The Break

A friend had a severe chemical imbalance that resulted in a psychotic break and ended in schizophrenia. The internet, counseling and time have given me the information I need to properly understand and process what happened not only to my friend, but to me as well. At that time there was no internet and I had no idea what was happening, I naively thought I could help or fix what was wrong and guide this person through hard times and back to ‘normalcy’. It ended with her being hog-tied by her parents, literally bound hands-to-feet in front of me, then driven across 2 states back home. I have no clear account of how many months this all lasted, I certainly became delusional myself and had no idea how to reach out, or who to ask for help. My memories of those months are very gauzy; ripped apart and spread out like messy clumps of cotton pulled across perfectly manicured hedges in the ‘burbs around Halloween. 

Her decent into total dislocation from reality turned out to have classic symptoms, naked walks in public, auditory and visual hallucinations, divestment of all material possessions and intense bouts of paranoia. There were possibly hundreds of hours she stood in the hallway at my place, a 5 bedroom San Francisco flat I shared with several friends, in an apparent somnambulant state; unresponsive, unaware of her surroundings and unable to make any contact. Convinced she was in a state of ‘hibernation’ I kept trying to get through, leading her by the hand to vistas and landmarks we both knew and loved, putting items in her hands that might get a response or playing music I knew was meaningful. Having no idea what it was that was happening to her mind I chose to believe that her actions and attitude were self-imposed, something that needed to be worked through before coming out the other side in a hopefully better place. The Park Rangers brought her to my house a half dozen times after finding her walking naked through the groves near the ocean, she would disappear while I was at work. She emptied out her bank account and gave thousands of saved dollars to homeless on the street, boxed up her cassettes and records and gave them to a garbage collector she had become friendly with before the break. Lost her apartment, her job and all context that separated what was happening inside her head from outside.

The beaten cotton clumps of memory I have since recovered lead me to believe that I tried and maybe succeeded in helping her kick her drug habit, she chose needles as the weapon of delivery and anything she could cook as the poison, and one of the few memories I have never lost was standing near the Golden Gate bridge and watching her throw her works over a cliff; sharps bent and melted, all tied up in the rubber strap usually found cinched to her bicep or calf.

On some of the excursions we went on I would fantasize that friends past or present would randomly appear and provide me with guidance, saving me with some way out of the trap I was deeply immersed in and pulling me out of the weeks and weeks of despair I was in over the situation. On one occasion I remember feeling sure I saw an old friend from high school as we were walking the beach at Aquatic Park, I waved and moved to get a closer look but my addled friend took that same moment to break for the ocean. I lost sight of this person in the crowd near the concrete seats as I wrestled my ward to the sand and kept her from plunging into the surf. I was so certain that this person had seen and recognized me too and that experience is also one I never lost, it somehow gave me hope that ‘normal’ life still existed outside of my darkness. 

Perhaps I became a lighthouse for imbalanced minds at that time because not long after this episode ended another similar one began, a young woman that slid into delusion naming me her savior, her jesus and although more responsive and lucid than the first her grasp of reality had become fragmented and without rational context. I was not as kind in this case and my emotional faculties completely shut down, I have no tenable memories of this time and emotionally was more hollow than the discarded snake skin. I learned from brief and painful conversations later that she was also collected by her family and shipped back to where she came from. Pieces of information that floated my way about these 2 women would occasionally reach me in the following years, and perhaps my friends understood how much these conversations would crush my spirit because often the tone of the telling was delivered in overly positive spin. More than a decade later I am not quite willing to recover most of what I experienced and rather would let those years from the late 90’s remain buried in purposeful psychic landfill, a thick layer of protective mental concrete smoothing it all out to a monochrome strata.

 Not surprisingly all the relationships I had dissolved, not that I was very good at maintaining those under the best circumstances anyway; the flat I shared with my friends was abandoned, the projects I was part of crumbled and if it hadn’t been for one of my former flat mates generosity and kindness I would have undoubtedly ended up on the street or worse. I started working 2 jobs, somewhere around 16 hours a day doing daily double shifts. I lost 40 pounds and instead of sleeping found myself lying in bed with endless streams running from the corners of my eyes and into my ears. I remember the feeling of being unnerved by the tears in part because there was no recognizable or predictable emotion to accompany them, but also because I knew I should be feeling something and most of all I should be exhausted and asleep.

I packed up the all my memories, literally, into boxes. Everything I had ever grown fond of from middle school into my 20’s went into tightly packed cardboard cubes, pictures, journals, mementos and emotions. I put them all in my pickup truck and drove them to Canada, leaving them with my Mom for 16 years.

The Beach

Sweat, salt and sun combine to get a perspective unique to the oceans influence. It cleared my mind and helped chase away some recent dilemma demons.

My Son, my Dog and my Love all relaxed together spending an afternoon on the cliffs, inside the heart of the California coast.




I left feeling refreshed and somewhat cleansed by the rough and fluid surroundings, almost as if I had run a mile in zero gravity. A much needed release.

Magnifique

Letters. VHS tapes, records, books and cassettes, zine's - ones I made and hundreds more others made, decal logos from cars that burned to the ground or were abandoned in a lot, keys from who knows where. Cheese stickers, wall posters and hangy things, slogans and buttons (you know, pins!) that go on your punk rock jacket. Middle school notebooks, journals and more journals, spirals books full of poetry and prose, collage papers big enough to have been folded dozens of times. My Dads letterman jacket from college, so many obscure pieces of debris neatly organized. I could tell that there was a method by the way the piles were organized in the boxes but I couldn't read it and had no idea what I was trying to tell me. pictures and sayings and references some badly burned from a fire that someone once set. The stories are that it was some other person who somehow did me wrong, the stories are from my Mom, the stories are suspiciously light in details and although I have no strict recollection I'm positive I set fire to my stuff sometime in the late nineties. Sometime during a month long drive from San Francisco to Chicago in the fall of '97, a pickup bed straining under dozens of cardboard cubes, many hurled into dumpsters at truck stops along I-80 while trying to fight my way over the Rockies. I drove 36 hours and then pulled over somewhere in the Dakotas and drove a distance off the freeway and sobbed until I passed out. All of the items were made and used and left in a barn for 15 years, since before widespread cell phones and internet. Since before Google and Facebook. I'm stuck now because I have had some very scary and powerful experiences with items that do bring back some intense feelings and emotions, like a deja vu thing but add in the stress dream about being naked in a crowd of friends. Sudden strong reflections I haven't had in many years. I'd like to think i have a personality disorder or some kind of specialized amnesiatic trauma but the reality is that I just lost it I think. I've had a few sweeping off my feet moments remembering people and places from when I had an easier time finding hope, granting myself an optimistic outlook. Less frenetic and more open to possibilities.

Hustling boxes in the west

I left San Francisco in 1997 just after thanksgiving. I packed up 9 boxes of everything I was and drove to Canada and left them there. Moving to Chicago in December and embarking on a year of loss and benefit, I moved back to San Francisco in 1999. 15 years later I drove to Denver with my 13 year old son and dog to retrieve them all and search the contents. We all bonded and became comfortable in the deep love we felt for each other. After I got back to SF I opened each box, mowing through the contents and sorting between trash, keep and unknown. On the 3rd box I laughed so hard I almost wet myself, by the 7th box I was crying.

communication breathless

Where there is practical beauty often the skein of torment lies softly underneath, bound tightly and waiting for release. In recording with mature equipment, and if by that you guessed I mean 2 inch tapes, hand built compressors and 50 year old consoles lovingly restored over years, it becomes necessary to develop patience combined with slow wit. Arriving at the site of creative extrication never fails to excite me, entering the booth with all the gear, dials and needles illuminated by lights, colorful racks of switches and knobs laid out for handling, stratifying the padded and smooth confines of the room. Gears and wires and rubber bands run all the equipment, listening to their whirlings and lock-step pronouncements as they flavor the commands of pushed buttons and circling capstans develops in me a tremendous amount of excited anticipation.

Each take of captured music is a suspension of belief, practically religious in it's regard, as the players strain for measure and pluck loosening the constraints of memory while gripping firmly the moment that strives to incite and elicit breathless connection of sound and vision. Often on playback of newly minted sounds the pathways between ear and brain seem to elongate, developing either a slowly realized and pleasant catharsis or meditative doubts that enclose the perception; I find myself actively trying to separate the performance from the sounds that rush and worry around the room so as better to make either peace or war with the results.

Those moments of playback are singular in my experience, they always give up something and often with wildly divergent result, unexpected pleasure or intransigent opinions develop in the recording booth when having given up both ears and brain to the moment of reckoning. These moments are insular and level such a total commitment to the moment that all other pieces of a life are removed, focus becomes immediate and a cocoon is born out of the concentration and predilection to being open to all possibilities that may result. Even the basic reasons for trapping sounds and performances to a physical medium have slowly evolved over the years, where once I imagined that others would hear and experience the multilayered joy I found in the creations I was part of, I now only imagine a moment of sound; wrapped so delicately in unspoiled communication, release, collaboration. Neither a secret I want to keep forever, nor a blazing trumpeted aural missive to thrust upon all, the music and sounds are all I want to surrender to; marking for the minutes and hours an undefined purchase of pure feeling and thought.