A tree branch is scratching the house. My skin is crawling. I can hear constant pressure flowing inside my head. A continuous wave from a mild storm in August. I scratch my arm. The storm is calming but the wave won’t break. I will snap the tree branch from here. The storm is stopping. All … Continue reading Meditation
As a younger man, every time I was shown the light serendipitously or deliberately I would push it out of my psyche with chemicals because I was afraid of reality. I altered my reality so there was a cause for being different. I embraced the result not the cause of my madness. The cause could’ve … Continue reading Perspective Is All Mine
If humans had taglines, what would yours be? I’m in a tough, vulnerable spot. There are plenty of people I come into contact with who know far more than I do about living right and who hear exactly where I’m at. There are also many others who don’t follow the rules, yet can see that … Continue reading “Pray For Them”
Anguish is the thinking we do that comes when giving into negligence of the heart while disrupting the responsibilities of the mind. If a place in my heart is filled with love and then replaced with sorrow there is going to be more chances for my mind to turn that sorrow into resentment. My mind … Continue reading Intuitive vs. Intrusive Thinking
When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out? There once was an acid I put in my head. It took years for the molecule to take effect. It eventually did and fit like a fiddle in the middle of a dj set. I tried to poke at the strings … Continue reading One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like? My feet hit the floor. My knees to the ground. My fingers clasped tightly. My voice whispers “how.” My legs find their footing. My arms in a sleeve. My breakfast is waiting. My book opened to read. My friends are … Continue reading Back to the Basics
Ptew. Now you are gone. I have spit you out of my head. There are plenty of reasons this will not get read. Number one, I’m sure, is the rude beginning. Number two - I am who I am when pretending to be Eric the Red, Eric the Viking, Eric on the wind or the … Continue reading Step One – Socks
A schizophrenic walks into a bar, past the bar and exits the bar out the back door. He doesn’t want to drink but just to blend-in as if everybody doesn’t know him already, the latest casualty to psychedelics. Before performing as a normal alcoholic he needs to know if the sound of clinking glasses is … Continue reading Return Home When the Streetlights Come On
Eric wants to walk through door number one, a tiny door he would never choose to enter without mounting courage or actually falling from grace. The king riding the tallest steed throughout the kingdom tends to never duck his head to miss the astonishment of onlookers who have only heard him cussing on the turret … Continue reading Sober for Good at the Goose Intervention
Steady. Steady. Pull. Tearing a bandaid off a tuft of arm hair is supposed to be more tolerable when you have a friend do it. For me it’s not. The moderate pain from ripping the bandaid off will be the same in both scenarios. An element of surprise is better than anticipation when you expect … Continue reading Bandaids Don’t Remove Themselves
Yeah, I can tell everybody why I went back to college. The Grateful Goddam Dead that’s why. In the Fall of 1996 the powers-that-be told me I couldn’t sit in front of a computer any longer staring at fractals on a screen just cataloging my live concert cassettes. So I packed up the tapes and … Continue reading Daily Dose
Drugs. Chemicals. A chemical reaction. A chemical reaction to drugs. A chemical reaction to drugs in the brain. A chemical reaction to drugs in the brain versus out in society. A chemical reaction to drugs in the brain versus out in society is beyond the individual. A chemical reaction to drugs in the brain versus … Continue reading Drugs That Work
I lost it because I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know where I wanted to be so I left. I went to the mountains to not ride my bike there, same as at home. Drove to San Francisco, ran out of gas on their bridge, then got gas and left without visiting the … Continue reading “Travels With Charley” at home on your lap
There was a time in my life when I thought I was divine. Imagine how difficult it was to overcome a delusion like that as a young man. And as a middle aged man I still believe some of that to be true because it’s easy to accept that everybody is exceptional at times but… … Continue reading 12 – The Peak
If I were to tell you that my social skills lean towards the schizoaffective side and that if I were a dog I’d only be good at wagging my tail, not barking, would you say I have low self esteem or true panache for admitting it? When a person, or dog for that matter, has … Continue reading Caveat – this mental health post has anthropomorphic references
Jesus…I…look out for…need…(indecipherable)…for…forget it...Amen. That is how well I pray inside my head as I breathe out thoughts I know I don’t need to say in order to be heard by any one force that already knows what is inside my head. When I pray for others I come up with the same broken language … Continue reading Caution – this mental health post has religious undertones
I was found at twenty after being lost for some time, seeing the horizon under my feet, people I care about walking with me parallel to the street. Other pedestrians walked like sophisticated dogs, wagging for attention as they hurried by in droves. I walked mighty with my nose to the sky, my eyes fixed … Continue reading In Dog Years
“I’ll get around to it,” Jer said when he was asked to go to the laundromat. On his way out a few hours later he looked around for a piece of fruit to eat but quickly gave up, opting instead to stop at Magoos Pizzaria for a slice since it’s on the way. Every time … Continue reading Time – I’ll Get Around To It
The landlady pinches her pennies and polishes her silver while the addict goes through hundreds of dollars in a day to not feel sick. She’s holding her money, he is going through his. They both need it. He needs something else even more than money. He needs more than a name. He needs to take … Continue reading The Landlady
The challenge of a two point try is not all that risky if there is time still to make more points. I would like to take the time to try to explain the similarities and differences between insanity and fate. Fate is what is going to happen to us because of our actions but it … Continue reading In Defense of Insanity
A little peace of mind goes a long way. I could do anything I wanted now. I could go back to college or I could hitchhike back to Albuquerque where I had probably unwittingly been contacted by spirit jesters when rubbing elbows with strangers who enlisted in the University of New Mexico DMT experiments of … Continue reading 11 – The Contact
Finally I am released from the hospital after a month of progression into a stable psyche with hopes to never again break into a fragmented mess of illusory, mental disturbances. Only after asking the question “what just happened,” as it was happening, am I able to remember enough to later write it down. I had … Continue reading 10 – The Surface
Sometimes when I sit and think, it’s too much for me. To sit and think is too much for anybody. To really sit and think puts too much time on my hands. Sitting and thinking gives me too much time to think about sitting…and thinking. Thinking about sitting is thinking too much. It looks to … Continue reading Anxiety
Another interesting part of my journey thirty years ago out of acute care that is worth noting is I was able to help others by simply getting better before their eyes. Not only did I recover but I had a positive impact on other patients because of the composed way in which I transformed madness … Continue reading 9 – The Compassion
The “next step” of my hospital stay began sort of like how my life began. I emerged from darkness into a bright and sterile environment with doctors wiping away my tears and cutting the cord to my sustenance. In the dark I could’ve cried all I wanted and nobody would come to wipe my tears … Continue reading 8 – The Birth
They came to get me but it wasn’t in the middle of the night. I was led from the sanitized sanity of the commissary, down the ever encroaching hallway passed the curious closet towards the damned doorway, which finally swung open with precise timing. I passed through the archway and stepped into a room with … Continue reading 7 – The Ward
I woke up one morning to the nurse telling me that my unit rival had moved on. I was bummed because when I got him alone in the same room he didn’t poke at me or ramble on feverishly about being Jesus inside the walls and God walking on air like he would say in … Continue reading 6 – The Closet
After one day I was so comfortable in the ICU hallway I began to look like a cowboy leaning against a post with his head down and a blade of grass between his teeth, waiting for his shadow to rise or fall without moving a muscle. I would sit on the ground with my legs … Continue reading 5 – The Hallway
The type of animal that I saw in the mirror every morning in the hospital was close to the chimpanzee but something more bipedal. The last one in a long line of chimps but first from the right on the chart of evolution. God's favorite. The human being. If God has a long white beard … Continue reading 4 – The Hospital
I was like a disheveled rainbow child whose name should’ve been Rain. I tried to learn from traveling and the streets, the inner workings of the world but I didn’t have a vision or even a simple plan. I had the more complex idea to take another run at college. They said my peers were … Continue reading 3 – The Classroom
The trailer was a lonely man’s hell hole where nobody could escape without invisible wounds. It was my trailer, where the impossibility to study was brought on by disparity in character but also boisterous low flying war planes that would swoop down as slowly as they could while I barely slept, watching the action from … Continue reading 2 – The Trailer
When I was in my twenties I was searching for this one complex man with a familiar face I saw in the college library who was shocked by the computer screen before him. I figured he wasn’t shocked by what was on the screen but in awe of the computer itself. I was intrigued by … Continue reading 1 – The Library
Francis Erich McElroy 