And thus began the beguine.

Time was of the essence as soon as I was popped out breach in a birth that required a crash cart for my mother.  It was the proper entrance really.
"Here's your new baby boy.  Now hand me the external defibrillator. CLEAR!"
I was God's version of an improvised explosive device.  The pregnancy was far from planned and I sure as shit went BOOM!  The family that received me was a thin Norman Rockwell skin over the top and a whole lot of bedlam underneath.  Father was a Doctor of Theology, Dr. Larry Kennedy.  He was also a closeted homosexual that kept old Casey Donovan, Al Parker, and Jack Wrangler mags in the same briefcase he kept his sermons in.  My mother turned a blind eye convinced that she was called to be a preacher's wife and Florence Nightingale.  I have an older brother, Lee, six years my senior.  My sister, Renee, is just fifteen months older than me.  There was one miscarriage of twins before my sister was born.  Growing up, I thought that they were the lucky ones.  In some ways I still do. 
All, and I mean all three, of us kids turned out to be gay though my sister and I were pretty obvious.  I had all the Rainbow Brite dolls and a Care Bear Big Wheel and could be seen on the front lawn practicing my Care Bear Stare.  My sister got the Tonka toys and the G.I. Joe figurines, though I stole The Baroness doll because she was so statuesque.  My brother was a tougher nut to crack.  So my sister and I were two peas in a pod.  I was brought home from the hospital and she wouldn't leave my side and alternated pacifiers with me consistently.  We had each other and suffered the same trips of terror with our father.  He was a deeply troubled, gay man trapped in a marriage behind a pulpit.  He had a violent streak that kept life in the Kennedy household on constant alert.  Everyday we were on code Orange.  My sister received beatings that are now linked to her being developmentally disabled by the age of two.  I was dropped from a grain silo in an attempt to sort of complete the sacrifice of Isaac.  My brother was beat with log chains.  Father could ignite at any moment and God knows what could detonate him.  I remember always being in fear and finding hiding spots all over the Cape Cod I spent the first few years of my life in.
Mother had started working for a podiatrist in the early eighties.  Her hours got longer and longer.  She also joined the ranks of the fitness craze and flowered into a figure-conscious, Capezio lily.  She stocked herself with a new found confidence.  She had never been so svelte in her life.  I can't recall anytime my mother has been happier ever since.  She was also falling in love with her employer, a well-educated, eloquent black man.  When first introduced to the first black man I ever met I set a tone of discomfort that would last until he left my life.
"I simply adooooore Denise Huxtable."
I was four, my favorite song was "Burning Up", and tangerine was my favorite Crayola.

Madonna - Burning Up
Uploaded by jpdc11. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Sport de sang

I went to a cage fight with Rahim and a few of his friends.  I hadn't ever been to a cage fight before.  I used to box and it had been a long time since I had been to a match of any sort....tennis included.  I'll admit that I was bit apprehensive and hesitated as we made our way to the entrance to the building.  Extreme violence has a direct connection with vexatious memories of getting my throat slit and boxing the fuck out of Eric's face mixed with seemingly paranormal hallucinations.  I lumbered through the experience like on a tumbrel on the way to some PTSD soaked guillotine.  At first it just seemed like an albatross hanging around my neck....when we took our seats near the cage/ring I felt like I was conquering something.
I enjoyed the fight without having to parallel any of it to my managed illness rearing its head in my life or thinking about how I was left at the alter per se because of something that one could not forsake.  Meh....if I'm to have a man in my life he needs to be made of pretty strong stuff and mucho compassion to allow some imperfections.  I don't think love is treated with a clinical and cold set of hands.

This used to be my playground.

The elevator stopped on the floor.  A familiar penthouse loft that I ventured to so many times in the past lay on the other side.  I could hear Mstrkrft's "Easy Love" bumping through the door.  They parted to a world of twin sets, pearl necklaces, wool pencil skirts, Hermes scarves, heavy twill pants, shirt sleeves, herring bone, rich reds, deep blues, royal purples, dark, chocolatey mousse silk charmeuse, hues of iron and charcoal and silver/grey wide planked floor.  It was the first time out since coming home.  This world was exactly as I had left it.  There were plenty of manicured vultures but there were the few well hidden jewels in the piles of bullshit that made associating with this pack a little bit worth it.
"Jonathan!  Oh my...honey!  I am so happy you're here."
Nikki ran to me on the balls of her feet across the room sloshing the beaujolais in her glass.  Her heels clacked like a little clacker ball toys.  She gave me salutations with a bise and took me aside to guide me through the group and give me all the latest gossip and introduce me to the new movers and shakers in town.
"Jonathan.  Your neck!  You look like a reformed bad boy.  Sexy."
"Uh..thanks."
"Smoke?"
"No.  Not anymore."
"Well now that you're caught up and we have you back from America's Wild Outback, why don't you go get a drink and meet me at my master bath?"
"No thanks.  I'm straight."
"Well that's boring."
"Not really.  I actually get to feel life.  It's a visceral experience.  So, um, hows life?  I'm guessing good considering your father gave you rights to your old digs."
"Yes.  Life is going pretty good.  I took part of my trust and invested it in a couple of small businesses."
"What kind?"
"A chocolat boutique, a bodega, and a bakery.  I wanted to invest in Boulevard Brewing company but I think I covered the basics for what seem to weather a recession, just minus cigarettes and the lottery."
We made our way to the frosted glass encased bathroom on the second floor.  I watched her set up her lines and just kind felt sad about watching it.  Just that sound of snorting was kind of vomitous on a spiritual level.  It seemed like I was waxing bad nostalgia.  Everything was still the same for her.  She was dating an urchin she picked up in a club, her brother was still scoring tar in the parks, he parents only stepped in for funding, and she was still trapped in the same motley crew of the upper echelon.
After we exited the bathroom I made my way to a cheese and fruit platter decked out for the gods.  I was right back where I was before just with sober vision and a palate for some of the world's best Gruyere.  A new track from Vitalic, "Poison Lips" started to play and my heels began to lightly stamp to the beat.  I found myself chewying to the syncopation and slowly made my way to the area where people were step touching.  I joined in on the bouncing and weaving with the thumping group.  It felt good just to move to something other than the treadmill.  Vitalic had came out with a new album while I was in jail and I was getting a healthy dose of it.  They'd been on my list of great "dance your problems out" music.  As I let it just pulse through my center I was feeling something rub up against my backside.  It wasn't a grinding.  It was a grazing.  I turned and he was beautiful.  Dark, walnut curls and these honey eyes in olive skin.  His name was Rahim.  We had been introduced earlier.  Now his hand was on the small of my back and pressing me into his torso.  A small bead of sweat was slowly making its way down his brow to his Nordic shaped nose.  It felt good so we stomped and stepped cutting up the rug.
I had a good time with him for the rest of the evening.  He's a professor at a local university.  It was nice just to listen to someone talk about themselves.  I get plenty of time with my therapist to talk about me.  I got to just ask questions and ask for further elaborations.  Again, it was nice.  We made different mixes with all sorts of juices and club soda and some Pellegrino with limes.  The rest of the spread was nice but I stuck to the canapes.  When it was pumpkin time I made my way for the exit along with the party that I came in and a new acquaintance that could become a new and interesting friend.  I've come a long way from where I was on 10.11.2008.

“These three are the marks of a Jew, not a Zionist - a tender heart, self-respect, and charity."

"Jack Kerouac was schizophrenic"

Nurse Mitchell brought up another cloth full of warm water and wrung it out over my head.  The water cascaded down my body like bullet trains down to the tub full of water quickly soiling itself with crusty debris of what should have been a nightmare.  Flakes of dried blood tossed on the surface of the water like clipper ships taking on white squalls.

"Brian Wilson is schizoaffective, too."

Her voice was like an ointment.  She smelled like my mother.  The tears and snot were so uncontrollable and unpredictable.

10-10-2008

 "JONATHAN!  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS!"

My eyes closed and I could see his bloody face and those green eyes.  My hands had doubled their size and ached.  I didn't see my father in him anymore.  Tears from fright spat out from both of our eyes.

"Larry!  You're not gonna get him too!", I screamed out to the energy I could feel floating in the room.

"Baby, I've gotta get to the hospital.", Eric whimpered.  Blood trickling down his lips.  His face all rearranged and swollen.

This all echoed in the present, in the cold tiled bathroom of the hospital unit in the correctional facility I had been taken to.

"Eduard Einstein, Albert Einstein's son, was schizophrenic."

The water rushed over me.  No matter how cold and clinical the place was I couldn't get clean there.

"Eric, we've gotta get you to a hospital.  OH MY FUCKING GOD!!  Look what I did?!! No.  Get up."

We scrambled for one of the bathrooms.  His left eyebrow looked like it had popped open.  His orbitals were so swollen and red and his jaw seemed askew.  Blood everywhere.  It looked like some prize fight had taken place.  Sprays of blood everywhere.  Then I began to see Larry in him again, in his reflection.  I came to believe my father was a demon because of the manifestations I had been witnessing over the last couple of months.  Eric cried over the pain and his wounds.  I did this and now Larry was coming back.  The battle seemed emanate. 

"Larry!  You can't have him too!  Dad get the fuck out of him!  You're not doing this.  Not to him!!"

"Jonathan!  I'm not your dad."

"I have to end this.  I've got to stop this."

My sobbing commenced into the tub.  I didn't have to even shut my eyes to relocate and hear the screams.

"Syd Barrett is schizophrenic."

"Even Jim Gordon and President Lincoln's wife were schizophrenic.  I have a son that is."

The hiccups to follow the quakes of sobs seemed to convulse my body.  Something happened to where the tectonic plates in my life made a great divide between me and the rest of the world.  Sadly, the great love of my life stood on the other side.  It was illness that truly separated us and at that time I had no idea.  I had yet to actually think that my world wasn't true.  What was true was what I saw and what I saw were visions of a demon.  I call him Dad.  Given all the physical and sadistic torture, rapes, selling me off to like sick minded friends to satiate their needs for, in a draconian Greek sense, mentor me.  My father's name is Larry.  He's Dr. Larry Kennedy, a practicing Pentecostal minister of a church with a fold of 1500 misguided sheep.  He teaches at a seminary and keeps twenty year old polaroids of my sister in I in compromising positions, solo and paired, under his pathologically organized, booby trapped bedroom.  These aren't cute, bathing photos.  In 2004 I found that he still had them during a short stay at the Kennedy farm.  He had accumulated a collection that extended beyond just my sister and I.

I began to feel phantom pains in my penis.  Piercing.  I would endure these anytime I fought my father and his phantoms.  Nurse Mitchel was cleaning my genitals off so gingerly.  Her voice seemed to be like kid's gloves.

"There we go, darlin'.  It's okay."
"GET 'EM OFF!  GET HIM THE FUCK OFF!  Fuck it hurts."

I could see the straight pins being plucked out of the tomato pin cushion and driven through my three year old acorn-like penis.  This ability to transcend from past to future was becoming all the more commonplace for me.  The tub filled with urine.  I could only scream.  Larry and his powers seemed to ascend on me like precipitous blitzes with needles.  I could not hear my current cries.  I could just hear that well-known blood chilling scream that toddlers give.  I couldn't move but soon I was being taken from the bathtub by guards.  The next thing was a pinch on a butt cheek and sleep.  It was my first bath in over a week since the night of my psychotic episode, the one that ended not a chapter of my life but killed the chance at marrying, and the life with the man I love.  That love does not die.  Ever.  It was the death of a world I saw as very actual, bona fide, ipso facto that I had known no other that was killing.   When I woke up the next day the stiffness and shooting nerve pain up the side of my neck surged like rupturing powerline transformers.

"I've got to stop this.  This..What is going on?  Dad?"

I made my way to the entry/exit of our flat's kitchen.  

"Stop stop stop stop...." under my breath.  

The room spun around and around.  Erratic breathing and flashes of light, auras, like the ones before one of my seizures.  My mind said "knife knife knife knife".

My carotids seem to pulsate for the blade of Eric's daily sharpened, 7 inch Santoku knife.  Some say it was even steven.  I can't think in those terms.  I turned and there he was.  He did what I was setting out to do.  1st try...futile.  2nd attempt...profitless.  3rd attempt...YAHTZEE!  We had arterial spray and blood pumping out with each pulse.  I went into syncope.  When my lids peeled back I could see him standing sideways by the frontdoor.  I stood and stumbled while hot blood dropped in clumps onto my bare feet.  I went to push him out and he ran.  I shuffled onto the threshold and that was the last I could remember before the full spectrum light of a trauma room hammered out the darkness.

I guess I left a puddle on the landing of a two story flight of stairs outside of our residence because the emergency department staff were beginning a second transfusion.  I had lost around three or more pints of blood.  

"Adonai ro-i, lo ehsar.
  Bin’ot deshe yarbitseini,
al mei m’nuhot y’nahaleini,
  naf’shi y’shovev,
yán’heini b’ma’aglei tsedek,
l’ma’an sh’mo.
Gam ki eilech
b’gei tsalmavet,
lo ira ra,
Ki Atah imadi.
  Shiv’t’cha umishan’techa
hemah y’nahamuni.

Ta’aroch l’fanai shulchanL’orech yamim."
neged tsor’rai
dishanta vashemen roshi
cosi r’vayah.
  Ach tov vahesed
yird’funi kol y’mei hayai,
v’shav’ti b’veit Adonai

I could hear the my mother's screaming from a phone receiver.  

"Where's Eric?  Is Eric okay? WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?"

"Yes.  He's at a different hospital but he's stable.  You on the other hand..."

"Barux hashem!  Tell him I love him.  He's safe now."
"Mr. Kennedy!  Mr. Kennedy, do you have a religious affiliation?"
"I'm uh..I'm Jewish.  I need a rabbi."


I went unconscious from there and soon into surgery to suture my severed artery.  Most of this has been gathered by talks with medical staff and at random recalls over the past year.  My first solid memory was the bath Nurse Mitchel gave me.  Before I left the correctional facility she came to see me.  She had given very special attention to me over the year I was incarcerated.
               

              Jonathan, 
              My Hebrewchaun, you hear the same voices that my own son does.  You know, there's a certain songbird too pretty to fly with the crows, the grackles, and the starlings.  The other birds attack it in flocks and tear it apart when it starts to sing.  Nothing soft endures.  Nature loathes meekness and goodness.  You got hurt early and deep.  Eric kept you from the bridge as long as he could.  But you are the same tribe as my son.  You're both so full of love it causes an imbalance.  You fall over with the unbearable weight of it.  The fall becomes what you do best.  You grow accustomed to great odds.  Love floods you , overwhelms you, and makes you almost impossible to be around.  You need love in equal proportion to what you throw off.  Everyone disappoints you.  It may seem this way all the time.  Don't ever stop fighting that desire to die in the cold thinking that you'll never find the right angel.  You have the most tender heart.  Nuture it because you nurture so many others.  I've seen it firsthand, even in a county jail.  That heart on your sleeve will never be ripped off if you don't let it and your unreturned attempts at trying to mend things, don't let that steal song.  It all strengthens your steel threads of faith that that there is going to be a better tomorrow.  As long as you take care of you life is going to be manageable.  You may not approve of everything that happens but that may mean you need to lower your standards a bit.  


I don't do this sort of thing for ANY inmates.  I've had a year with you, five to six days a week, and a special part of my days were the parts I spent with you.  Please go forth with a thicker skin, made of stronger stuff, and know that when the time is right, and you'll know when, the person that you were truly born to be with will be so much more, so much bigger than the loves you had before.


Love and Light,


J. Mitchel

How seamless seemed love and then came trouble

That trouble truly began to surface as my symptoms grew more intense. Moments would flower with incompetence. My next suicide attempt was on a morning in November of 2008. Perhaps going to my online journal at the time would be more appropriate.

11-12-2008

I woke early this morning and watched Mr. A. sleep. I hear the others in the room and they get so incarnate especially when I wake up. I hear Larry, my father, speaking out in his old fashion that he gave those hellfire sermons. They were directed at me. Those loud tones that pierced so easy. I hear my childhood moans and feel the burn from him on top of me. Sometimes I wake up and the shadows or phantoms are in my peripheral field of vision.
I can smell my father. I could this morning. That cologne drenched preachers double-handed handshake. "I'm glad you were able to make it." I hear that. I heard that this morning.

I can see him more in reflection lately. If you could see the master bath in our flat you could see why I might be frightened. I take showers with the bathroom door closed. That's like a sanctuary for my father. I believe he is a demon. This concentrated terrorism can only be a discouragement. Just a little over a month ago my sister was diagnosed with a serious illness. I have this duty that I have secretly taken up. I must take honesty out of it's sheath and try to do something about him.

His congregation has to know who is trying to lead them. Last week I could see him behind the camera he filmed my sister and I with, the polaroids of us and other children in still in his chest of drawers under crisply folded underwear, the porn in the brief case he kept his sermons in, the piercing of genital tissue with bloodcurdling three year old boy screamed fanfare. I hear moaning and whimpering a lot lately too.
When I confront him by myself I get no answers but strong, verbose incisions.
"You'll be seen just like your sister. No one will believe you."
"He won't marry a boy who was his daddy's hole to cum in."
"You're nothing but mistakenly spilt seed."

This morning I could smell dust at 3 AM. I passed out a bit earlier and looked at my love cuddled up on his side. He looks so cherubic and I feel so full of filth. I went to the kitchen and began to drink wine. I didn't want to give permission to these demonic manifestation anymore. Why should my personal demonic Cimmerian get pleasure out of my life. I felt so out of control. Then that dust. Attic dust from an old house. The smell of that crumpled gray insulation and sweat, unwashed foreskin. It was in the attic that he took me. I still freeze when I see those drop down attic stairs and that string that hangs. I tried to soften all of my abrupt heightening of senses. I drink and drink. I took my bottle of phenytoin. By the time everything started to slow the world down I was by Mr. A. in bed.

He woke up in a panic. I can't say I remember much but I know that it was the first time I started to hear things when I was with another person. I remember asking him to just tell me he loved me over and over as I fell asleep in his chest after a huge ordeal. I was so upset that my father was taking that from me know. I used to be able to curl up next to my love and then everything was alright. Stress left, everything left. I found solace in him and he was my soft place to land.

11-27-2008

I layed down to go to sleep early around 7 PM. I had a big day ahead. Mr. A has spent a long week back home in Dallas because of his Bubbe had past and for Thanksgiving. I thought it was inappropriate for me to meet his folks for the first time when a funeral is what would bring me to meeting them. Emily Post thinks it's inappropriate and so it is in my book. I woke up around 9PM.
"They're here. They're here to get you. Just like your sister."
It was such a loud declaration I sprung out of bed. I ran to the mirror to see if I could see anything moving about in the reflections. No. But I could taste that salty, sapor saliva that preambles vomiting. I looked out the window and saw police lights through the trees. I began to panic. It looked like they were surrounding the block. I called my love and asked him to research it. I crawled into a closet until he came back with an update. He stated there was nothing as far as recent news in Austin that would affirm the base element for my sheer fright.

I called the police and Mr. A, first one then the other, repeatedly over the next hour. The police offered to come to me. I said "No no. It's not necessary."
"Do you feel the need to harm someone or harm someone else?"
"No. What kind of question is that? I called to see what is going on in my neighborhood. I'll just call my fiance and take my medication."

When I got Mr. A. back on the phone he told me to walk out of our gated community and stay on the phone with him. I made a trek from our front door through the oddly warm November winds. I'm from the midwest so I had three layers on and a coat. I walked with my slippers still on. As I approached the outside and the busy street and it's empty sidewalks I was so confused. I saw them. I saw police cars.

I went home and took my seizure medication and told Mr. A. I loved him so much and that I truly couldn't bear another day without him.

Present-

I still go to bed with that same look and feel every night. The look as forlorn as a sea-captain's wife waiting for the ships to come home. That ship will never return to my shore. It hurts, still, not being his harbor. But there is comfort in knowing that he will find it in a much better place than the one he left. Now is all about taking care of me. And I am okay with that.

Tous les peuples sont égaux dans l'esprit.

I skimmed over today's headlines. We have once again made human life trivial, almost to the likings of Romanesque flavor though we lack the public indulging in communal executions. There are the exceptions like the lunatic fringe that publicly display a vigilant countdown for repellent murderers' deaths. When did we turn into such a revolting species that regards existence as passe? When did become acceptable to go outside civic duties and civil circumscription that we set up to make our species civil and different from the savage? Waiting for answers to such fundamental questions is not contrary to the wait for the Apocalyptic Horsemen. Suppose we justify a Robespierre reorganization of the dim, addle minded, greedy, contemptuous, degenerative, pathologically/intellectually defunct that lack the where-with-all to tie their shoes?
The sycophants that pollute our nation's capital? Would it be an acceptable form of eugenics? Are we setting up a rendezvous with the hangman of our sense and sensibility?

This isn't a simple giving up of the inclination to hid behind niceties or false modesty. It's a monumental disgrace of decency on the platform of global awareness. Is it just a lacking of manners or the clear statement that empathy is no longer in our playbooks? Only apathy. Where did we learn such grotesque behavior that lacks compassion? So impoverished of sacred clemency. It's hard not to tsk at it all. Benevolence shouldn't be a virtue. Shylock's soliloquy is universal yet it's only something taught in passing if one takes the elective Shakespeare Lit. class offered in some high schools. We must have depleted our sources. You used to have to drill too far to lift some crude compassion that once bubbled up outside of the holiday season as well as within. Guile, callow people just turn a blind eye I guess.

Entre bride et l'éperon, de toute choses gït la raison.

I've started to journal on here because typing flows better than writing and I feel secure that this site will not crash and erase my journal. I am also too lazy to go out and buy an external hard drive to back everything up on. I don't consider this hanging out my dirty laundry. There is still a bit of anonymity though I really haven't kept much private since the world watched my maelstrom level my life as well as others'.

I started this without any preamble. My name is Jonathan. I am diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder as well as having acute PTSD. I have psychotic tendencies if I've gone unmedicated. This was all determined in the twenty-eighth year of my life, this last year. Unfortunately, the life that I had built up had to be completely annihilated in order for me to live life as it ought to be live. It was hard to have everything that I knew as my world be taken from me. My world was burned down quicker than General Sherman and a fleet could've singed it. When what you know as real isn't real you have to learn to be aware of it and it can be truly terrorizing. This journal isn't solely based upon my illness, my sexuality, my past, or even present. It's a therapeutic record and a safe place where I can be totally honest. My treatment team has quick access too. They check it at their discretion. Being that this is on the net it's not really all that discreet.

My days are not filled with pills and sedation. I'm quite functional and agile enough to navigate my life now with a little bit of intense help from my treatment team for the time being. I will not limit out the possibilities of a less vehemently chaperoned life. But this...the fables of my reconstruction, shows that it's a continuing effort, as is anything. This blog will be full of random editorials. I tend to have a knack for them. My vocabulary is extensive and may seem grandiloquent or even pompous and bombastic. I apologize. I was raised with certain principles. For instance, my momma had me sit on my hands if I began to gesticulate when I talked. She said it went back to simpletons only able to count on their fingers. She required us to paint with words and to be more verbose. Emily Post was very popular in our rearing. I speak French as well. Please don't think that I consult a thesaurus on everything.

In this entry I would like to pass on four pertinacious ideals that perfect adherence to may be impossible but I claim progress not perfection. They are my personal mantras that I recite in repitition to myself all day.

1. You do NOT have to fix anyone. Let them take care of their own crazy...it's a big relief this way

2. You only react to people and situations due to the power you give them.

3. Acceptance is VERY different from approval. This means that if you scald your crotch with coffee or the cuntface infront of you in the checkout at Whole Foods (AKA WHOLE PAYCHECK) pays for everything with an EBT card and 5 bastard screaming children in tow.......You have a blistered dick and some people find a GREAT way to scam the government for free food and the universe works itself out...don't fret it all to the point of going postal.

4. In the dawning of my age of grace I am witnessing a civil rights battle that parallels no other. Racial and religious minorities have shed nothing more than throwing us shade when it comes to unorthodox marriages. When we do cross the threshold we have one MAJOR promise outside of keeping our capacity to be totally honest....this promise I speak of is "FORSAKING ALL OTHERS". If you are not ready to stand by your mate through any form of illness or injury you probably do not have the capacity to be in a marriage. What you have the capacity for, I don't know. That's none of my business. This sort of sanctified, consecrated dependability I refer to equates with personal integrity. To eradicate that vow is more than just some sort of sin of omission. It's a broken promise and that makes you just another statistic. You can add yourself to the lexicon of unreliable, self-absorbed men throughout history. You have not navigated or circumvented the proverbial obstacles a man faces to claim that he is a gentleman. You are in no way authentic or aberrant of atypical smarmy behavior. If you are a victim of arrested development, as am I, you need to fix your shit...bluntness saves more time. I digress. You are nothing more than the common homo-lothario. Don Juans, Casanovas, Romeos, and Lotharios are fiction. Life needs to be lived in the raw. So, in closing, forsaking others is not some cumbersome albatross hanging around your neck. It's a joy to flow with because love is unconditional. There is no shame in admitting you are inadequate of fulfilling that promise beforehand. Honesty makes you loyal to yourself. A promise broken makes the promiser a liar. It's simple and should not cause a man to become addle-brained. None of us have time for regrets, self-recrimination, and kicking ourselves in the pants. If you're husband becomes incredibly disfigured, lies in a hospital bed in a coma, or, heaven forbid, is stricken down with a genetic or mental illness that he may or may not have been bequethed with from ancestrally predisposition...you must stick to the oath. Stay the course or at least be forthright on your wedding day and bring along counsel equipped with documents that are riddled with more cosmetic riders than Mariah Carey's contract templates. If you are on the receiving end, the promisee, forgive and forget. And be big enough to forget what it was that you forgave.

I've attached some art by artists that are schizophrenic. They've truly piqued the art world's interest as they have mine. The last is a photo shot of my neck. We'll broach that injury when I feel I've reached the point where I can process the event that detonated a blitz on two worlds.

Plankton

2-15-09

No matter what the mix of medication I'm given I can't keep my heart from pumping love for that promise. For my lifesblood to be teeming for another one of life's broken promises, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, turns my humors into acid, disintegrating what is left of that magical kingdom built on faith in that promise you gave. My ramparts burst, were demolished, symmetrically collapsed when that promise was made into a lie. Witnessing such a clean demolition followed by a cold, clinical, wordless escape left me wondering around fallout thinking that this had to be a professional job. I have just started to take into account your perspective and I annihilate any emotion I can conjure up that would be resent related. I can't recriminate myself. I seek no exoneration. I know myself well enough to declaratively state that forsaking all others applies to myself and how I treat myself from here on out. I find that promises hold nothing but a lot of pork. Bien fait
Be grateful you didn't stick around to be in the forefront of these fresh battles clad with solecisms over all past transgressions. I am waging war on myself. And I battle myself continuously throughout my days. Most of them end in stalemates, the days that is. This fallout is gruesome and instead of shrapnel the air is fogged by skin and bone and flesh and blood. Sob born tears are baptized by echos of how I need another chance, how I am not done loving you yet, in my cell here. Still no words from the North. These cries fall with the weight which you might quantify guilt to have and hit the ground with a dull thud. What remains is a misty cloud of crimson spraying down and around. In a moment, blink, all the bones were removed from my body, fait accompli. This pool that remains lost its grip on an illusion, swiftly withdrawn, and began to sink deeper and deeper into the pit of catatonia, tomb silence, tomb darkness, and tomb sleep. At one time I declared I was born for something, that I was born to be with you, womb to tomb. Now I make every one of your senses revolt. This is a reality neither of us would approve of.
Life isn't always what you make it. Sometimes life makes you. This is something I learn each day in the tedium of this institutionalized living. A lot of these men are so processed that they are beyond repair. I can see how having a revolving door experience with trauma and the struggle to survive it can lead people to develop deadly routines. All these small vignettes filled with anguish and strange, frightening, ambiguous, palgues and malignancies brought about by critical exigencies helped us to create our coping skills, whether they are healthy or not, float around like plankton. We are microscopic as far as the big picture, as are our mechanisms that allow us the smallest space to function in. Some just do it better in handcuffs I guess.
I'll maneuver my way through this fog. The light at the end of a tunnel may not be you. It may be an oncoming train. I refuse to continue to be a perpetually flowering monstrosity, though.


The present-

I'm still shaken and hang-dog from all that both me and my better half endured. I figure the conditions are mutual. Still, for some reason I cannot shake the attachment for the that half. I feel like a subject that is fodder for the parvenu. I've prayed for castration of my soul/heart from this love in order to extirpate it. Those roots go so deep. I don't think that anything will grow in this soil anymore, no matter how much I till it. It may not be fertile ever again. I did not want this life and if I had an ounce of making it certain ways I would be finishing off a Red Robin dinner, then making love, taking a shower, then going to bed to go to work for the state of Texas the next day. What was fallible was so much bigger than making some wrong choice like too many scotch and sodas.

Still, across the length and breath of my being are these isolated explosions, traceries of fire, pinpoints of fire, great cavities, and narrowed channels plowed by pain, exploded in me, vomited forth from my heart. When I charred everything I was stripped down to an inchoate creature, a freak of the universe, a thinking animal that's just trying to see its way clear through this morass.

Am I an irrefutable anathema?
A plighted heart that perpetually agonizes and twists up a storm in my chest all for the priceless casualties?
The threads of my faith were once steel. Now my song is silenced.
This is more than some diatribe soaked in smarm and written with florid words pirouetting in well choreographed sentences. I could never be wanton if I'm honest with myself. Maybe this is just part of the process. Do we Kubler Ross everything until it is sand?

Macabre Gentilhomme

I now live in a war torn country that is my mind. A year and a half ago I would've told you that everything was fine. I had a good job, a relationship with a gorgeous genius that resided in Dallas, and I was content with my physique, though there is always room for improvement for someone with classic body dysmorphic disorder from being gay. It had come time in the relationship for one of us to make the move and fate set its sights on me. The separation was becoming a great divide and hurting us rather than the absence making our hearts grow fonder. I had never left Kansas City, Missouri to live somewhere else. Sure, I had visited numerous places but the idea of leaving my stomping grounds was frightening and when it was put into action I took to the idea of it being a visceral, exhilarating, epic adventure to escape the dread brought about by going into the unknown. I was bound for Texas and a bright, shiny future with my then fiance awaited me.

Prior to leaving for Austin that July, I had some hang ups I had dealt with. You see, in 1987 at seven years of age I was diagnosed Manic Depressive. I had some catastrophic behavioral patterns starting at a young age. If the doctor had asked to get a BPS on my paternal side of the family he might have found a lot of answers there. Being that it was my father's side of the family they viewed themselves as so perfect that their imperfections were perfect. I never stayed on medications or in therapy very long because my single mother couldn't afford it. We weren't very educated on our, our being my sister and I, illnesses. It was always a recovery in a hospital for a month or two, a little bit of outpatient care, and then life would go on until there was another mental crisis. I lost faith in psychiatric medicine. I had ECT treatments, diagnosed bipolar type II, then borderline personality disorder, then clinically depressed, then a pathological liar with sociopathic tendencies. I got to a point where I could lie through a psych evaluation without batting an eyelash and getting away with it. By the age of 25 I had 20 suicide attempts. Most of them going unreported, like a failed overdose where you wake up in your piss and shit and vomit the next day and just clean yourself off thinking, "Fuck. I can't even do this right." There was always this great fear and pressure to not get hurt and getting hurt meant some sort of getting caught. I came to a screeching halt in my twenty-fifth year.

When I turned 25 I was around a few people that were enduring the same highs and lows that I was and not doing anything to help equalize them. I soon went inpatient after another failed attempt. I had been dosing myself with blow and alcohol to self- medicate my already wild and eccentric life with chemically induced zany behavior.
During this hospital stay my diagnosis changed from bipolar II to borderline personality disorder. I went from an Axis I diagnosis to an Axis II personality diagnosis. It simply meant that my illness was more of a programming than a chemical imbalance. Medication could treat the symptoms but dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT, would ultimately improve the quality of my life. I got all the strength I could muster and threw myself into it with holistic medication serving as an organic accoutrement. I religiously took my omega3 fish oil, 5htp, St. John's Wort, SAM-e, and nanotechnological vitamins. I started a grueling 2 hour work out six days a week and attended therapy twice a week while journaling every day. It did change my quality of life. I body was the best it had ever looked and I felt the best I had ever felt. I was learning how to cope with my symptoms with an easy to follow program.
After tragedy hit my life full speed with a failed relationship I soon found myself in another relationship. It was a little more comfortable. It budded from simple conversations over the net. Yes. The second healthiest place to find a mate to be chummy with outside of a bar. Right?
His name was Mr. A and he was just what I needed. I needed a passionate voice that was full of genuine care, support, wit, contagious laughter and intellectual ingenuity. To top the cake he was gorgeous. I would kiss the pads of his feet and did on many occasions. Some sort of a green eyed wonder mystified me. He was an addiction that I would gladly give myself over to anytime, day or night. He flew from Dallas and spent an incredible week with me after a year of correspondence. We knew it was time and that we wanted to share more than just a week or two with each other. I wanted, more than anything else, to be with him, wake him up with coffee ready every morning, satiate my sexual appetite, which he surprisingly did, and melt me into a pool with his warm, seductive, adorable presence. I thought I was born to be with him and he the same.
I was hauling a secret load. In March of 2008 my cyclothymic symptoms started to rear their heads in a very acute way. Now not only was my "inner dialogue" violently self deprecating but I had picked up darker passengers that became maladies visible only through peripheral vision. My olfactory lobe seemed stronger. I was have total recall of things that I didn't remember or didn't want to remember only to find myself in strange positions, under my bed for example, after the vivid memories filmed for IMAX. For a minute there I thought my mind was going into some sort of degenerative state, a sort of cerebral atrophy. My emotions had never been so erratic. My symptoms never so paranormal like or as acute. I bucked up on the exercise and tried to incorporate all that I learned in DBT.
Things, emotional things, subsided when I ventured forth down to the lonestar state. The first morning we woke up next to each other I woke up still in a dream. Things weren't right. Phantoms, or supernatural vagrants, in full view told a tale of an unhappy ending for Mr. A and I. He would leave if he ever knew the TRUTH about me. I was scared to do wrong and I was ultra scared to be off and abandoned in a foreign place like Texas.
I'm a born and raised midwestern man. Anything south of the Mason-Dixon Line is suspect for oddities. I amalgamated myself to Mr. A. That just made our intimacy even more intense. The dance started out on the right foot. I found a job with a decent wage that I could do with my hands tide behind my back. Mr. A had a generous friend that let us stay in a guest bedroom until we found a decent flat. We were doing it. The next step was nuptials. I laxed on my fitness regimen and spiraled faster than some cyclones. Instead of sucking up, I became a microburst.
We moved to Austin, Texas, me from K.C. and him from Dallas, at the end of July of 2008. By the end of August my inner battles started to scorch the earth.
On a weekend at the end of August that year the microburst that seemed to rush the pressure down upon me was going to run screaming across the plains leveling anything that was in its way...Mr. A.
We had a less than mediocre dinner that was only made wonderful by the company we gave each other. Anything was susceptible for witty, sardonic banter. I loved everything that came out of his mouth, his finesse, and every pore . We meandered over to Austin's more preeminent sissy bar, Rain. After we tripped the light fantastic a couple of times Mr. A went to go get our last cocktails for evening before we went home and did what soon-to-be spouses did. I went to drain the lizard.
While in dispose the scent of dusty, old attics full of old crumpled, grey insulation and sweat. Tactile sensations of hands rough, liked they'd been soaking in battery acid, were going up my thighs and down my ass. That combined with the sudden raise in volume of static, chatter rattling off into a hum and then the disabling sounds of moans and whimpers from a boy sent me spinning. The stall was moving like an amusement park ride that spins and then the floor drops out. I braced myself with my hands pressed into the sides of the metal cubical. I thought it must be the drink. Never had I had this type of reaction. I turned and opened the door to lines that had formed for a free urinal or stall. Panic started to pulse through the veins in my eyes and coursed through my body in an over exaggerated pulse that pounded in my ears with each drop and up beat of the disco house blasting to a loud white noise. Out of their mouths came the moans. I other men in the restroom acted surprised and some were a bit disturbed by my behavior it seemed. I scrambled for the door and out into a busy Friday night club I seemed to glide like on tracks. I felt riddled with torpid appendixes ready deploy my body with vicious consternation. A. I had to find Mr. A. The phantoms ascended into positions. I was plowing through people drinking, laughing, yelling, smoking cigarettes. Life suddenly goes to IMAX. The room was running out of air but nobody was having a hard time breathing. I received strange looks. I was wandering through rooms. The dance music loud so my heartbeat matched the pulse of the disco. I wanted to faint as the looks perforated me expecting me to vomit.
The sound of the party was larger than the party. The clinking ice cubes in the glasses carried by drunken parishoners, the sizzle and small crackles of burning cigarette paper taking large tugs from lips around the filter, the cash register opening and shutting, the buzz of the discotheque lights. Life became amplified. There was some missing variable to explaining what exactly made me the catalyst, the mercury switch for this Chernobyl.
I saw him and quickly beelined to him. He saw the panic and tossed the drinks. We took on a brisk pace and walked down 5th St.
"Where were you? I was looking all over for you. I couldn't find you."
"I was getting our drinks. What's the matter?"
"I asked you to never leave me!" I exclaimed through my teeth.
The conversation was consisted of minced words because physcial contact was soon to follow. We were outside and the world began to slow down a bit. I couldn't make sense of this and I couldn't possibly have anyone else carry my crazy. What wasn't working? The drink surely didn't help but keep me from breathing or pushing towards a scary form of syncope. This wasn't a soft malaise. I felt out of control of every single thing that had to do with me. And that smell, the dust, I couldn't get rid of it. I would inhale and almost become incontinent on the spot. Just fear struck through me like that of a caught rabbit.
"He was feeling on me again."
"Who? What the fuck is the matter with you?"
I answered with a lie. Stating that I was molested in the bathroom by the latino man that was all over me on the dancefloor.
"I told you to never fucking leave me. And then this."
"Will you calm the fuck down?!"
I couldn't explain what I was going through. I couldn't differentiate much. The words delusional and abandonment came quickly into my head which struck a chord of fear and more panic.
I pushed him. He flew back down on the sidewalk onto his ass. He got up and started to walk away.
"You're fuckin' crazy!" he exclaimed.
I pushed him again. He hit the pavement, bracing himself by skinning his palms and forearms. I start to calm down, noticing what I was doing. Mr. A. stood up and began to walk away with a look of terror on his face. I caught up to him at the car. With reluctance and trepidation he let me into the vehicle and frantically drove off. A yelling match ensued in the car. I was trying to express what I was going through and it was coming out it what was received as crazy talk. So floodgates opened and the sobs and tears came out. Mr. A. had no idea what I was going through. How could he? I opened my door on a bridge.
"Yeah. There ya go. Kill yourself."
My right shoe hit asphalt as I was swiftly evulsed out of the moving air back to the passenger seat.
"Get the hell in here." he howled.
The door slammed shut. More of my incoherent ranting and raving continued. When our bedroom door shut daggers flew from his mouth and heavy rocks were lightly thrown. He didn't understand. I had barely a grasp on it myself. The situation kept escalating. Trying to win an argument with an Italian is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. Soon I spat in his face. He tries to leave but I wouldn't get out of the way. The heat goes from spunky simmer to seething in seconds. The next thing I knew Mr. A.'s friend was prying us apart and separating us. A. took off and, smartly, would not answer his phone. I didn't talk to him until morning but endured the sounds and scents and repelling urges through the night. That night was my first attempt in Austin. I tried the old loop the belt through the buckle, put your head through the hole, toss the slack over the top of the door to the garage, stand on a stool, then knock it out. Well, tragically/comically, the old leather ripped in half on the slack and I went smack down on my tailbone on the concrete floor of the garage.
Now not only did I feel like a degenerate freak, but a fat degenerate. The idea of being alone with all that was happening and I didn't feel I could talk about frightened me. I was never in the closet when it came to being gay. At seven I coined the phrase "Closets are for clothes." But this? I didn't know which side was up. The morning came with a phone call and me reeling myself back in from a pool of drool around my face on the dirty, oiled stained cement on the garage floor.
"The only way I'll continue is if you find us a therapist."
I agreed and found and LGBT affiliated counseling center and set an appointment. I was frightened about what I was experiencing, Mr. A finding out, and if he'd stick around if I were ill like my sister, my father, my father's mother, and so on. I always told myself that it was not something that could happen to me. I show too much promise for a life full of piece and quiet. I could lie to a therapist and deflect it all to some trivial behavior caused by seeing as my move as a sacrifice and resenting Mr. A. for me making my own choices. Sure he twisted my arm by saying that the relationship would be over if I didn't make the move. All-in-all I had the where-with-all to make my own adult choices.
That's what I did. I deflected. I lied. There had to be more herbs or I could start more lifting and less cardio. Something had to give. With so much shit piling up all over the place there had to be a pony near by. I will not be my father. It was too late though. My father fought to accept what he was to where he fabricated his life to suit his taste.