where am i going?
do i need to go somewhere?
i feel as if i do
where i am now is not bad
it is not unpleasant
but it is not where i want to stay
i must move on

i remember when life was constant flux
chaos
everything changed every few days
while perhaps i do not want to go back to that extreme
i do not like stagnation
i need motion
i need change
those days of chaos were not too long ago
although they feel like a different world
i want to seek out the middle path
the road in-between

For about one month during the summer of 1994, in a brief break from living on Route 9, I was able to rent a room in a crappy apartment on Graves Ave. in Northampton. The street actually dead-ends near a cemetery.

purpleglitter, zarthon, and I spent the last night in Hadley. This morning, I woke up first and walked down Route 9 in Hadley for the first time since I lived here. I touched its pavement and it felt like touching an old friend. I realized then that I was never really homeless when I lived here, not in the truest sense of the word.

A home does not need walls or doors or any of those things which make up a house or an apartment. Home is the place where the soul finds its center and my home was larger and more beautiful than any mansion. My home was Route 9, that glorious stretch of asphalt between the center of Northampton and University Drive in Amherst.

It's spring and my life is waking up. Just a few years ago, my life was extremely turbulent and my mind was an unpleasant place to be in. Everything was always in flux, but far from always in a good way.

This past year has been calmer, quieter, so stable it has bordered on a bit boring. But, it's been something I needed.

Now, things are beginning to pick up again. However, this time it's different. I can feel the motion of before, but things are clearer. This past year gives me a platform from which to launch from. It has been a place of stable mind and thought that has let me ground and center. The loops are still there in the background, but I know how to work them now. I am not afraid. My eyes are opening. I am awake.

Good Friday always makes me think back to the First House of Clocks. One of the more notorious parties we had there was the Be Bad on Good Friday Party. We crucified Ian and played Pin the Nail of Jesus. I remember someone shouting "the beer's on fire!" and rushing to put out the flames. You know it's a real party when you have a beer fire.

We had music in the old tinfoil covered playroom. The old playroom was crazy. I mean, really crazy. Tinfoil walls, strange paintings along with random items screwed into the ceiling. I had written on the walls and the floors. Blissfully hopeful things and abysmally awful things. The pictures on the walls didn't match up spatially with their frames. A Twister mat was the table cloth. It was me. Me then. Strange, cluttered, mismatched, bright, stark, broken, glowing, and scary. I'm different now. I am no longer that room. I am breaking out of a chrysalis, not sure yet of what I have become.

Spring has arrived. Soon, the plants my sister and brother are sending me for my birthday will start arriving and I'll be able to put the compost to good use. They are sending me 3 butterfly bushes, 3 red latham raspberry bushes, and 6 oriental poppies. I'm very excited about gardening this year.

I haven't done any gardening since I rented the house in Columbia, Missouri and grew carrots out back. It was a very small house with a small yard, but it was a house with a yard and it was $185/month. Wow, that price seems great now, I couldn't rent a room for that around here these days. It's a different season here, in more ways than just not being winter anymore.

Sorting through some old stuff in boxes and drawers, I found a old Risperdal pill. Seeing it brought back memories, although not good ones.

By now, most have heard about the video of U.S. marine throwing puppy off a cliff in Iraq. This sort of behaviour isn't new to war. There was a Vietnam veteran in Cahill 3 with me. He told me a story that seems now eerily similar to this.

The guys in his unit called the orangutans "rock apes", because they would catch rocks you threw at them and then throw the rocks back. They had fun playing catch with the orangutans until one day one of the guys in the unit decided to pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it at an orangutan . Of course the orangutan caught the grenade and was blown to pieces. That ended the fun they had with the orangutans. The difference is that they didn't have camera phones then.

Should we be surprised by this sort of behaviour? These soldiers have been sent to kill people. Most humans view other animals as less than human. If they're killing people left and right, what's the odd puppy or orangutan ? Who is more evil then: the marine that killed the puppy or the politicians sent him over there to kill?

This has been a wonderful and merry Christmas so far. purpleglitter got me wonderful gifts, including a new birding camera — the same model as the broken one, so that it will work with my telephoto lens.

My parents gave me a brass clock once owned by my great-grandfather. It's an old electric clock and wasn't made with the ability to start up on its own. A knob in the back must be spun just right so that it "catches", then the electric power will take over. The neat thing about the clock is that it will run backwards if the knob is spun backwards. I used to always set it running backward when I was a kid, and it is running backwards in my livingroom now.

I had thought of the Building 19 food section as an equivalent to the dented cans section of Stop & Shop. Not any more, that can of tomatoe soup literally tasted like stale old vomit. Absolutely disgusting. I will never buy a food item from Building 19 again.

I dumped it out and made a pot of a good can of tomatoe soup from Stop & Shop, but couldn't get the bad taste out of my mouth. Then I got worried about what might have made the first can taste like vomit and made myself throw up to reduce the amount of whatever bad I just ate. The actual vomit didn't taste nearly as bad as the first can of soup, likely because it was mixed with the good can of soup I ate.

Afterwards, I brushed my teeth and the fowl aftertaste has been greatly reduced. However, I'm still worried I didn't get enough of the bad stuff out.

This experience made me realize one good thing.: my bulimic days are so strongly enough behind me that an episode like this isn't even triggery.

I made taro fries last night and they were good. Simple to make: just cut up a taro root; toss with olive oil, garlic powder, and pepper; place on a cookie sheet; and throw in the oven at 450°F (230°C, 510 K) until crisp.

I haven't made them since I moved out of the house_of_clocks, mostly because I don't make it down to the Super 88 very often since I moved here. That probably won't change, as I cook mainly for purpleglitter now and she doesn't like the food from the Super 88 except Pocky, taro and a very few other items. We only ended up getting the taro because we went with invalid_userid to pick up food for her stay.

Today marks 2 years since I was released from Cahill 3, the last time I was on a locked psych unit.

For years, I was constantly in and out of hospitals. Throughout that time I was put on various medications: prozac, geodon, seroquel, zyprexa, depakote, lithium, ativan, klonopin, celexa, zoloft, and too many others to list here.

At times, the medications seemed like it was helping, but what it was really dong was preventing me from getting better. It wasn't until I stopped taking the medications that I started truly improving. It wasn't until I stopped taking the medication that I was able to stay out of the hospital.

Mental problems need a mental solution. Mental "illness" is not like diabetes or cancer. The speculation that mental "diseases" are biologically based is just that — speculation. There is no evidence to back it up, but the idea is treated as gospel. It is more religion than science.

Without the medications obscuring my real issues or slowing my brain down to the point that thinking was a labourious activity, I was able to directly address my problems and I was able to make myself better. I've been out of the hospital for 2 years and I'm sure that if I had continued to take their drugs, I wouldn't be able to say that.

I'm strongly considering deleting the house_of_clocks community. It's been a while since the demise of the second House of Clocks and there will not be a third. The community dates back to the first House of Clocks, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of nostalgia in the community and I doubt that anyone will ever have use for it in the future.

A 27-year-old man from Ethiopia was arraigned today at East Boston District Court on a charge that he made a false threat to "blow things up" at Logan International Airport. Ermiyaf A. Asfaw, a taxi driver who lives in Washington, D.C., walked up to an AirTran check-in counter Saturday night and was asked by an agent why he had stickers on his luggage from Dubai. Asfaw responded that he had been there. The agent asked, "Were you there on business or pleasure?" According to prosecutors, Asfaw responded: "No. I'm Al Qaeda. I'm with them, and I'm here to blow things up." The agent responded that his statement was not funny and was against the law. Asfaw laughed, prosecutors said, and walked away from the counter. The ticket agent alerted a supervisor, who notified State Police. full story

What is it about Boston that attracts this special brand of idiocy? Sure, maybe the agent's questions were invasive, but I knew when I was 6 not to joke about bombs at an airport. They take these things very seriously. This is not some new post-911 thing, this is the way it's been as long as there has been high traffic commercial airports.

Speaking of mail, today is my sister's birthday and I hope my sister's birthday gift makes it to her today (I won't know until this evening if it did). I got her a bottle of Burning Leaves by Christopher Brosius. purpleglitter stumbled upon these strange perfumes (even requesting that my gift to her for her birthday also be a bottle). She is hoping that her nasty allergic reaction to most perfume does not include these. I have my doubts whether she'll be able to stand even this stuff, but we'll see.

The flavours that personally intreque me most apart from Burning Leaves are Greenbriar 1968 ("with Sawdust, Fresh Cut Hay, Worn Leather Work Gloves, Pipe Tobacco and a healthy amount of Dirt. There is also a faint whiff of cotton overalls covered in Axel Grease") and Winter 1972 ("A field of untouched new fallen snow, hand knit woolen mittens covered with frost, a hint of frozen forest & sleeping earth").

Three days with no caffeine. I've managed to stay relatively wakeful today, even with the oppressive heat. I see that I felt like I need caffeine a lot more than I actually needed caffeine. I don't think I've gone this long without caffeine since high school. Even in the madhouse they'd let us have real coffee in the morning. I doubted if I could do it, but the only real hurdle was that doubt. Yeah, I've had a bit of a headache the last few days, but I've gone through Geodon withdrawal - compared to that, this is a piece of cake.

Yesterday, sophiaserpentia commented that she had heard Domina at Club Choices was canceled, but indicated that she was unsure of the accuracy of what she heard. To confirm this I looked online, but could only find one source and wasn't sure who the source was or how accurate they were. I called the number on the flier and the person who answered (apparently it's the promoter's cell number) didn't know if the night was happening or not. She said she'd call someone else and find out. Victor called after I did and she told him it was not canceled. So, we went and it was canceled. In my opinion, if you're going to put your number on promotional material under "Call for more info:", then you should be in the loop about the night. The people running the night really need to get it together.

We ended up going to Queeraoke at the Ramrod. I'd never been to the Ramrod before, but like anywhere I've gone with Victor he seemed to know everyone. I actually got up and sang, only the second time I've done karaoke. Unlike when I went as Phil to Glitterswitch Drag Karaoke at Club Hollywood many years ago, I wasn't absolutely horrible. I'm sure I wasn't memorably good by any stretch of the imagination, but at least this time I wasn't memorably bad.

It appears that I might be going clubbing tonight. What's more, a goth/industrial/fetish night (those three things seem to always go together). I haven't gone to any club in a long time and I've long since stopped being "goth". However, I really need to get out. I've been stagnating and stewing in my out mental juices too much. This will be good for me.

I'm going with Victor, an old friend and ex-roommate from the first house_of_clocks.

Found via dkmnow in _psychmedfree_ and antipsychiatry:

People diagnosed with schizophrenia who are not on antipsychotics are more likely to experience recovery than those taking the medication, according to an American study. Over 15 years, schizophrenia patients not on antipsychotics showed more periods of recovery than those taking antipsychotics, states a research paper in last month’s Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Researchers reported that, after 10 years, 79% of patients on antipsychotics were psychotic, whereas 23% of those not on medication were psychotic. After 15 years, 65 per cent of patients on antipsychotics were psychotic, whereas only 28% of those not on medication were psychotic. ... The research was part-funded by America’s National Institute of Mental Health. full article

While I don't have schizophrenia, these results do not surprise me after my experiences with Geodon, Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel. At first I was a believer. I "felt better" when I took them.

Zyprexa was the first with it's horrible weight gain effects. Then came risperdal, then came seroquel, then Geodon. I was given Haldol inpatient a couple times, the only old school antipsychotic I've been on. It wasn't much different than the newer atypicals.

They all made me "feel better" at first. But, what "feeling better" really meant was not thinking. The major side effect of not thinking when you have mental problems is that you can never work through those problems. Working through problems of the mind requires thought, requires figuring out coping mechanisms and how to break old loops.

I definitely wouldn't say I'm perfect at this point, there's still progress I need to make, but I've made so much progress since I broke free of Geodon addiction. Much of what I'm working through now is the damage done by the psych drugs and not the problems I had initially. The point is, I'm able to improve despite my experience on psych drugs not because of it.