On my 40th birthday my younger sister gave me a coffee mug with a picture on it of a mouse singing, “Hi Ho … Hi Ho … It’s over the hill I go.” It immediately became my favorite mug I was never going to use. I was going to keep it in pristine condition so I could give it back to her on her 40th birthday. But I almost didn’t get the chance. When I went to retrieve it after eight long years in storage I found the handle of the mug had snapped off. Now it was time to see if all those Crazy Glue commercials were telling the truth.
I repaired the mug, wrapped it up, and was able to re-gift as well as re-joke. But … if someone had taken a sledge hammer to the mug and reduced it to a fine white powder, no amount of Crazy Glue would help. There would be no doubt that it was irrevocably broken, smashed to bits, and it would take some sort of deranged magical thinking to think that it even could be fixed.
But what if I ignored the blatantly obvious and dedicated a little time every day to try and “repair” the mug? And even though my sister’s 40th birthday had come and gone, I still tried each day to force a mound of powder back into being a functioning coffee mug. You might say I was a little … um … strange … for even thinking about it, but as long as I kept my obsession a secret, and continued to function normally in my day-to-day life, no one would be the wiser. But as soon as you found out I’d spent almost 14 years at it, you’d definitely know I had blown my wheels. I do believe I’d fit the definition of suffering a psychotic break with reality.
A “psychotic break with reality” means hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something that does not exist. Or believing something to be true that is false, fixed, and fantastic. Simply put, the person loses contact with external reality.
I read an interview with Dr. Todd Essig PhD where he said, “… people don’t snap into psychosis, they slide. And they can slide in-and-out, back-and-forth. People can and do recover, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. A psychotic “break” is not at all a Humpty-Dumpty situation; people do get put back together again.”
Good news for me because I’ve been sliding back and forth and in and out of psychosis for almost 14 years. It all started back in December 2000 when The Supreme Court shattered The United States by installing George W. Bush as president and ever since then I’ve been trying to figure out how many 50 gallon drums of Crazy Glue it would take to put it back together again. I have periods when I think something could actually be done. During these times I am completely delusional.
Just when I thought I had a handle on things something terrible would happen that would crush everything to a finer powder: September 11th, the Patriot Act, the wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, another stolen election, torture and secret prisons, over a million dead with hundreds of thousands wounded, the largest theft of wealth in human history, the National Defense Authorization Act, and … and … what else could possibly happen?
Today The Supreme Court took the control of the political process and gave it to the rich. The ideas that were the basis for The United States of America have been smashed smaller than sub atomic particles. How’s that for a Reality Check?
Y’see my long slow slide into psychosis really began a long time ago when I embraced two concepts that were utterly false. I can’t remember where I read this, perhaps I just overheard it somewhere, but here it is:
Act as if there was a revolution and your side won.
At the time that really appealed to me. Why not cut to the chase? So I thought what the hell … I’ll give it a try. And for the most part it worked out pretty well for me. I ignored most of the BS that surrounded me and went ahead with my life. Little did I know this was a terrible idea. It was just a sub-set of a series of bad ideas that all fell under the umbrella of Personal Change. Personal change was The Big Thing at the time because people in my chronological age group (the dirty effing hippies) didn’t really pull off the revolution. After all the riots and the head bashings it was obvious that changing the system was really hard. So they decided to adopt this bumper sticker instead. “Become the change you wish to see in the world.” This was far easier to do and you didn’t have to worry about being tear gassed.
The second Really Bad Idea was best described by Gloria Steinem. She said, “It was heady, and exciting, and naive, you know, because we thought these injustices are so great, surely if we just explain them to people they will want to fix them.”
This kind of naiveté is astonishing unless you come from the white privileged class. There it’s par for the course. And it’s been the mindset of liberals for my entire life. It’s behind that bone-headed platitude, “Speaking Truth to Power”, as if somehow we clearly explain to the vicious thugs in power the damage they’re doing and they’ll suddenly start playing nice. At best it comes off like We The People are telling The Elite we know the game they’re up to. Well they know the game. It’s called Heads They Win and Tails We Lose and they do not give a good goddamn what we know because we still keep playing their game.
While my chronological peer group went off and became the change they wished to see in the world and I was living my One Man Revolution, the serious psychopaths were hard at work spending whatever amount of time and money it took to get what they wanted. Y’know … everything. Yeah these are serious people. Like Sally Kirkland’s character said at the beginning of Oliver Stone’s JFK, “These are serious effing guys.”
And now they’ve got it. They already own the government and the media and as of today our voices have been switched to “mute” … permanently. The only voice from now on is the voice of money.
So to sum up … It was over 14 years ago. It was over in 2004. It was over in 2008. And this just in …
It’s Still Over.
