing but coffee for forty years,” I interjected (as
I’ve warned him many times). Now that men and women in white coats are telling
him likewise he seems to be starting to listen.
At noon I
split for Sick Boy’s Game Den & Crazy Making Eyrie which he shares with an
alcoholic hoarding terminally ill-ish mom (to their mutual simultaneous
salvation and demise) where he managed to slip rather gracefully into the
Miracle Saturn (which has eaten up $3000 in recent repairs to the wheel areas
alone – at a time when my employment has been spotty at best) despite the
crutches and the ghastly hole in his foot which somehow came about during an
attempt to infiltrate an area of the eyrie sealed behind a thoroughly
hoardified corridor.
En route to
the medical centre we stopped at the bank to have his virtual monthly income
cheque negotiated for conversion to much-needed food, rent and utility funds
only to discover that the funds had been “previously negotiated.”
I’m not even
sure what that means but apparently this is the result of some mistake (whether
honest or malicious) and can only be rectified by a certain Disability Worker
who is high on Sick Boy’s roster of personal nemesisses. Nemesai? Nemeses? Ah! Nemeses! Like crisis
pluralizes to crises! Thank you Spell
Checker. Um… and apparently the evil disability worker will not be available for a week and thus
there will be no food, no rent, no hydro payment to a hydro company which has
run out of patience, and thus soon no hydro, but instead there will be hunger,
a condemned apartment and swift eviction.
I’m not
criticizing. I’m not judging; just observing. It seems like every problem in
his life becomes an immediate foreboding of cascading problems with no break in
the chain for possible solutions. I wish I had money to loan. I gave a modest
donation instead.
It’s
difficult to hear his roster of troubles on a regular basis. There is always a
rebuttal to every suggested solution and always barriers put up - and awkward
conditions attached - to any help you offer, which makes the help you intended
become harder to give, and potentially laden with regret.
This is what
mental illness – in this particular case – does. It throws a monkey wrench into
goddam everything. Whatever the official combination of illnesses, conditions,
syndromes etcetera are at play here: it should be summed up as Goddam Monkey
Wrench Disease.
But I always
wonder how much of this is necessary, and how much of it is optional: brought
on by ineffective coping strategies perhaps, or failed adherence to them, or simply
failed understandings stemming from the gap between psychological theory and physical
facts. I have long been suspicious of our social presumptions concerning which
mental machinations are healthy, or even
“sane” and which are not. I’m convinced in fact, that we are rather
misguided in general, choosing the mental tendencies which are common and labeling them sane and
healthy, only because they are normal. When in fact, normalcy may be the most
fucked up disease there is, and very much at the core of the state of our
social, economic and industrial world: a world in tragedy that is immensely –
and probably now irreparably – fucked up despite all the thin surface comforts
we all so blissfully and arrogantly take for granted, blind to the malignant
grotesqueries which provide this veil.
Earth Writer
said to me the other day, over coffee, that she was rethinking the nature of
our attitude toward mental illness and starting to see it – in general – more
as variation than illness. I applaud this thinking very
much. How much of Sick Boy’s difficulties are a matter of mental dysfunction
rather than just being different; her
own preferences, fears and idiosyncrasies at odds with the structures we have
built which serve the preferences of the normal . That would be a valuable and challenging
experiment to dabble in.
Come evening,
after struggling to stay awake all day, I hit the Six Minute Show where
storytellers told their brief memoirs on the theme: Nevertheless She Persisted. My dear friend, who has insisted on
remaining nameless for now, did muster the courage to participate.
I’m sure she
wowed the audience from the start, beginning the brief tale with rich imagery
and texture of the setting, informing us that we had a real writer on our hands!
And then quickly but eloquently pouring an immense story from early childhood
to present, into this confined space, so artfully, and sparingly choosing resonant
little details from which we interpreted clearly: parental death, prolonged abuse,
regular examination of suicide, but finally, perhaps just in time: The partner
who is her “heart” and the son who is her “soul” and the “warrior woman” whose
wise words also helped her to finally see value in her own existence. I knew
the warrior woman in her final years; very well in some aspects, though I did not
know her back in her heroic years, before she diminished somewhat and sought her own hero, and I yearn to hear those stories. I fought hard
to hold back tears through all of this and even at her generous mention of dear
friendship, with a nod toward me.
Her message
in the end was one about joy and celebration: an attempt to re-gift the warrior
woman’s good words to those in the audience who needed them; for the event was
a fundraiser (as all the Six Minute Club’s events are, I believe) to, on this
night, a group called SACHA which helps victims of abuse.
As the
actual nature of the event had finally dawned on me early on, I asked my pals:
“Am I going to feel terrible about being a man by the end of the night?”
“Nope,” was
my friend’s reply. “You’re going to feel good about being a good man.”
Touche!
There were
many other almost-as-great storytellers that night. I’d love to say more about their
charming and diverse offerings but this post grows long. I will pass this fine
moment along though, from the woman who spoke with delightful humour of her
struggles with men and with the law and with her own mind, who concluded with a
conspiratorial smirk and said: “I don’t suffer from mental illness...”
“ I’m
enjoying it.”
Peace out,
folks.
FWG
.jpg)
