A ligature risk

is what the CEO of Spring Grove called a gas lamp chandelier in a picture of the hospital in the 1920's. Electricity was still unreliable. Doctor's operating theatres always had picture windows to let in natural light, in case the bulbs went dark in the middle of a procedure. Procedure.

A veteran of WWII, a former employee of the hospital, told me, "You better get some combat boots."
I said, "Oh, you mean for the tour of the campus?" We were to walk about a mile and to be shown where buildings used to be ( and be warned that sometimes sink holes open up when the earth settles into subbasements.)
"No," he said, "When the Arabs come, those shoes won't cut it." I was wearing two and half inch wedges.

I had some hesitation about repeating this, after thinking about how I presented the homophobic and racist comments of my brother-- that my repeating them was giving them audience.

My reply to the man was, "Oh my." The small circle of people dispersed.

He later said, to the roomful of people as the conference ended, "Go home and have a martini-- don't take Thorazine, that stuff will kill you." He was responding to a speaker that talked about how a woman had had 80 electro shock treatments and a partial lobotomy and was still uncontrollable. She was in the first Thorazine trial and within a year was employed in the community. I don't know how she had any brain left.

It was a full day. I learned that it was the Great Depression that broke taboos about family attachments. Prior to the GD, if you had a schizophrenic aunt, you took care of her at home. This meant a basement, usually. After the GD, people no longer felt shame about giving their relatives to the State. It broke all kinds of codes of behavior.

I saw a "psychodrama theater" from the 70's. It was attached to a laundry building from the 20's and an office building from the 40's. The hospital now uses that mash up of a building as storage. They don't use psychodrama anymore. I'm sure they can't "bill" for it.

The CEO pointed out that the grounds offer the same soothing qualities as back when the patients and the staff played baseball games together. That's something, considering over 60% of the people there are forensic -- court-ordered, and they aren't allowed outside at all...

One last thing. One photo from the 60's featured a doctor measuring out prescriptions. He was smoking a pipe in the pharmacy.

That’s It!

Think of the dark boil on the mitochondria,
the individual angina pectoris, that is, heart ache, of each cell as it divides
and carries the hereditary handicap of Original Sin.

It’s molecular, this badness.

That’s why you stole buns from the street vendor and stuffed them
into your bra.

Overdue things

One thing that isn't weeks old: Read my story, "only of motion" here PANK

Two weeks ago I took the Megabus to NYC for the Bushwick Open Pages fair. I've been on Ugly Duckling's mailing list for at least a year and when this invite arrived in my inbox, I jumped on it. I started following them because of their Eastern European writers focus. And, the letter press journals they create are beautiful. I sent a query letter to Linda half a year ago, but they aren't publishing books outside of their series. It was an exciting day. I talked to editors of Gigantic and BOMB as well as UDP. I have to say, I expected to walk up the subway stairs and fall in love with Brooklyn, but no such thing happened. It reminded me too much of South Jersey, with its abandoned warehouses and chop shops.

I then interloped at a DOGZPLOT reading. Barry was kind enough to let me read, oh wouldn't you know, I do have some stories on me... It went well. When a woman says the "p" word it gets laughs. The after party was fun. KGM is as lovely as you imagine. Peter S. in his underwear, flashes the audience. Such a long walk to PENN, but it was worth it. Took the late late bus back.

Sometime between the fair and the reading I stopped into a Russian Souvenir shop on 2nd Ave. The elderly owner was born in Belarus. He kept calling it "White Russia." I didn't ask him about that. I bought a small lapel pin of a bird with a word that doesn't translate well. He said it means something like museum. I don't know. He smelled like sausages, but was very kind.

Last week I attended the On Our Own conference at Rocky Gap in Cumberland. On Our Own is a peer support organization that helps people with mental illness live fuller lives. My work sponsored me and one of my co-workers. Last year I attended and spent too much of the time drunk or hung-over. This year I walked some ten miles of trails and swam in the gorgeous lake. I mark this conference's anniversary as the time when I really slapped myself in the face and demanded I make changes. And I have.

The Baltic people know a good time...

So many thoughts about this. After talking with my friend Peter I've become aware of themes in my writing that have to do with identity and belonging/being outside of a culture. He could say that much better than I just did. I've had trouble with this fascination of mine after reading about how Romantic irony (I am both in the world and have an awareness of the sublime and I am isolated because of my private self awareness) birthed nationalism. And nationalism, as we know, birthed many of the horrors of the last century. I've been moving towards a more neutral stance about preserving this "pride" (although I was happy to read that the Lithuanians were the absolute last European country to adopt Christianity and when they finally believed in Jesus they depicted him with an outrageous amount of Pagan symbolism) of culture or heritage and thinking that I should consider myself nationless. This parallels what Zizek was saying about environmentalism-- in order to actually preserve ourselves and our planet we have to see ourselves as alien, not part of the natural system. So, in order to preserve the order of government, we must move away from identifying with the symbols, the flags, the colors that represent it.

BUT.


The first thing a colonial power or a Christian power, oh that's redundant, does is remove language and indigenous culture. Economic dependence follows, poverty follows. Nationalism through Romanticism is what preserves identity. "I am different in these ways, different like all of these other people." And colonialism, not nationalism, is what continues to create the horrors of this century... that rough individualism that allows Brazil to import milk after exporting it first to Europe. By colonialism I mean capitalism, of course.

I suppose I am saying that I am going to continue to identify, in a Romantic way, with my Lithuanian roots. I've just now worked through any ambivalence I was feeling about this.

The photo is of a famous singer from Chicago-- a city that has more "Lithuanian" people than the capital of Lithuania. He was pretty fabulous, what with his aluminum sneakers and tinfoil pants. The rhinestone "R" is what really got me, though.

One last thing. This celebration of Lithuania took place at the Catonsville Armory. With tanks and army recruiters. Ha!

ANALOG MAPMAKER+LOST PERSON=

Gosh, I hate to admit it, but I think doubt is creeping in. I'm starting to feel self-conscious when I write and that automatically kills the piece. I'm twenty-three pages into the book. I'm very pleased with what I've written. I know that this story hasn't been told. I am confident in that. I'm starting to worry that maybe people won't want to read about a six year old and his idea of what sex is. Or matricide. Do people want to read about that? I'm just feeling lost. I feel like my poetry collection is strong, but I know better where not to send it then where to send it. I am very aware that I need an editor. It looks like I am going to start going to those Buffalo things. Or, I just need to start going out again. I've been cloistered at home, content. The need to shake things up is in my genes. I can blame it on my dad's side, if blame needs be assigned.

Maybe this is because I am reading, get this, THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND! (exclamation point is mine) Summary of the first 68 pages: Language is the root (ha, see) of consciousness. Language evolved from concrete things-- like the word head-- that then developed into metaphorical uses to symbolize other things-- the head of an army. Metaphor is what created consciousness because it allowed us to see ourselves in a distinct way, as separate from the reality of our environments. Here is a quote, "Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world."

I want a vacation.

telephone........................................................... ring

Ah, what a day.

I've been tracking 63 people that were discharged from Upper Shore Hospital when it closed because of budget cuts.

About twenty-five of these people have been incredibly hard to find.

Today I called a number I've tried a bunch of times before. A family member picked up and told me that the person I'm looking for is dead. He died last week of natural causes.

The average lifespan of someone with persistent, severe mental illness is twenty-five years shorter than a peer without mental illness.

Another father I spoke with said that he kicked his daughter out because she won't take her medicine. She is living in the car in the front yard.

FENCE contest

I placed as fellowship winner of the FENCE SLS contest. That means I wasn't in the top three, but I placed high enough to be granted a partial scholarship to attend the writing conferences in either Montreal, Kenya or

Lithuania.

You get one guess as to which program I'm going to attend.

The Lithuania program isn't until next year. It will celebrate the 100th birthday of Lithuanian born Milosz. I'm glad that it won't be for a while, even though it's hard to wait. I'll have time to save up.