Symptoms

I know I am sick when I start imagining myself dying.  


I know I am sick when I feel intensely frustrated and then start imagining my family discovering my limp body in the bathroom.


I know I am sick the way you know you are sick when you have a fever.  Officially sick.  Like, you can go to work with a cough or a headache, but if you have a fever?  take a sick day.


I have been round this carousel enough times to recognize the horse.  I know something is misfiring in my head when I think
 if I kill myself the day before my partner is set arrive from Europe anyway,
 the funeral will be more convenient.


This insight is helpful, because I know that I do not really want to die.


But like a hacking cough or a high fever, these thoughts of dying can't help but affect my general well-being.  They're distracting, distressing, and very disturbing.  They beg to be believed.


Even when I remember that these thoughts always retreat, I also remember that they always return.  I know  I am going to see them again, these old bullies who never grow up and never grow tired of tormenting me.


It's the certainty that this cough, this fever, these suicidal imaginings 
always come back
that makes them such a bitch to endure 






p.s. please do not worry, I'm on a horse of a different color today.

Smashing Papayas

photo by Jeremy

I am still smashing things.
I am still smashing things.



Recently papayas, eggs, those kelp balloon-pods on the beach, and bubble wrap.

I've been trying to understand my compulsion for this kind of destruction, and its expression in an artistic context.

photo by Jeremy

I realized that my hypothesis about my 2-year-old niece applies to me.

She loves to perform "night-night," squealing with joy when I pull up the covers of my bed under her chin, yet going to sleep in her own crib at night seems fraught with anxiety.  She sometimes screams her little head off.


  She also likes to play "fall down," in which she gently lowers herself to to floor, dirt, or sidewalk and calls out "fall down!" with glee. 


 Are you guessing my theory?  Right, she repeatedly performs acts that scare her, exerting conscious control over them during playtime, rehearsing for the real thing.  Like a fire drill.

I keep finding new ways to perform accidents.  Instead of rehearsing, my performances are more ritual reenactments in which I keep trying for a different outcome.


 In my performances no one gets hurt and I can clean everything up by myself if I have to.

Of course it is really amazing when a big group of people spontaneously decides to help me clean up, as happened with the eggs on a street in Barcelona.

Consoling Words

I wrote this last year, probably in late February.

Everyone has their words of consolation, their way of making sense of the accident in 5 sentences or less.

1. It was an ACCIDENT
2. IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT
3. It could have happened to anyone
4. These accidents happen all the time
5. Other people have survived worse traumas.
6. People tell you not to feel bad because there’s always someone who’s got it worse.  But whatever you are suffering, you are in it, and your personal experience needs to be respected and felt for what it is
7. It’s about karma.  When a series of bad things happen to you, you need to examine it and change your karma
8. Tragedies and difficulties happen in order to teach you, to push you to a higher spiritual plane.  Since so many big bad things have happened to you you must have an advanced soul
9. Tragedies push us to take stock, to consider why.  I strongly urge you to pray, and to pray to Jesus Christ our savior.
10. My daughter’s whole class at school prayed for you, and for the two sisters.
11. We’re all praying for you
12. You are a good person, with a good heart, who never wanted to hurt anyone, and after this accident you are still the same good person.

Yet the mother said to my attorney, You want justice for Jessica?  What about justice for my two daughters?

17 Days

Today is January 17, 2010.  It is 17 days until the first anniversary of the Accident.

 I am starting to feel an inexorable pull

on the fluids in my body,

as though a different source of gravity is affecting me

 a sort of tide rising

 I can't stop the days from passing

In 17 days I will wake up, it will be a Wednesday

Once again, there will be nothing I can do to stop what happened.

The liquid in my body seeping into my lungs

inevitability

will there be a memorial in Managua?  of course there will be.

remembering, mourning

i see my body lying in the dirt next to theirs

how much have their bodies decomposed?

how much have I decomposed?

damp leaves

ants

plastic bags blowing across the cemetery

soft rain

Papaya Mistake?

I may have made a mistake. I'm not sure yet. I'm here at art school in Barcelona, and I kept missing class because of depression, paranoia, etc. So when it came time to present a work of art related to our personal identity, I decided to drop another papaya, only this time as performance art, in a gallery/classroom. I dropped the papaya from about 8 feet up, so it did not break completely. I spoke some of the details of the accident and its aftermath. I explained that this was less a presentation of art and more a necessary communication from me to them, in hopes of dissipating my fears so that I could come to class.

They all critiqued it as a work of art - "you should have just dropped the papaya and not said anything" "you should have smeared the papaya guts all over yourself" "this is NOT a place for art therapy, this is a place for art, and your 'performance' doesn't belong" "I didn't want all those details" "I wanted more details".....and so on. It degenerated into me shouting that I HAD prepared another, completely impersonal piece, but that I needed to share this as a human being, not as 'an artist'.

So it wasn't my most successful venture.

Papaya

I dropped a papaya
off the roof
to watch it smash on the ground.

Then I took lots of close-up pictures of the carcass
Why?

The car accident was an act of destruction
in which I feel I was forced to participate
I was not the author of those moments,
nor an arbiter of the physics
mass
velocity
vector force of metal on flesh
I was not acting deliberately or willfully in any way
I can't even remember what happened

It has left me
unmoored,
demolished,
furious.
It has turned my skin inside out.

I DECIDED to drop the papaya,
I carried it up the stairs,
I opened the door,
I held it out over empty space, and
I dropped it.

CRASH

I documented it myself
the pulp oozing out of the rind
the juice flowing into the grass
no police or coroners necessary.

And I cleaned it up.

Finished.

PARASITES OF THE MIND: PTSD Healing: What are the Causes of PTSD?

PARASITES OF THE MIND: PTSD Healing: What are the Causes of PTSD?