Man Up Yours

OK...if I judge your feedback correctly, then it would appear I am to be a mental health advocate. Funny how we are often forced into these kinds of roles. Reminds me of Larry Kramer, possibly the most vocal anti AIDS activist. No one would choose such a thing...hell, I would much rather be living normally. But I am not. I seem to have been chosen by some divine force to speak up about something that is killing us. Not just those with mental health issues, but everyone else as well. This might be a question not only of the survival of the sufferers of mental illness, but the entire human race.

So...I guess...this is my destiny, & I might as well embrace it. Because fighting it has not worked! So...if you're on board, I hope there is something here and in my subsequent work that will shine a light on the affliction, and offer some solutions for surviving it. If not, I wish you well in your travels, and hope you never have to hear the words 'mental illness' ever again. However, let me just warn you...all of you...you have not heard the end of it. Not by a long stroke. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. Mental illness does exist, and business is booming. If it continues the way it is...there will be no humans left. If you think that is a good thing...then ignore the problem and carry on. If it bothers you that we might become extinct...then come with me, and let's see if we can't find a way out.

Gus Worland is the man behind a new documentary series on the ABC, called "MAN UP", which purports to tackle the issue of male suicide. 

There is a crises; & the phenomenon is reaching epidemic proportions.  The facts and stats are out there..read at your leisure, should you be so inclined.  

Attached is a link below, dealing with the program, which screened for the first time last night.

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/mind/how-a-mates-suicide-changed-everything-for-gus-worland/news-story/fcd42bac3760eb41fc53a6f121c1105a


It's a noble effort. trying to understand mental illness among men. However...the title really doesn't help. 'Man Up' is a close relative of 'snap out of it'.  

& we already know that this doesn't help.  

If you want a more balanced view of mental illness, take a look at the doco 'Sunnyboy', about the member of the band the Sunnyboys who had schizophrenia...I think it's a more sober, compassionate portrait of mental illness. Not a 'man up' in sight; only compassion, tolerance, understanding. & even a few suggestions for recovery.  

I'm not even going to watch the rest of 'Man Up', because the title already exhibits a lack of compassion for the subject.  

FACT: people who have not had a mental illness, or have never been touched by it, will NEVER understand.  

FACT: of these, most do not want to understand. & I don't blame them; who wants to be around a sufferer, especially when you have your own shit to do. Who needs it. Unless the sufferer is a spectacular one, gifted with all sorts of good shit, like music, art, writing, film, etc; people will tolerate all sorts of mad bullshit from a person if they are a talented artist. Damn, most people forgave Michael Jackson his pedophilia because he could sing and dance! Human nature, I guess...  

FACT: as long as the popular treatment for mental illness is to 'Man the Fuck Up' or whatever the latest Hollywood hero Bruce Willis think fast look alive Die Hard inspired gee-up is...

more men will be killing themselves.  

FACT: the medical profession, for the most part, hasn't a clue what to do about all this mental illness nonsense. It's the chemical and neurological equivalent of Vegas.  

It's a roll of the dice; whether you get it, how it affects your life, and whether or not you recover.  

It really is about luck.  


You might argue, 'isn't it about whether a person wants to get well or not'??

That might work if you have a cold, or flu, or some virus or other, etc...but mental illness? Just as an virus infected computer doesn't know it has anything wrong with it...same with a mentally ill human brain. And even when it does...the causes, and the cure are so 'shot in the dark'...

it literally is a roll of the dice. 


If you are mentally well...you are NEVER going to get this.

Indeed...I would be amazed if you have even read this far.  

If you have come this far with me...then you are already on my side. 



So...who am I talking to?

Preaching to the acquired?

Not so much...although it is lovely to know you are there.  

Trying to convert the perpetually intolerant? Not really; most of these people have already made up their minds, and they will no more be shifted than those who believe in god.

belief in god is narrow, superstitious, immature bullshit. relinquishing control of the uncontrollable, trying to manage the unmanageable, trying to understand the un-understandble.,..by laying it all at the feet of an omnipotent one...is simple laziness.  

there is no god...& if there were...he is a lover of torture porn. he sits and watches us suffer, and laughs. but does nothing.

leaves us to it,...with illnesses we don't understand, and no cures.

except death.

very funny, you evil bastard. If there is a devil...he is this 'god' people talk about.

if you wish to be an adult...accept there is no one up there who cares about us. 


accept...that we have a virus.

accept...that we might as a species BE a virus. & mother nature is getting rid of us, one malfunctioning unit at a time.  

You know my thoughts on this; mental illness is simply a matter of brain malfunction. If your computer picks up a virus...you can either take it somewhere to be cleaned out...or get rid of it, and get a new one. My book deals with all this, so I won't elaborate further, but I will say this; a malfunctioning mechanism generally does not know there is something wrong with it...until it is too late.  

If you must say something about people who commit suicide...then try to say something compassionate, like 'what a shame'. 'how sad'. 'never mind'.  

pretend, if you need to.  


But let's can the 'COWARD' stuff, or 'HE SHOULD HAVE MANNED THE FUCK UP'!

Most people who top themselves are NOT sick of hurting themselves...they are sick of hurting OTHERS!! Can you imagine what it is like, having an illness that makes you so selfish you hurt others indiscriminately, don't know why, and often don't even tremewmber doing it? All you are left with, is a lot of mess to clean up- like coming home to the consequences of an all night party hosted by your evil twin brother, who has torn the joint up and ecamped?

That is what it is like.  

Suicide...is NOT SELFISH.  

It is the ULTIMATE ACT OF COMPASSION!

Of COURSE we don''t want to suffer any longer...but more importantly, we DON'T WANT TO BE THE CAUSE OF OTHER PEOPLE'S SUFFERING ANY LONGER, EITHER!

I hope you get it.  

or at least...try to.  


We would LOVE to be like you.  

We would LOVE to function normally.  

Sadly we don't.  

We cannot 'man up', whatever the fuck that means; for we have been toughing it out for a LIFETIME!

We cannot even 'human up'.  

We...
Our brains simply don't work.


Sorry about that.

Sad, but true.  

Now...you can whip a malfunctioning brain all you like; but it won't help. 

All you can do...is try to be tolerant. 


If you care about human beings...

If you think we the sufferers have something to contribute...are somehow worth saving...may have to potential to heal, and grow, and contribute, despite our illness...

then you might have the capacity for compassion.

& I applaud you for that.

But if we are lost causes...

then walk away. save yourself.

life is tough...& your own survival is a noble cause.



All we can really do...is keep on choogling the best we can, & HOPE something changes.

Or shut the mechanism down.  

It's a shitty situation all around...& there is no point bitching about it to a god that doesn't exist, or if he does, has a terrible sense of humour even allowing such an illness.  


what purpose does it serve?

why does it even exist?


we don't know yet.  

my view is...the human race is doing so much damage to the environment, and to each other...the fact is. our species might be mentally ill, and this...all this suicide...is just natures way of getting rid of us.  



So...if this is the case...might as well 'rage against the dying of the light.  



Which is why I am having my say.  


Because if I can save one life, telling it like it is- whether that be mine or someone else reading this...


then it is worth it.  it has to be.

that is the only meaning i can think of.



& for those who are getting tired of it...


join the club. I don't know a single person suffering a mental illness who isn't perpetually exhausted.  

Life is suffering.  


if you don't understand people who suffer differently to you...

then thank the gods or the omnipotent being of your choice for the mental health that allows you to think that way...& go and read something else.


you will never understand, and you can sit and hunker down in your bunker, and watch as the human race slowly destroys itself.  
 

& for those who understand...bless you. 


For in that understanding...


you save lives.  


just by listening...

caring.  


you save not only my life, but the lives of all humans.  


& this is what it boils down to.  


if you want a future...you will understand, and be compassionate.  

if not...


then our manifest destiny will be complete.



we will all...ALL of us...do what we were put here for.


To Go.


the entire species.  


forever...

Under the Bridge...

I sat at the bar where Jim Morrison pissed.  

'The bar'.  HAH!  A bar...he probably went potty in lots of bars, but this was the most famous of them.  There is actually a plaque commemorating the auspicious occasion. 

I wandered in there by accident around midnight after a bad night in West Hollywood. 

Like a lot of things about Jim, it was probably apocryphal, but Ollie Stone certainly shot the recreation at Barney's Beanery for 'The Doors' movie.  

So much history in Hollywood...so many ghosts...


so much wee under the bridge...    

The Fourth King...

I have the title "The Fourth King" in my head, and have done for a few days now.  I have no idea where it came from...it just popped in there, and now I can't shift it. 

It would make a great title...but for what?  I don't know.

When something nags at me like this...it usually means I need to look it up. 

It's not really a film as such...or a book...

it's part of the nativity story. 

Once upon a time, three kings came out of a distant land and followed a star across the desert. You may know them as the Wise Men, or perhaps the magi-bearers of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for a newborn child. What few know is that another king set out on the long and difficult journey, a king named Mazzel who, unlike the well-sung trio, arrived too late and empty-handed.

A day late and a buck short, it would seem.  & by all accounts, this fourth king was a bit of a fuck-up.  Sounds a bit like me.  But this king redeemed himself...I am about to read how.

Should be interesting;



I can't wait to see how the fourth king pulls his genitals out of the bear trap...

Remembering Brautigan.

Just an inconsequential little portion of bullshit...

it won't change your life, but it won't hold you up long, either. 


Not many things sadder than an abandoned thong on the road. 

Such things always remind me of my beloved friend and author Richard Brautigan. 

An abandoned...anything in the road...always reminds me of his book, 'Sombrero Fallout'.

Someone leaves a sombrero in the middle of the intersection of a busy street, and everybody in town loses their fuckin' minds over it.  It almost ends in a nuclear catastrophe...all over a Sombrero in the middle of the road.  Do check it out one time, won't you; I got to spend some time in Brautigan territory...he lived in San Fran at one time, & Monterey, Carmel, etc...

I love his book, 'Confederate General from Big Sur'...it was the first Brautigan I ever read.

I loved Big Sur.  Carmel.  All round there. 

& the lovely people. 

Brautigan was a lovely man...apparently...when he wasn't drunk.  The demon booze had him in it's clutches...like a lot of other writers/artists. 

Poor fellow murdered himself in cold blood as a result of the desperation his addiction drove him to, dwindling sales of his books (possibly related to his sporadic output due to his alcoholism) &...

he just wasn't made to be a regular human. 


It always gets the sensitive ones.

They fried his brains when he was a young man in the mental hospital.  I don't think he was mental...his family say he was just 'highly strung'.


I'm not sure that is a 'madness' thing. 


Please read his daughters book about her father, and how him blowing his brains out with a shotty affected her as a little girl...& pretty much forever. 

It's called, 'You Can't Catch Death' by Ianthe Brautigan. 


Very touching...very insightful.

& she's right...you can't catch death. 


But it will catch you.  Eventually.

Try to make it later, rather than sooner...& let it be death's idea...not yours.

 
Get your 'five goddamned minutes', as Buke put it. 



Thank you for coming, Richard. 

I guess you were a handful...but I am certainly a better man for having known you.



Peace...


JWA



 

Dancing With the Gods...

Dispatches from the machine shop; 

Thanks for taking an interest; I appreciate the support. 

If it wasn't for you...I'd be in the fuckin' ground, H.  

Now...this is just more musings on the process of...writing, and I guess living, because for me, you can't separate the two.   It's all crap I deal with in the book...but in a book, you just write it differently.   A lot of this stuff is just occasional what have you...incidental little nibbles, sociables at a party.  Some you won't like- maybe you don't like anchovies, I do.  Some you might.  

But working this stuff out helps me with that big bastard that has eluded me a lifetime...

the book.  

My routine is, usually, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 hours writing in my room, then I try to get to the library, to clear my head.  Then I write this stuff.  I helps keep me on track.  It's...still writing, but it's very different in style.  It...it's like a break, but not a break, if you get my drift.  

It's...like...did you ever read Steinbeck's "Diary of a Novel"??   It was basically...while he was writing 'East of Eden' in his notebook, he used the offhand page to write a few notes about the novel he was writing.  Sort of a commentary.  Here's me with a statue of the Beck, in Carmel, maybe Big Sur...Ken could help me here...anyway, JS used this to help keep him on track.  & I guess, to convey something of the intricacies and minutiae of process to his readers.  

It's a good idea.  It helps keep you in the zone.  You need something; for that  fucking book, like my life, is like scaling Mount Bullshit, but I cannot stay away from it.  

This is what I was born to do...it's in the blood.  Can't argue with that; well, you can, but it will kill you to do so.  Seems to want to kill me either way.  But you have to be true to yourself, right?  No matter what happens???  All my ancestors were infected with the same disease, and it killed all of them in some pretty pathetic ways.  So...if I can't get it together, then no one can say I didn't try.

  

Hubert Selby Junior said, “Being an artist doesn't take much. Just everything you got. Which means of course that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it completely, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.”

So there it is; if I feel like this 'job' has taken everything I have...it's because it has.  It will.  It does.  I don't imagine it helps being mad as a cut snake...writers...artists...are mad bastards.  Does the writing make us mad?  Or are we mad to be writers?  who knows.  

Oh...by the way...writers think they are a cut above.  Most artists do.  We think we have been blessed- or cursed- with the job of creating art.  We are suffering...for you.  

Like we are somehow...special.  chosen.  

It's bullshit.  Inconceivable, unimaginable, irretrievable, irrevocable and inexorable bullshit.

It's the worst kind of bullshit...like fame; somehow, some people are better than others because they are 'artists', or they have a lot of dough.  

It's a con job.  Don't buy into it.  I know you won't.

You know the truth...it's why I like you.  

You know...

   

We all have it tough.  

We artists think we invented suffering...but it's bullshit.  

All the pain that goes with being a human- families, past life, man's inhumanity to man, god's eternal silence- we think we have some patent on how it pains us. 

Bullshit.  

We all suffer.  If we listened for a second, shut our brain off for five goddamned minutes and listened to other human beings...we would know...it's tough for everyone.  

Just because we feel it more, or differently, or choose to make it last longer, or hurt more...doesn't mean we are worse off than anyone else. 

Other people feel the same things, suffer the same things...& they get on with it.  

You wanna' write?  

Then be the best goddamn writer you can be.  

You feel as though you are in hell?? 

Spare a thought for the poor bastard who takes your money at the toll on the Holland Tunnel in the Apple.  Or those poor bastards busting their hump, walking along narrow beams building sky scrapers.  You think you got it tough, because you can't make your book work?

Go fuck yourself.  

Take a ticket, and join the agony cue.  It's a long one.  

Just because other people don't bleat like I do...

Doesn't make me special.  Never did.  

Yeah, I had crap in my past.  It's only because I have given the writing an extra special shove, I uncovered quite a few buried memories...one...when i was little, I was beaten so severely one day by dad, I wandered in a daze out into the garden outside our house, & lost consciousness.  

I forgot it...probably because my brain never worked properly after that.  

Sad.  Tough luck.  

Now...what seems to be working for me, at the moment, is realising that this is the case, accepting my brain doesn't work properly, trying to deal with a few memories that plague me and rule my conduct, and deleting them like bad files.  

Then...we can take a look at the operating system, and see what can be done.  

I think most computer boffins are agreed...when the hard drive has been damaged, by viruses, or whatever...it's best to dump the files onto a hard drive, and return the computer to a factory setting.  

Or...you dump the prick.  

I can't do that with my brain, as much as I would like to.   

Which, I guess, is why I spent a lifetime trying to figure the shit out.  

As I'm stuck with this mess...I keep on going.  

I write, I live (as best I can)  I fall down, hard, I threaten to shut the system down, I slowly recover, and then I go again.  Over and over, again and again.  

I roll the dice.  

Which is basically what everyone else still alive is doing. 

I don't always see it...because I bought into the bullshit mythology that artistic souls are 'special'. 

I can see this.  

Which means...I might just be sane enough to get back in there.  

I might be just normal enough to know...

I'm still in the race.  

Yeah...I lost a lot...

but I'm still in the race, goddamn it.  

& you are cheering me on. 

If you are reading this, indeed anything I write...

it means you give a shit about me, and what happens to me.  

It means you think I am worth the bother.  

Taking the time to read my humble shit.  

That makes me feel...I am worth bothering about.  

It gives me...

it makes me want to keep on going.  

My job seems to be trying to figure shit out.

It's not an ideal job...but what can I tell you.  

This is the only time I feel the fire in my belly...when I sit here, and I am making the words work for me. 

dance for me.  

i can feel them...

i can barely breathe.  i am typing like a mother fracker...

i can barely type fast enough, getting the words out.

& I know...you're out there.  

rooting for me.  

it means something.  

i know you're not supposed to care about the reader...

but you mean the world to me.  

I won't forget what you've done for me...just being there. 

hanging in there with me. 

I'm no bargain...I'm a selfish shit.  

most mental people are.

but you make me want to be...

better.  

person. 

writer.

human.        

It's a gamble; either I will make a go of it, and my instincts were right...that I am a writer, and I do have something to contribute to humanity...

or I'm a useless piece of shit, as dad predicted.  

It's one more assault on the Mount, I guess;  who knows...maybe one day I'll wake up, look at that 500 pages of...whatever the hell it is...& I will see, in total clarity, it works.  

I did have something to say. 

Or it was all a futile waste of time.  

Whatever...if I fail?  I have me to blame.  

If I succeed...I have you to thank.  

So...it is only common courtesy to give you some insight into this...new attempt at the summit. 

A lot of you have invested a lot of time and effort in me...& only a shit would ignore that.  

It's been a tough road...but you are in the process of saving a life.  

& if I can make all this work, once and for all...

I too can dance with the gods!        

 

Dammit...WE ALL CAN!!

YIPPEEEE!

New Born

The notion the world owes us a living is the greatest lie to be visited upon mankind since mythology was invented.   & the new age is peppered with lies designed to syphon our dough and leave us looking naked & foolish in a house made of bullshit. 

 

'follow your dreams' without a plan...and you will live to choke on them.  

 

It's baby food.  stay away...  

 

The moment you are torn screaming from the womb, sons and daughters, you are on your own. You will learn sooner or later, one way or another.  god hates your guts, and the world is full of things that want to eat you, rape you, or tear you a new one.   There are things in our own heads that want us off the menu.  Learn to fight...or die.  Twas ever this. 

 

Doesn't mean you can't have a little fun along the way...

 

 

RIP LEM.