Wrestling Psyches in the Gemini phase

I seem to have a dual personality.  Maybe it’s in the stars. After all I’m a Gemini.  Do the gods mock me with this internal striving of tastes and desire?.  I find that I go into a self-imposed exile and spend 7 months by myself to write and illustrate.  “Working on a new project.”  Making my own decisions, and staying out of contact.  But then the other personal nature wrestles me over and pins me so that my social nature can arise.

Being a creative spirit is a painful course of life.  You rarely find anything others who understand the gift.  You are living with others in isolation of soul.  There is this clawing and scratching to find a place of connection with other humans.  A place to ride the same vibe.

The closest I’ve gotten to this type of rapport is to play music with others, though that is not a true soulful connection.  But we all can catch the groove of a great song, and that seems to patch human spirits together, ever so transiently. We get great community connected through both music and food. Though you eat the same dishes and dance to the same beat, we really have trouble keeping the thread taut. It reminds me of the two cans with the cord we used to have as kids. Never worked really well, did it.

Being a writer can come from desiring this connection so strongly that you’ll do about anything to get the communication process started. Some of us have torn souls, ripped by the indiscretions of family or an evil neighbor who soiled our childhood innocence.

We spit out words and though to make a connection. We tried this as children and were often abused for trying to bother adults with our demands for shared moments. They slapped us and belittled us when we stepped forward with our fledgling efforts to make music, write stories or color a picture. But the more we (our feelings) are trounced upon by heavy sarcasm and mean-spirited comments, we grow in hunger to connect.

It’s like living as an alien in an alien world. A Stranger in a Strange Land. Jo Walton writes this review.

We then turn intelligently defensive, and withhold out thoughts and ideas from others. Or we build unclimbable walls. We then create in isolation. But that same powerful desire to connect keeps throwing us into the painful fray in our efforts to make that singular connection. Aren’t we all still looking for approval.

I’m at a place in my personal life that I’ve gotten some balance, and my soul is stronger now. It’s time to venture out into the world of humankind again. But this time, I’ll seek the company of artists and writers, poets and screenwriters, sculptures and musicians & of course, comedians.

My First Step

I’m considering joining a writer’s group. What do you think? I live in Orange County, California, so I know there are writer’s groups here.

My first search results:

If you are like me, living in your isolation? Are you sensing it’s time to step out and meet someone? Are you a writer or illustrator, poet or painter? Have you joined a community-based group? You may want to if you would like some companionship on this road to achieving success in your passion. You may want to try out www.meeting.com. On Google Plus I searched for “Writer’s Group” and got connected. But I live in OC not LA.

The LA Writer’s Group page

 

No real conversation

I have been looking at this webpage (blog) writing task today wondering if I’m not turning into a generational reject.  Coming back to these words, and splashing thoughts on the white screen is like an effort to mental masturbate.  The whole thing is like an explosion of misdirected creativity.  Who is impregnated by our heedless banter?  What senseless, soulless, drivel is going to pour out of my twisted mind?  Hell if I know.

What I do know is that we need each other.  In our breathless effort to father some original thought, we are sucked into the vortex of other’s words, works, and ideals.  We stick some tiny little innocuous teeth into a movie, a script, a photo, and album of sound, tracking some source of brilliance that erupted in ecstasy eons ago.  But the creative God never rests, he is pumped always, spilling his seed in the minds of those seeking to enjoy the strokes of creative bliss, over and over.

The leftovers of other geniuses, really paint a picture dripping with color that amazes us, sometime inspiring us to dip our own brushes in to splatter our own attempts of expression.

Without an audience, without a stage, without a readership, we suffer in the world of little closed minds, who do not even sing with the music, dance with the beat, or dare to lick drama off the spoon of life.  The world grinds onward filled with their fear and cowardice.  They are the types to bag Napoleon’s manhood.  We must not succumb to their vile ways or develop their vices, we must fight the darkness of empty minds and souls; we must think and believe.

This blog has received over two hundred thousand reads, but most of those reads are only looks.  I not that readers check out this blog from 300 plus countries too, but after all this time, I have yet to have a real conversation with anyone.  How is it that we pour over articles, blogs, news and facebook sputtering, and never stop and converse with anyone.

I think I need to strap on a nice straight jacket.  Or maybe I should watch Iron Maiden youtube videos. Try one.

The sting of allegory: Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is an epic loaded with allegories laced with the strains of truth which men reject from man’s institutional religions.  In my own spiritual struggles over the last 20 years of my life, I’ve grown closer to unraveling those fibers of fiction in order to peer into my own soul.  Yet, I’m afraid that those poignant messages are lost when the uneducated masses sit before this masterpiece of film.

The first simple message is that those who seek power are crushed by it.  The hobbits, of course, want to live simple lives, not venture from their hobbit holes in the shire http://gusgo.webs.com/theshirefarm.htm , and to basically enjoy the pleasures of life, like hearth and home, the pipe, the potato and carrots.  The ring is for those who want to yield power.  The ring draws the ambitious.  Those tempted to use it, which includes even Gandalf, either succumb to it, bringing out of them their own personal darkness, or spurring them to fight off madness.

That message is the most readily visible part of the story .  It percolates throughout the whole of the three books.  Yet, in the writing, the analogy I’m more interested in is Frodo getting lost away from Sam, and caught in the webbings of the Shelob.   This relates to the spiritual condition of those who have separated from the fellowship of men.  The more people are disconnected with the body of believers, the more easily they are to become prey by the wicked.  The sicker the mind, the more one stumbles, like Froto in the lair Cirith Ungol .

There are whole classes of leeches in the world.  They are known by their own markings: Get rich schemes, pleasure purveyors, selling sex, drugs, alcohol, what will make you cool and fit in.  The tares of these temptations are venomous.  Add to that the tangles such as video games  , television shows , porn    and other entertainments that waste the productive souls of men, and you have a whole web of things to secure men from the light of truth.

The webbings aren’t deadly for Frodo, but in the story he has ventured too far into the dark to be safe.  He nearly perishes due to the perversity of Gollum  , who has tasted of and been consumed by the power of the ring.   Frodo is like us once we have wandered from friends and family who care for us.  Actually the true fellowship would be more akin to those connected to the members of a Christian body who live the commandments to love one another.  I think J. R.R. Tolkien would agree with the assumption.

The wages of sin are death, and just like the poisoned spider sting the Frodo encounters, that is how people who have given in to the darkness cause themselves harm.  The meth addict consumes their own flesh in pursuit of the pleasure of their drug.  The crack addict   too.  Each addict is not intending their own demise.  They have lost command of themselves.  The emotional turmoil inside is so painful that the willfully wash their minds with chemicals to block out the hurt.

Most of the world is so hedonistic or nihilistic that they turn their back on these warped beings.  They need to recover, but that takes the true and unquantifiable force of love – that is the picture Tolkien paints with Sam recovering Frodo, and later when he carries him up the steep slopes of mount doom.

Deeper within my psych, I have realized that the first step for people away from the love of God is for them to step outside the fellowship.  Breaking fellowship removes the unsuspected to a world of pain.  I see that in families, like my own, that once love is lost and obligation is the only tread holding a family together, that family members often hurt each other, and care little if their members wander from the path.  It is worst when the family has turned their back on faith, or with a greater fatalism have curse religion, faith and God – like the atheists do.  Where they have been wronged is that what should have been a loving center becomes a place of pain.  Everyone wants to avoid dens of inequity.

What is most amazing is that even in those dark arenas of despair God’s love can still penetrate.  But those sapped of their will power, left without true friends, for no friend feeds off another, only need to reach back to the fellowship to find comfort.  Families are often entirely inadequate for this purpose.  They are often so concerned about their resources, that they cut off the hand that reaches from within  the darkness.  Unlike the father who has the prodigal son mentioned in the bible, these families say that they will give their own sons shelter for a week, and then if they haven’t gotten a means of supporting themselves, they are out.  I heard a motherly hypocrite  recently talking about that on my bus.  My wife also spoke with a guy who had come back to visit family when he had lost his job, and they turned him out on the street, changing the locks.

Healthy families don’t kick their own when they are down.  But I suspect that before their rebellion started that their homes lacked the love necessary to help the children grow up feeling safe.  I certainly understand that personally.

So the point I’m making here is that Frodo is like anyone who has lost touch with the family of God – which is the true family.  That he needs to connect with those who love and support him.  For all of those out there who have families who only give love if the child meets some level of adequate behavior, you need to realize that that type of love is only a starvation diet.  God’s love is expressed better when people are from the fellowship.  But it takes for some to hit the bottom, to take the venom to their soul, until they are helpless, paralyzed and without support, as if they were stuck in the web, before they can realize their need, face their own shame, and give themselves to the true loving father for whom we are starving.  Everyone needs a Sam.

 

America’s Mental Wasteland

It’s time to wake up America regarding the inhumane treatment society is giving the mentally ill.  Of the 740,000 homeless in the United States 250,000 are mentally ill.  These individuals make the downtowns of many major cities a nightmare for everyone.  The streets are America’s mental ward.  This needs to stop.

Since  the Reagan administration mental illness (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act in 1981) which was treated in intuitions like psychiatric hospitals, the country has given in to neglect of the mentally ill.  The idea was to save the cost of institutionalizing the mentally ill, but according to studies, the cost of leaving them on the streets is still around $40,000 per individual.

But is it sane?  Are we as Americans sane to let those we know are crazy out in the public centers, the marketplace, the city centers? Is it not extremely crazy to have the mentally ill loose on the streets?    There is this song about Los Angeles with the lyrics “nobody walks in LA.”  But the streets are full of the homeless.  Why do people allow this?  Why aren’t the politicians doing anything about this – “public servants,” the term is laughable.

Where fo art thou brother?

The real public servants, the police, firefighters, emts, the paramedics, the homeless shelter workers, the lay ministers, the emergency room staff, the clerks at the stores, they see these people up close and personal.  Why aren’t they crying out to get these mentally ill off the streets.  They are a national embarrassment, a blight on society.

The Police have been cited so often for police brutality after they beat or kill the homeless that they look like goons.  They aren’t trained to deal with these mentally ill people.  They cannot control the city streets filled with sick mined folks.  They should be enforcing real laws, and these sick people should be cared for.

People are saying:

Mentally Ill Patients Strain EMS Resources by Tony Plohetski in Mental Health News

“As emergency rooms continue to be crowded by mental health patients who can’t get beds elsewhere”

Paramedic Perceptions of their role.  Journal of Emergency Primary Care 2009: Volume 7, Issue 3

“The removal of people with mental illness from an institution based system of care to the community has not been accompanied by an appropriate level of community service development resulting in a growing need for prehospital care.”

Dealing with the Mentally Ill and Emotionally Disturbed in the Use of Force Context, by Jack Ryan, Public Agency Training Council

Homeless in Los Angeles by Jerry Drucker, LA Progressive

“In 2011 the census count of the homeless (in Los Angeles County) was 51,340, 3% less than 2009 at 52,931. A looming problem that Arnold brought up was homeless veterans.”

References

Accordino, M. P., Porter, D. F., & Morse, T. (2001). Deinstitutionalization of Persons with Severe Mental Illness: Context and Consequences. Journal Of Rehabilitation, 67(2), 16.

http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentally-ill.html