I used to have dreams of snakes, black mambas to be precise. They slithered into my house and I had to catch them. I never got bit, and they never out ran me, even though they are the fastest, deadliest snake in the world. Someone told me that all snakes in dreams meant sex, but that interpretation never sat well with me. It just doesn’t seem to fit.

Maybe we all have our own black mambas to chase and tame. Maybe it’s just a representation of that something within ourselves that could ruin us if we’re not careful.

Things about Saskatoon I remember

So I’m having a beer with this queer friend of mine who lived in Saskatoon ages ago, he’s asking me about what’s been happening in our old hometown.

“Cher was at Fuddruckers this past year.”

“Nooooooo! I don’t believe it!”

It’s true, for those who don’t know, Fuddruckers is kind of like Chucky Cheese. I used to get free time on the air hockey table because an employee went to the same queer youth group as me. I was actually living in Saskatoon at the time Cher made her glorious appearance at Fuddruckers. I don’t remember what they said she played there, maybe it was air hockey.

What I do remember is the radio stations kept playing “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” over and over. It got to the point where I could sing a few bars and be guaranteed to drive my mother spare.

Fuddruckers is on 8th Street. 8th Street is the main driving route of all the bored teenagers. They just go up and down this one street. Like sharks, always moving. I was one of the teenagers that drove around too, but I hung out with gay boys, so we drove up and down the strip where the boys were, listening to New Order and generally acting dramatic about everything.

I think everybody in Saskatoon does it, the driving around thing. Joni Mitchell probably did it too. She went to the same high school I went to, and the school was so proud of that fact. There was a signed photo of her in the trophy cabinet. Of course, at the time there was no music program, no art program, no writing program, and no theatre. So, there you go.

My friend just told me she went to the same high school as Neil Young. Too funny! What a pair we make.

There’s this local legend about the train bridge where Joni lost her virginity.

The place I lost my virginity in burnt down.

And that makes me think about my Neil Young friend’s favorite pizza place, Dynomite Pizza, which blew up. For real.

That’s not a Saskatoon story though.

When I was a little kid I was convinced my mother was living a double life as Nana Mouskouri. She went off to Canada Council juries and I would be left alone trying to process where she could be. I saw this woman on television, Nana, and she looked just like my mother. Nana was touring. Nana sold records.

Nana wasn’t my mother, but it took me a few years before I was sure.

18 years of living in Saskatoon and I had never seen the fabled Joni Mitchell. This was it, I was at the airport, on my way to my new adult life in Vancouver. I was all fresh faced and hopeful, and there, sitting in Robin’s Donuts, was Joni Mitchell. My mother was trying her best to impart advice about life and how things would be. I could only see Joni Mitchell, drinking coffee and waiting for the same flight as me.

Last night I had a dream about Eclairs. Not the pastry variety, the sync 16mm cameras. I was surrounded by all this shiny old school technology, god, maybe it was a wet dream. I would love to shoot my feature on actual film, that would be so nice. It’s so pricey though, bleh. I heard a nasty rumour that Kodak is going to stop making film and just stick to digital. I think that would be tragic, there’s something so gorgeous about film.

Oh, now I’m hungry for a real eclair. Mmm, eclairs! Stop it! Stupid Zyprexa gives me carb cravings like you wouldn’t believe. When I was on it before if there was a carb within ten feet of me I’d eat it.

Dream Cup

I just had the weirdest dream. My cousin took this coffee mug I had that had the word Dream stamped on it in iridescent lettering and threw it on the floor. But instead of shattering, it just melted into nothingness, then he smiled at me and the alarm went off and I woke up.

It Gets Dark, It Gets Lonely

So I am finally feeling like making art after 3 years of not producing anything. I’ve been an art bum. Crud. But now I’m inspired, and I’m just thinking about what it’s like to make art. It’s so hard sometimes, just me and my thoughts alone in a room with some technology and dirty laundry piling up. The blacks get washed with the whites because my brain is somewhere else. And it’s so constant, I’m sitting down at breakfast with pen in hand scribbling in case the magic sentence that works will show up for some coffee. Walking down the street so fancy free and I totally space out while my characters have a conversation in my head that I need to go write down. Recently at an art event some friends were surprised that I brought my sketch book.

The Muse strikes at odd times, it’s true. Sometimes a gentle tapping, sometimes a full on punch in the face. Sometimes she’s there for hours getting giddy and you have to call her a cab to send her home. Sometimes she runs into my bedroom in the middle of the night and shakes me awake with the perfect moment.

The hardest part is when the concept is still so abstract, so fuzzy and out of focus, far away but you just know it’s there. Excavating your soul until you can make sense of it, and then trying to put it into a form other people can make sense of.

It’s worth it though, I think. I try to believe that anyway. I make work so other people don’t feel as lonely as I do. Yeah, if someone asked me today why I make art, that’s what I would say.

Another day, another blog. Every site about mental illness should have the obligatory famous people roll call. So here it goes:

Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Schumann, Leo Tolstoy, Vaslov Nijinsky, John Keats, Tennessee Williams, Kurt Cobain, Vincent Van Gogh, Isaac Newton, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Michelangelo, Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh, Patty Duke, Margot Kidder, Charles Dickens, Lyndon B. Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe, Paul Gauguin, Mark Rothko, Britney Spears, Tori Amos, Connie Francis, Peter Gabriel, Kristy McNichols, Kate Millett, Charley Pride, Axl Rose, Ted Turner, Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock, Theodore Gericault, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Courtney Love, Rachel Griffiths, Eric Clapton, Johnny Depp, Francis Ford Coppola, Princess Diana, Harrison Ford, Cher, Sally Field, Winona Ryder, Victor Hugo, Audrey Hepburn, Francisco de Goya, Graham Green, Buzz Aldrin, Alexander the Great, William Blake, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Jim Carrey, Albert Camus, Frederic Chopin, Dick Clark, John Cleese, Leonard Cohen, Samuel Coleridge, Sheryl Crow, Emily Dickenson, Thomas Edison, T.S. Eliot, Queen Elizabeth I, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sigmund Freud, King George III, Ernest Hemingway, King Herod, Heinrich Ibsen, Kay Redfield Jamieson, Charles Lamb, Joan of Arc, Job, Jerimiah, Karen Kain, Larry King, Jack London, Greg Louganis, Emelda Marcos, Herman Melville, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ralph Nader, Florence Nightengale, Ozzie Osborn, Dolly Parton, Ezra Pound, Bonnie Raitt, Joan Rivers, Anne Sexton, Mary Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Louis Riel, Queen Victoria, Mike Wallace, George Washington, Walt Whitman, Brian Wilson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Agatha Christie, Tim Burton, Marilyn Monroe, Han Christian Anderson, Patricia Cornwell, Liz Taylor, Carrie Fisher, Larry Flynt.

Eating breakfast and I feel like I’m gonna throw up. Nice beginning sentence for a blog Thirza, I’m sure people want to know that. (I talk to myself sometimes, good conversation is hard to find and I like the arguements.) It’s these new drugs I’m on, hello Zyprexa. You have a Z in your name too so we should be getting along better. This side effect of nausea is supposed to go away in a week or so.

Side effects of psych meds, I hate them. Lithium, the drug of choice for bipolars, is horrible for me. I get shakes and tremors, my cousin got them too. The doctors didn’t listen to him when he told them what was going on, he ended up in muscle spasms on the sidewalk in PoCo. Turns out he could have died, it could have stopped his heart. So yeah, lithium’s not the best choice for our family. Epival, otherwise known as Valproic Acid, is far better. I haven’t had any terrible side effects beyond weight gain. Sometimes you lose hair, but zinc is supposed to stop that.

The problem with Zyprexa is that it can cause diabetes, or at least, heighten your risk of becoming diabetic. Diabetes also runs in my family, as it does in many native people today. So that’s not very nice.

And the good old anti-depressants. Ah, now there is something sure to kill any desire for sex. Even if you’re temporarily celibate like I am, losing your libido totally sucks.

The problem is that psych drugs start off a domino effect, today’s drugs can’t target just the one thing without throwing everything else out of balance. It’s such a hassle. But you know, life is like that. Nothing can be perfect.

I just want this side effect to pass soon so I can eat without wanting to hurl.

The good news is that I have my CareCard finally so I can go to the hospital if I need too. However the mini crisis has passed, so it’s a bit of a moot point. I think it’s going to be a long while before I ever have to go to the hospital again. Maybe I will never have to return. I have another close relative who was hospitalized at around my age, and I don’t think she’s ever been back. Something good to remember.

I have a confession to make. I love watching Star Trek Voyager. It’s this little weird passion of mine that started when I was living with my mom in Saskatchewan and had nothing to do but surf the net and watch television. I got hooked because of the Captain, all sexy husky voice and hands on hips, she could be a dominatrix. Space dominatrix! Then I watched her and Seven fall in love subtextually, and I had this voyeristic need to watch them do it! That lead to a period of voraciously reading J/7 fan slash.

Recently I was watching an episode called The Voyager Conspiracy. The plot goes like this: Seven of Nine has decided to upload information while she regenerates into her cortical processor, in an attempt to perfect herself and make herself more efficent. She uploads too much information into her processor and begins to weave paranoid conspiracies about why they are in the Delta Quadrant, in the end believing that the mission was to capture a borg drone and take her back to the federation to dissect her. So she runs away to destroy a catapult (a space catapult) and Janeway talks her down in what is considered by many in the J/7 shipper community as a romantic moment. (It is.)

What interested me is the approach that Star Trek Voyager takes on issues of mental health. The Voyager Conspiracy is basically about Seven having a manic episode (albeit minus the cute trying to spread love and happiness around). And there are other episodes about characters on Voyager in mental crisis. The Doctor has a guilt loop in his subroutines after he makes a medical decision which saves one patient and loses another, Tuvok, B’Elanna, Vorik’s pon farr incidents, and a lot of Seven’s left over borg processors going hay wire.

The characters are never considered flawed, only that they are currently “malfunctioning” and that it can be fixed, either in sickbay or in a holodeck. They return to their jobs and are welcomed back into the community without reservations. I mean, wow, if only we were as forward thinking. I’m generalizing, I know, people close to me have been steadfast, but in the larger scope, many people who “malfunction” for a period of time do get shunned. Out of fear, out of people not knowing what to say or being under the mistaken belief that their loved one is no longer really there. But when I watch Voyager I can forget all that, oh dear, Seven has Dissociative Identity Disorder today, bring on the Vulkan mind meld!

Well, that wraps up another blog. If you want to read some J/7, here are some recommendations from my months of one handed research. You’ll never hear the Captain say “Do it!” the same way again!

Delta Quadrant of Venus

For funny ha ha sexiness read The Borg With Five Fingers and Bride of Arachnia!

Novel Expectations

Home to Gina Dartt’s infamous Just Between series, an epic series about an ongoing relationship between Seven and the Captain.

Pink Rabbit Consortium

Home to lesbian fan fic on everything from Buffy, Alien Ressurection, Xena, and some hot J/7 slash.

If you’d like to read something more academic about Trek slash, I highly recommend Constance Penley’s NASA/Trek. The focus is more on Kirk/Spock Slash, but it paints an interesting picture of the slash community.

P.S. My current favorite slash pairing is Sara/Catherine from CSI. So if you stumble upon a hot story in this vein along your internet travels, email me a link!

Am I back to myself again? Hmm, can’t tell. Feels like it.

The funny thing about Manic Depression is that you really can live a normal life most of the time, if you take your meds, keep it all in check, learn the tricks of remaining stable, respect your health. So I say “Today, I believe that I am healthy.”

The magnolias are blooming, I feel an affinity with them. For a week or two they are florid and gorgeous, pink splendor dotting the city and gracing us with their presence, and then they fall apart and it is over.

The sun sets and the mountains turn purple, my rat has crawled into his bag of food. Finally today I have written something that feels right. Hey, I learned a new word the other day. Hypergraphia. It means the need to write. I definitely go through periods of hypergraphia, sometimes for the purpose of making art, sometimes to heal, sometimes both.

I have heard it said in contemporary art circles that art shouldn’t be about therapy. I’m not sure who invented this rule, as I believe that many major artists were creating work to get out of some kind of personal hell and torment. It seems to me that the art I see where someone has gone through hell to bring out something beautiful and/or meaningful has more resonance within it. I feel blessed for being trusted with such a personal story, and through the artists healing, I heal as well.

In other thoughts, I have been thinking a great deal about aboriginal women I know. So strong, so fierce, we are powerful women, and yet instead of solidarity I see our community tearing at each other’s necks. It saddens me. There is still so much work to be done, and yet we have so many divisions. I would love to see a day when all of my communities band together for civil rights, and yet I feel that day is still so far away.

I find myself singing songs as I walk down the street.

A new short video is on it’s way everybody!!!