I want Candy

I’ve pretty much decided to get facial tattoos, specifically traditional Plains Cree women’s lip chin tattoos. Essentially it consists of three sometimes double lines extending from the bottom lip to the chin. It’s kind of tricky trying to research the meanings behind it. I know I have to know more about it before I do it, but I’ve decided to get it done when I’m 30. I think it is often done around the time of marriage, which would be cool as well. I would prefer to get it done as part of getting married, but I don’t want to wait around for a wife either. Some traditionalists would take me to task, but I think it’s okay to ascribe new meanings onto old traditions. Lots of younger people are reclaiming their traditional tribal tattoos, like the moko for the Maori people, which are gorgeous! I think one of the things I like about getting the lip-chin tattoo is that it demonstrates my tribal affiliation, which is something not everyone notices because I’m a little pale face. I know it will probably limit the places I can get jobs, but I think those places are also limiting their pool of potential employees. Eventually there are going to be so many modified people in the workforce that people are going to have to start relaxing their rigid standards. Besides all of that, I don’t particularly want to work in a place that gets upset over body mods.

I think I want to get it once I’ve learned some more Cree, enough to have a modest conversation, and possibly if I get married. Maybe I will get the three lines and then add a parallel line to each when I get married.

I’ve been reading more about TLE and TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury). The story of my brain injury is kind of silly, so I won’t be offended if you laugh. I was about four years old when it happened, maybe even younger, and it was Halloween night. I was so excited about getting candy for free that I suddenly fainted and hit the back of my head against the wall. We had to go to the hospital and get stitches, and if my head is shaved you can still see some scarring. I told Deanna that if anyone makes a film of my life and they shoot that scene they have to play I Want Candy during it. The irony of course is that I don’t have much of a sweet tooth except for my cola addiction. So that could be how I ended up with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, which is still undiagnosed officially but I’m pretty sure I have it.

I also noticed there is one really common seizure I have on a regular basis. I’ll just suddenly remember some weird snippet of time that has strong emotions, often negative emotions but sometimes happy ones, and to stop myself from being upset by it I make a noise. Just one weird little noise, sometimes a word but usually some weird grunt or murmer or something, and then it’s over. I also get sudden waves of fear or sadness or disgust or happiness, out of no where, like I could be sitting in a room with people I love and suddenly be sure someone’s about to run in with a machine gun, and then it goes away. Just weird crap.

Some people say bipolar disorder can occur with TLE, but then I just read somewhere that pretty much all symptoms of TLE that interest psychiatrists are really entirely under the umbrella of neurology and that trying to say someone with TLE also has a mental illness is just unnecessarily complicating things. I would believe that. It makes sense, I got a brain injury, I recovered as well as a four year old can, and I ended up with TLE that sometimes mimics bipolar disorder. I’m irritable and moody and hear things and get migraines where I go blind and a couple times I’ve hit the floor and thrashed around for a few minutes without knowing it.

But on the whole, I dunno. It’s my brain. It doesn’t work as well as I wish it would, but it’s all I have and it’s all I’ve ever known. I think I’ve done pretty awesome considering what I have to work with. It’s still weird to see feelings come up that have no relevance to the current situation of whatever, but I’m more or less used to the unpredictability of it. And sometimes the unusual sexual feelings are entertaining. After a certain point I have to stop listing off all the things that are “wrong” with me and just accept it as my own normal brand of reality. And really, the only things that have ever truly bothered me are the occasional yet inevitable suicidal moments. I can live with all the rest of it, I can manage all the rest of it, even the voices, it’s just trying to figure out how to deal with that ONE thing that led me on this whole wild psych goose chase. The irony being that I’ve managed to create my own systems of support for suicidal nights during this decade long medical misadventure. The only time I thought I might REALLY do it was when I was in the hospital. I came closer there than anywhere. And whereas before suicidal feelings were more about an existential escape route, being suicidal in the hospital was more about the desperation for a physical escape route. There really didn’t seem to be any way out, and I didn’t trust those freaks called The Staff to know what the hell Normal is. I have a natural distrust of people who gravitate towards work in the Psychiatric Industry. I think some people might go in well intentioned, but it can all spiral down into the Stanford Prison Experiment quicker than you can write a prescription for meltable Zyprexa.

Ziggy played gee-tar . . .

When was I in a Biennale?

I did a vanity google and found out I screened in some places I had no idea of. Like, I did not know I screened at the 9e Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva. I mean, that might have been nice to go to. What the hell, am I really this flaky? I need to keep more on top of these things. What was I doing in 2000? And what the hell were they showing? Was it my vulva again? Was my vulva in Geneva? Okay, now I should just go to bed, no googling after 10:30.

Uh .. . . I don’t want to do that again soon

I just spent two hours with about six boxes of crap looking for a letter from the Canada Council for some additional material for another application and found some weird weird stuff. I found of all things my application for commitment to an institution. That was like, ugh, so many ugly energies attached to one tiny piece of paper. I found a letter from an old/new cute girl that is nearly a decade old. I found Miranda July’s invitation to her Miss Moviola chain letter video art thingy she did way back. I found Stephen Kent Jusick’s address in New York, I was probably supposed to send him something and didn’t. Good thing I have distributors. I found grad school applications, along with essays on Cindy Sherman and Madchen in Uniform. I found a small reproduction of Les Sabines that made me cry at the Louvre. I found some crazy writings, I mean, high mania crazy writings. I found a photo of an old high school friend and some short stories I wrote when I was a teenager. I found a manual for a video switcher circa 1985 that we used to use at Emily Carr in 2nd yr Video. I found some faxes from Oberhausen and a few congratulatory letters for scholarships and so on.

You know what I was thinking though, I mean, some of it’s interesting in some sentimental kind of a way, but most of that shit is really, just shit! Most of it doesn’t mean anything. I know for a fact I still have the fuck off letter my best friend in high school wrote me. I still have the fuck off break up letter my first girlfriend gave me too. In fact, I bet I even still have the break up email I got from another ex archived in my inbox!!! Why do I save mean things? And most of my love letters are all in emails.

I think I will save some of it. But there is definitely stuff I don’t need around, like bills from 1998. Or grant applications that were printed out in 2000.

I don’t know what to do about the stuff from when I had my psychosis. It seems kind of weird to keep it around. I might burn it. I have some friends who go to Burning Man every year, maybe I should try and go this summer and just throw all my crazy stuff on it and let it the fuck go. Actually, thats a really good idea, I think I’ll look into that. Maybe my cuz Deanna will want to come with me to Burning Man.

The nice thing about looking at all that stuff was to realize its all in the past. Stuff changes. I don’t feel like its me, it’s mostly just detritus.

More psych talk, and thoughts on The Trial

I got to talk to my best friend and ex girlfriend Margaret last night, whose number I lost until I did a reverse address look up. I love Margaret, she’s so swell. She’s working in an alternative totally voluntary mental health crisis centre. She was the number one support person for my suicidal nights. I don’t know how she was so amazing, she just was. Maybe because she didn’t make me talk about it unless I wanted to. Maybe because she would just hold me all night so I could sleep. Maybe just because she’s awesome and made sure I knew someone cared about me while at the same time not being freaked out by me being full of the snuff its. I had two other awesome support people in my life, but Margaret is still the best. I’m glad she’s doing that work, she’d be awesome at it.

I told her about deciding to go off meds. She’s supportive of it, which is nice. And then I talked about girly things along the lines of “OMG! She’s SO cute!”, which was fun. I’m still nervous about talking to my doctor about going off meds. I think I’m ready though. Someone told me I might get a bit worse while doing this long extended change over, so hopefully people won’t panic and throw me into the abusive hands of psychiatry again.

I was reading that nearly 50% of people with mental health issues recover completely, but it doesn’t make it into psychiatric knowledge of outcomes because most of those people have to go AWOL from psychiatry to get better. I would believe that. I guess I’m just nervous because I don’t know how to divorce myself from psychiatry yet. I’m lucky in that I don’t have a psychiatrist, just a G.P., which is a start. I think G.P.’s are a bit more open to things than pdocs, at least the ones I’ve had have been. And they’re more aware of other conditions, whereas psychiatrists seem to only know their goddamn DSM. Tons of medical conditions can look like mental illnesses. Still, G.P.’s are just as faliable, especially if they’ve read my file which describes some definitely bizarre behaviour. Never mind that I only did that stuff for two weeks out of my nearly twenty-nine years on this earth. It’s like looking at my meth use when I was nineteen and telling me I’m still a meth addict even though I haven’t touched it or thought about it for nearly a decade. And I’m still surprised that no doctor ever picked up on the fact that my one and only manic episode was triggered by antidepressants. One would consider it to be a side effect of my medication, in fact it is in the side effect profile, but that one side effect got me a diagnosis that will follow me the rest of my life.

Ugh. So TIRED! The psych industry is just a tired sad little tyrant, the schoolyard bully of all the medical disciplines.

In other thoughts, the Pickton trial is starting and I’m dreading following it on the news. Anyone who lived in BC during those years knows some of the stuff they aren’t saying, and maybe won’t say. I heard that he was sending body parts to the rendering plant which supplies fat for use in cosmetics around the world. I also heard he was selling his “pork” to restaurants in the downtown eastside, I don’t know much about it but I know they did have to issue a tainted meat warning that freaked a lot of people out, including me when I realized I ate pork in the downtown eastside. Just fucked up. Not only that but women had been going to the cops about Piggy Palace for years and would get threatened and turned away. Those cops SO knew what was going on, they so did. It pisses me off when I read or hear their description of their investigation, like they were actually doing any work. I seem to remember for the longest time they only had one or two people working that case, even though so many women were disappearing and so many people were getting upset, they were even denying a serial killer was at work. And now they’re saying he killed 49 women. So what happened to the other sixty or so women who are missing? Is there someone else out there? And do we know if women have stopped going missing?

Not only that, but I’m tired of those womens lives being summed up with the words “drug-addicted prostitute.” It’s such a value judgement. They did have drug problems, they were in the sex trade, but that doesn’t mean that’s all they were. What freaks me out about that use of language is that it frames them for the public in the same way that the killers framed them (and I truly believe there was more than one person involved). I noticed they don’t really mention that most of those women were Aboriginal, which I think was a major reason for them being singled out as victims. I think the questions we as a society have to ask is why was this allowed to happen for two decades with the police knowing that women working the streets had taken issue with the New West pig farm. Why were these women in particular allowed to be hunted for so long with such minimal protection or attention. And furthermore, how is this trial coverage going to perpetuate societal feelings about Aboriginals, about sex trade workers, about drug addicts, about women. We have 300 international media folks accredited to cover the trial, where was the international media when these women were going missing?

One one hand it’s easy for us to point to Robert Pickton and say he did all of this, but there were so many issues inherent in Canadian society that enabled this to happen. For one thing, the fact that Aboriginal women are the highest risk group for homicide in Canada. Justice is generally not served in the case of murdered Indians, which makes us a prime target for whoever wants to get away with murder. And then we have to look at how anti-prostitution laws have endangered womens lives unneccessarily. In Canada prostitution is technically legal, BUT communicating for the purposes of prostitution ISN’T. That means no street walking, no newspaper ads, no escort listings in the phone book. You’ll note that all of these things still exist, but they’re illegal. Either way, Vancouver’s needed a safe way for women to engage in prostitution, something like Amsterdam’s red light district which has been talked about over and over. It’s not ALWAYS going to be safe, but at least some risks could be lowered. And then we also just have to look at why certain demographics in our culture end up having drug problems. It’s not the drugs that are the problem, the drugs are a symptom of a problem, a much larger problem. Say someone got sexually abused by a second generation residential school survivor who became a perpetrator, or by a white foster father, that could kick off a long standing drug habit to try and cope with that kind of trauma. I will make the grand sweeping statement that a lot of these women ended up in dire poverty as a result of colonialism.

So, it will be interesting to see how the coverage of this trial works, but I know it will be missing out on most of the dialogue that was going on in Vancouver about the missing women. I also feel bad for the people who will be going to the trial who know the victims. That is going to be so traumatizing. I wonder if the truth of what happened will ever get out, or if we’ll all be called conspiracy theorists.

God

Recently I was reading “Letting go of the person you used to be” by Lama Surya Das. In it he tells a story about a seeker who visits all of these teachers to ask what the final total encompassing truth is only to be told that he is God by everyone he meets. He disagrees with every teacher until he finally finds one who agrees to let him study with him for years, but only if he also works shovelling manure. Several years later the seeker finally asks what the truth is, and the teacher tells him he is God. He gets furious and asks if that’s true then why did he toil away for so many years. The teacher says it’s true that he is God, but he isn’t very bright.

This is something I figured out when I went “crazy” and this is the main reason people threw me into the bin. I knew I was God. And not just me, you reading this are also God. It’s the greatest irony of human existence, sort of a joke really, but also completely sensible. God was never some Us/Them entity sitting up in a cloud making judgements. God is a being that supernova’d into billions of pieces to learn something about life and become better. And we’re all God and therefore the same person. It’s really terribly simple. But no one believed me, or bothered to do spiritual searching on their own, so when I realized this basic thing I got into DEEP shit, and I never really talked about it since.

Maybe I thought that one revelation was enough, but now I’m realizing it isn’t. Just being God doesn’t answer everything. I still have to figure out how to live my life in a suitable manner, I still have to take responsibility for certain things. So I guess that’s what I’m doing now. I don’t know why it took me so long to be able to just say this again, that I am God. I guess because I didn’t want to get thrown in the bin for something so obvious and true, AGAIN. Also, I think people just have to figure it out on their own. It’s not something you can truly believe unless you go through whatever it takes to understand this basic premise of existence, even if that means shoveling shit for seven years.

I don’t think it’s right to punish someone for having spiritual revelations, and I don’t think it’s right for people to have to hide what they know to be true about the nature of life. So mostly I’m looking for other people who know this too. A lot of people with mood disorders seem to have discovered this a long time ago, which is why I like hanging out with them. Buddhists too. Christianity has these principles in it’s history but I think the church obliterated a lot of it. I just feel like I don’t have a plan for after discovering that God thing. I have terrible spiritual discipline. I collect and toy with various religions, none of which suit me much. I like spiritual concepts but I find so much is caught in dogmatic ideas that have held it back from meaningful evolution. Mostly I find I’m making it up as I go along. But really I’m just trying to figure out how to live my life in a spiritual way, without falling back on rules which make no sense to me.

I guess I have questions, but I haven’t formed them properly so that I can address them. Those questions would be something along the lines of “How do you deal with bad people?” “Is forgiveness always necessary?” “Do you always turn away when someone is mistreating you, how do you hold them accountable?” Questions like that. Am I really crazy? Why am I crazy and not other people? What made me crazy, was it me or someone else? Am I just holding onto someone else’s projections of neurosis? I could ask questions all day.

I also think there is a spiritual emergency going on right now though, I keep seeing visions, and I keep thinking about that thing I saw in the sky. People I’ve been talking to have also noticed a higher incidence of paranormal activity. Personally, I think we’re moving into another dimension. And I also don’t think everyone will realize it. I think there will be a number of people who aren’t going to see things which are manifesting around us. In my own family I noticed my generation are nearly all capable of seeing and hearing things which people say don’t exist. And we can’t ALL be crazy. Something is afoot. What does it mean, I’m not sure. But I know life as we know it is going to be irrevocably altered.

I keep having a dream about something evil, something really bad but also completely paranormal, an entity of some kind. It’s not like it represents something specific, just a generalized Bad Spirit type of thing. And in my dream I have to swear at it, I have to yell really loud and I have to insult it. And I can’t do it, I keep stuttering because I’m so afraid. And this dream just happens all the time, and I’m starting to get better at it, but I still can’t yell. It’s like I’m training for something, it’s weird.

Normally I don’t talk about this side of me at all, because when I did I ended up in the bin. BUT, I think we’re at a point when these things should be talked about. Especially since some of the things I’ve been seeing have a political basis.

Maybe the most troubling thing I’ve seen recently is this vision I had of this dark rumbling cloud, something like the Nothing in the Neverending Story. This dark angry cloud of fury and frustration and anger and sorrow coming out of the whole of the Middle East and moving toward the United States. I don’t think it’s evil, I think it’s bad in that it has negative repercussions on everyone involved, but I also think someone in the Middle East would have seen the exact same entity coming towards them from the States just after 2001. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since I saw it. I don’t know what it means, like, I’m not going to say I see a dirty bomb in New York or anything. I don’t know what will happen. But it’s there, and it’s coming, and it’s slow and dark and huge. And if I could say it has one cause then that would be grief. It’s been built by grief. I saw it back in early November.

So yes, trying to get a spiritual practice together. I’m so often NOT someone who seeks out attention through things I’ve seen on those other planes of existence, so it’s kind of awkward for me to talk about this stuff. But I feel compelled to. I feel like if I don’t then there’s no point for me to be getting these visions. I don’t know why I’m getting them, but I think anyone can if they’re open to it.

Opening, Submission, new Doctor, BOOKS!

So the homeopathic doctor hit upon something everyone else missed, the head injury I recieved when I was two years old. He’s trying me on Natrum Sulphuricum for the head injury and chloramphenicol for a Salmonella infection I got when I was twenty, he thinks it might still be impacting my immune system. Anyway, it was one of those great moments in a doctor’s office where I was like “Holy shit, the head injury!” I did have to go to the hospital for it. And I was two (maybe 4?) when I got it so I wouldn’t have known life without any symptoms from it. I’m going to take this stuff for the next few weeks and we’ll see what happens.

The opening went well, people liked my tape. There were too many people so I hung out with my friend off to the side and felt ridiculously uber submissive feelings keep coming up and I was trying to behave, it was really hard!!! I don’t usually have massive submissive urges directed towards people, it’s nice when it happens but it makes me turn pink and shy.

I bought a book called “The Sanity We Are Born With,” it’s about Buddhist psychology and this idea that we are all born sane and that we are in fact sane at this very moment. It’s specifically written for people in psychological distress, so I’m curious to read it. I’ve never read much about Buddhist ideas around mental health, specifically the sane/insane thing.

I also picked up a book called “The Buddha and the Terrorist.” It’s like a parable about a terrorist meeting Buddha and having a serious of enlightening conversations.

I’m thinking of going to my first meditation group tomorrow night. We’ll see. A friend sent me a huge email about all the things she’s done to live med free. It was really helpful.

Sick fucks

Shit like this is why I don’t support the troops.

The Yellow Ward

“It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw–not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.” – The Yellow Wallpaper

“Is there a reason you’ve chosen to paint this ward in this shade of yellow?” I was specifically thinking of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which I assumed was an obvious cultural reference (it isn’t). However they didn’t get it and just started telling me about using whatever paint gets donated. How can people working in a psych institution not get the Gilman reference? It’s like not being insulted when I call them Nurse Rached.

Briefly, The Yellow Wallpaper charts a woman’s descent into madness while using the yellow wallpaper of the room she’s imprisoned in as a focal point for obsessive ruminations. It’s written by a psych survivor in the pre-med era.

In her own words:

“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

“Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.”

The irony of psychiatry is that time and time again the survivors who finally leave it altogether (or as much as is legally possible) go on to do great amazing and wonderous things, sometimes specifically to spite their doctors. It is clear that psychiatrists are not psychics and can’t truly say someone will be dependent on medication and be insane for the rest of their lives. But they do. And once someone sets up THOSE kinds of expectations in someone, it’s hard to see and move beyond it unless you have some really supportive people. Currently mental illnesses are theories, we know people have clusters of specific symptoms, but we really don’t totally know WHY. There isn’t a test one can do and underlying issues are never investigated. The most likely causes of mental illness symptomology involve trauma or abuse of one kind or another. Social factors like racism, homophobia, and poverty have far more impact on mental health than mere genes. Even beyond that, mental illness is more often a judgement call. I can easily say someone is crazy because they act or think in ways different from myself, but psychiatrists have the legal and medical pull to make that person’s life a living hell. And the cures are often worse than the initial issues.

How would reducing someones life to rote domestic duties cure their depression? It doesn’t, it made Gilman crazier, and the only way she got out was to buck doctors orders and have an intellectual life again. The only way I started feeling more human and in control was to kick Olanzapine. I am beginning to suspect that psychiatry is designed to create mental distress in patients rather than allieviate it. So many alternatives have been shown to be superior to the current medical model (the Quakers had it going on!), and yet we’re still using the psychiatric model born out of Nazism (the heavy neuroleptics have their basis in Nazi experimentation) which we already know compounds mental health issues.

Either way, I am still researching the way out of the system. It’s tricky. I’m just sick of the Yellow Ward and the Yellow Wallpaper and all the Yellow Pills.

You’re going to help me, bitch!

I’ve been trying to commit this year’s 4th Anniversary of the Psych Ward to personal reflection and growth and I’ve noticed that some major issues have been presenting themselves which I was totally not expecting. One thing I wanted to really work on is the repeated rape attempts I endured in the hospital, but in a larger scope I am recognizing that it wasn’t this one element which negatively impacted me for so long. It was the whole concept of the hospital itself and of contemporary psychiatric treatment. Of COURSE I wouldn’t be protected from a rapist in the hospital, for one thing I was “crazy” so nothing I said mattered, even when I went to the nurses station for medical attention because of 1st degree burns. Of COURSE these things would happen because being raped would not be worse than being allowed to be “crazy” and unmedicated. Of COURSE I wouldn’t have input into my own treatment, because I am “crazy” and therefore intellectually diminished.

It’s not just about how I could have been raped (for the second time), or that I’ve been on brain damaging drugs, or that people still watch horror movies with crazy antagonists, or that whenever my mother talks about someone she doesn’t like she says they’re bipolar. It all really comes down to this essential idea of human rights. And not just human rights, but the fact that even among human rights activists there is still this idea of forming a hierarchy of whose human rights are worth MORE than other’s human rights. I had a huge blow out fight with my mom earlier today about Dr. Dickwad and having my right to proper health care violated. She was trying to assert that racism was a more damaging form of discrimination than crazyphobia. I blew up. KA-BOOM!! There is no human rights violation that is more or less important than another. Sexism does not outweigh transphobia. Racism does not outweigh crazyphobia. Homophobia is not more important than racism. They are all equally important. Anytime someone’s human rights are infringed there is a problem, and everyone’s liberation is tied in with that. The concept of a human rights hierarchy is just a fall back to the original hierarchy which created all the hateful isms in the first place. We can’t say “Okay, let’s deal with this one thing and then after we win equality on that basis we’ll deal with your little oppression over here.”

As someone with multiple identities which are oppressed, I don’t value or fight for one more than the others. However, I currently am very invested in disability rights because legally I am on shaky ground in terms of rights. While I am included in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I can still be subjected to CTO’s, and I still could have been sent to the ward yesterday because a doctor seeing me for five minutes assumed I was actively batty. Legally, I don’t have a lot of protection. Even emancipating myself from the psychiatric industry is going to be a long hard struggle and I could always be thrown back in the bin if my mom thinks I’m too emotional or back talking. Legally I am a 28 year old adult woman. But in Dr. Dickwad’s eyes I am a “young girl.”

Psychiatric labels aren’t only used for people with genuine neurological problems. They are also used to crush dissent. Step out of line, be defiant, demand equality, stray from a medical definition of normalcy, be poor, and you too could be in the ward. If you get angry about your treatment, it’s because you’re crazy. If you cry because you’re being abused, you’re crazy. If you demand to see a lawyer, you’re crazy. If you try to keep from showing emotions, you have “flat affect” and you’re crazy. If you ask for a second opinion or alternative treatments or try to be a pro-active health consumer, you’re crazy. There is no way out of the ward except to acquiese to doctor’s orders and judgements, to be docile and compliant and take the meds and agree that you have a serious illness which now puts you in a second class citizenship. If my mom was irritated with me, she could easily call the cops and have them haul me to the bin at any given moment. I know this.

So, I am tired of being at the mercy of the medical establishment. I am tired of the ball and chain medical file which follows me around. I want out, for good. I don’t want to see one more psychiatrist. I don’t want to try one more new miracle wonderkind drug. I don’t want some creepy chemicals with no long term studies mucking around with my brain. How many psych industry inmates commit suicide just to get AWAY from it? I’m tempted to myself.

Although to be honest I would probably run away and change my identity before I did that.

The thing is, I have a brain that works really well. I don’t talk in front of people super well, but I am a pretty good thinker and I have that kind of burning passion that’s useful in creating change. I can’t snuff it because I know I can be awfully useful.

So, this is the year where I am going to apply for every single thing I possibly can. Already the Canadian Film Centre has my application for the FFP. Outfest has a deadline coming up. Canada Council and Sask Arts Grant deadlines are coming up in a couple of months. And the beginning of March is the deadline for the Critical Disability Studies MA at York. There’s a program in New Zealand for a month long writer’s retreat. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. But I think if I just keep going, keep applying, keep making films, something will come out of it. My ideal life would be to write critical theory, be active in the Psychiatric Survivors Movement, and make short and feature films. That’s all I really want. I don’t even care about the girlfriend thing or having a family or being fabulously rich or winning a major award. I just want to have a home, food, clothing, my support animals, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees, and the resources to live full time doing the above three things. And by the time I die, hopefully at a very old age, I just want the world to be better because I was here.

Next week I am seeing a psychic and hopefully she can give me some advice or guidance on where I’ve been and where I’m going. I really don’t know if I’ll stay in Saskatoon now. Toronto has a horrid psych industry, but it’s also the epicentre of the Mad Movement in Canada, and it has a really diverse population otherwise, along with a film and video community. Sure, maybe the apocalypse will happen and I’ll be stuck in T.O. and the CN tower will fall, but maybe that’s just where I’m supposed to be. Who knows? Maybe I won’t end up in Toronto. Maybe I’ll go for the MA program and then move back here. I really don’t know.

Really, I just want to have the freedom to be ornery, happy, sad, super in love, crabby, angry, and all those other emotions which people outside of the psych industry take for granted. I have a right to have emotions.

Who Ate The Pube Cake?

Tomorrow the show opens. I have to dress clean and beautiful and stand around making small talk. The media are going to preview the show at 11am, I don’t know if I will drop by for it or not. I do alright talking to the media. I’m excited to see my friend Rebecca though, and my friend Archer is coming in at the end of the month too. Another person from the Grunt millieu. He’s hilarious. Once when Lynn and I were walking around in the hood we found him intently tinkering with his NDN car installing the most whack sound system I’ve ever seen. It was very Powwow Highway. I don’t remember if it was the Toasted Marshmallow, maybe he had gotten a new car by then. One halloween someone set the car in front of his on fire and so the whole front of his white car had a scorched distressed look to it. Hence the Toasted Marshmallow moniker.

One time my friend and I were getting a ride in Marie Baker’s fifth-hand station wagon and while she was trying to show off her new wheels she sped down 7th Ave and a hubcap flew off in a grand jeté.

PUBE STORIES!

Marie Baker reminded me of these. The first is her story. Shawna Dempsey used to do this performance where she masturbated with a chocolate cake and one time Marie Baker happened upon the stage just afterwards, NOT having seen the performance. She saw all this crumbled cake on the ground so she ate some of it because it looked perfectly fine (if you knew Marie Baker you would understand why she’d do this). When I told her where it came from she said “You mean I ate of her bush!?”

This is not the only pube-cake eating story involving performance art though.

During Art’s Birthday at the Western Front, Margaret Dragu did a web based performance that involved me holding a slice of cake while she cut off her pubic hair and sprinkled it on the cake then kissed me.

Well what do you do with a pube sprinkled cake? I put it on a plinth and then later at a function in the same space, cake was being served. My friend Lynn and I watched that Dragu Pube Cake and sure enough, by the end of the night there was a plate with scrapings of crumbs. Who ate the Pube Cake? It’s the eternal question. I told Margaret about it later, I think she got a kick out of it.

SPEAKING of cake, my friends Cindy and Megan told us all about Annie Sprinkle’s wedding over in Calgary this past Sunday. They were in charge of making a three tiered cake, which had four breasts on the top. Megan promises to put it on Flickr soon. Apparently it was mucho fun, and they got to help the blushing brides get their outfits on. So jealous.

I think if you get married you either have to be COMPLETELY over the top, or you have to do a quiet lets-run-to-the-courthouse kind of a thing. Or maybe that is just me. I like extremes.

All I know is, if I do have a wedding cake I’m going to make pubes out of icing and put them all over it. Or maybe delicate marzipan pubes, or sugar glass pubes.