Psychotic Views Part Eight:
The priest came to see me again three days later. I had moved since our first visit. Not to a different room, to a different place. A place for someone like me. Other people were there for the same reasons I was there and then there were people there for different reasons all together.
The elevators moaned and wailed almost as much as the patients. Maybe the elevators were empathetic and were experiencing sympathy pains, or maybe there were just old and hadn’t had any maintenance since FDR’s last term in office. I tried telling them to shut up a few times, but it didn’t do any good. They didn’t listen to me. They just kept right on groaning. I wonder if it made them feel any better.
It was sometime in the early afternoon when the priest came. Around 1:30, I had finished another lukewarm bland lunch at 12:30, then fell asleep for close to an hour. When I woke up, I turned my head slightly and saw him siting in the chair next to the bed. He was reading something, not a newspaper or a magazine, it wasn’t a book either. It was writing. Pen on paper writing, my writing. For a long time, I said nothing. I just laid there in the bed watching him read my writing, at least it seemed like a long time. He was wearing glasses, narrow lenses with black frames. I watched his eyes moving across the words line by line by line. I wondered how much hee had read. I wondered what he thought of it. I shifted slightly in bed. There was a slight groan. He must have heard it, because his eyes lifted up to see me watching him.
“I hope you don’t mind me looking at your writing. This is your writing?”
“Yes and no. Yes, its’ my writing and no I don’t mind you looking at it.”
“Has anyone else looked at at?”
“Until now, no one has seen it except me.”
“Is this the first writing you’ve ever done?”
“No. It’s been awhile, though, since and done in this hard.”
“How much have you written before now?”
“Four novels. I’m not sure how many short stories.”
“Nothing published?”
“No.”
He closed the folder that held my writing and placed it back on the table next to the bed. He then slid the chair next to the bed. He then slid the chair out and around in order to get a better vantage point.
“This writing you’re doing now.” He said. “You’re holding nothing back, are you?”
“I’m opening up the windows and airing out the world.”
“It needs it. Not exactly optimistic in your world view, are you?”
“There’s a famous saying that goes: ‘ Optimists are people who just aren’t paying attention.’”
“Somebody famous say it?”
“Yes, but the name escapes my memory.”
“Are you going to try and sell it when you’re done?”
“I just want to finish it.”
“Is that a no?”
“A definite no? No, it’s not a definite no. It’s a probable no. A more than likely no.”
“That’s a lot of nos.”
“Do you think it’s worth selling?”
“A definite yes. A very definite yes. Will you excuse me for a few minutes? I need to make a phone call and get another cup of coffee.”
“Sure, go ahead. Take your time.”
He stood up slowly, let out a muffled moan and left. I get out of bed and went to the window. It was raining. It was always raining. The rain was gray, cold and gray. The wind was blowing in gusts. Calm one minute, galling the next. When the priest came back about ten minutes later, I was still standing at the window, looking out.
“See anything interesting out there?” he asked.
“It’s hard to see anything through the rain.”
“Well, at least you’re up and moving.”
“Yes, I am.”
“How are you doing?”
“Well, standing here in the near past and the near future, okay.”
“What do you mean the near past and the near future? Don’t you mean the present?”
I was pacing around as I talked. The room was small, the pacing even smaller. He was sipping his coffee and watching me only when I crossed in front of the window.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think there can be such a thing as present time. Time is never still. It’s always moving. If I ask you when the present is and you say now. By the time you finished the word now, its already in the past. To me, everything is either past or future.”
“So, now is it just an illusion? It’s an impossibility.”
“Yes, but who am I to say so”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“You can ask anything you want, but I won’t guarantee an answer.”
“Have you had any visitors other than me?”
“No.”
“You have no friends or family?”
“I haven’t told anyone yet.”
“Why?”
“Shame.”
“Is it that you don’t want to leave your room?”
“Yes. How did you find out about that?”
“A nurse told me. She’s concerned about you. I’m concerned about you and there are others who are concerned about you, you have to tell them.”
I went to the window, lowered my head and pressed it against the glass. I closed my eyes and fell into a hard silence. The priest let me be, he continued drinking his coffee and waited until he thought I was ready to talk again. It seemed like an hour, but it was really only five minutes.
“In your writings,” he said, “You wrote there’s not enough shame in the world. You’re saying it’s a good thing to feel shame and it is. This is the kind you wrote about.”
“Shame is good both in personal behavior and how we treat others.”
“But shame, a different kind of shame, can be dark and destructive. That’s the kind of shame you just talked about in this room.”
“Yes, I know, but do you understand why I’m reluctant to tell anyone. Once people know you’ve been in a place like this, they might come after me with torches like I’m Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.”
“Am I? You damn well know what the public is like when it comes to this stuff?”
“People can be irrational?”
“Irrational? Irrational? There’s not much worse people can know about you. It’s amazing how fast a supposedly rational group of people can turn into an irrational mob.”
“Why do you think that happens?”
“Because the rationale is only a mask, a guise for people to hide behind when they sow their faces to the world.”
He stood up, finished his coffee, then tossed his cup into the wastebasket. After a small interval of pacing near the chair, he circled the bed and came over to where I was sitting.
“This is why you never got help before, isn’t it?” he said, “You’ve had this problem your whole life, haven’t you? You’ve carried it around with you all this time.”
“Yes.”
I put my head down in m hand and started crying. Quiet but--- tears flooded my eyes, streams cascaded down my cheeks and dropped into my lap.
“I have to go now, “ he said.
“Okay.”
After he left, I started thinking about that one particular dream I had. The one where I was flat on my back and they were jabbing my arms with IVs and needles. I started to re-examine the dream. On the first pass, I took the dream to be a portent of what just happened to me, of my attempted suicide, of their saving my life. On the second pass, here, I began to wonder about that first conclusion. I closed my eyes and played the dream, once again, in my head. This time, when I was done, I formed no firm conclusion. I had serious doubts about my first conclusion. Now, I had serious suspicions that the first conclusion was wrong. A new possibility began to rise from the ashes of an old, fading fire. Maybe that dream wasn’t a portent of something already happened, but of something yet to be. Something I don’t survive, something whose end chapter is my death.
I couldn’t shake this idea off. In fact, the possibility of its veracity became stronger as time went on, even when I was thinking of other things, it was there. It just wouldn’t go away. It shadowed my every thought, it lurked on the heels of my every step. Enough of that for now, onto other things. Things I want to say, truths that need to be heard. I know people say they want the truth, but do most people really mean what they say or is it just more words made meaningless by the human inability to deal with things as they are and not with things as they would like them to be?
Many people will say they believe in the truth, but vociferously deny it as it really is. Many people will say they believe in the truth, yet live their life at polar opposites of the truth. There are people who have institutionally, individually, denied the truth so often day after day after day for so long that they live in an opposite world. A world where lies are truth and truth are lies. Who was that asshole that said: ‘ If you repeat lies often enough, they become the truth. Was it Josef Goebbles, that Nazi propaganda mother fucker? It was him, wasn’t it? Hell, it doesn’t really matter who said it. The statement bears out, doesn’t it?
Individuals can’t run away from the past, neither can countries. The past is always with you. You can’t escape it, you can’t bribe it, you can’t run from it, and you can’t kill it, you can deny it all to seven different kinds of hell, but it will still be there. The first step to resolving a problem, it has been said, is to admit there is a problem. To rid yourself of an addiction, you first have to admit there is an addiction. A problem cannot be corrected if it is denied.
The first step to resolving a problem it has been said, is to admit there is a problem. TO rid yourself of an addiction, you first have to admit there is an addiction. A problem cannot be corrected if it is denied. I’ll give you an example of what I mean: the U.S. has a problem of spending too much money on the military, policing the world and warring with foreign countries. Now, there are a few people in the country with the courage to say these things are a problem. A Godzilla sized problem, but these people aren’t in the position to change the problem.
The Pentagon is certainly in a position to admit there is a problem to change it, but they will do neither, why, because they’re boatloads of money and the only way they can induce hard ons is to build dick shaped missiles and start wars.
The president and congress are certainly in a position to admit there is a problem and to change it, but they are corrupt moral cowards who care about re-elections and making money for themselves and their friends. Did you ever notice what kind of jobs politicians get when they leave office, lobbying. This is proof of their corruption, their self-centeredness, their cowardice and their total lack of regard for the well being of this country and its people. The media is in the position to admit there is a problem, but they are not in a position to change it, but they are in a position to influence change. On the whole, though, they will do more of these things. Radio? Forget it, newspapers? Forget it. The so called big liberal bastion papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times never fail to beat the drums for war.
They only become skeptical after the fact, when they can get fat publishing money for writing a book. Before the war starts, when they could use their power and influence to try and stop the war from happening, all you hear is direct press quotes written by and fed from the Pentagon. Remember Judith Miller? That great so called liberal reporter working for that great so called liberal newspaper, who spread her journalistic legs for the Pentagon, the State Department. Where is she working now? Fox News, that was mightly liberal of them to hire her. There are only a few news media outlets that run against the norm. Free Speech TV, Link TV, Mother Jones and maybe a couple of others, but they are all outside the mainstream. They are nibbling at the fringes. The mainstream media, where there is much money, power, influence, are all corrupt.
The public is in a position to admit a problem and they are in a position to change it, but they will do neither. Some will admit there is a problem. The numbers, though, are pathetically low. The way they could change it is by admitting there is a problem in extremely large numbers, raising hell about it, then voting for candidates who support their view. This is never going to happen. The public, on the whole, doesn’t pay anywhere near enough attention to the political process and the way it works. They let themselves be lied to, used, and manipulated into thinking what the powers that be want them to think and if you bring this up to people who vote, they are smug and self-satisfied with the themselves for just the mere act of voting, but even large numbers of people who vote lack basic knowledge and facts. They are stuck in this two party black hole with any desire to get out. They vote with Democrats, or they vote with the Republicans. The two party system is a colossal failure and by participating mindlessly in it over and over again, you’re just adding to the size of the failure. You think because you vote that lets you off the hook? What is your vote based on? Do you keep track how your representative votes on bills? How many specific details do you acquire before you vote? How many facts. I am Democrat, he’s a Democrat, I’m a Republican, he’s a Republican, Jesus fucking Christ.
One thing that never fails to rile my blood is when there’s a war going somewhere halfway around the world and everyone starts chanting that old, propagandistic lie: ‘ The soldiers are fighting for our freedom’. This often repeated truckload of shit drives me so far up the wall, I often pass Spiderman along the way. He always waves to me when I go by and he says, “ Did someone say the soldiers are dying for our freedom again?” I answer, “ Do you even have to ask?” Then I ask him how he and Mary Jane are doing and he tells me they’re having personal problems. Mary Jane’s complaining that she’s tired of fucking on walls and ceilings all the time and would like to have sex in a bed once in awhile. So I say, “ What are you going to do?” He replies, “ Nice talking to you again, until next time.” We then shake hands and go our separate ways.