This afternoon, I stepped out on to the porch, expecting a damp, cold day. It had been slate gray all day, and there was never a break in the clouds. It rained on and off; nothing serious, but definitely wasn’t leading me to believe it’d be …. warm. Really gray and gloomy and really warm. There was rain in the air, literally and figuratively, and I was instantly transported to my childhood home.

These were the days that we ran around the neighborhood, jacked up on the electricity in the air. When it was still warm out, so we’d ride bikes or play ball — it was warm like summer, but without the beating heat of the sun. I’m sure we were given strict instructions to not be in the lake when it was storming, but if it hadn’t yet started, we’d be in the huge(ish) waves of the lake, finding the warmth of the lake to be remarkable, despite the ever-increasing wind.

I have a vision — a memory — that I have locked in my brain. I know exactly where I was standing — right on the edge of the property line between my backyard and Uncle Speck’s yard. There were two trees that made a big enough space to run through or ride bikes through — none of those lakeside lots were fenced off; we ran and screamed and played and made up games and hid and laughed as much as we wanted.

I remember looking up at an ominous sky and just feeling so fucking alive. Just tingling with the excitement of a possible storm and seeing just HOW LUSH AND GREEN everything was. Sort of like the pictures I was to see 20+ years later, infused with deep, dark color on Instagram. But this was real life and the present moment and how fucking glorious! I wanted to run and jump and fly — I had so much energy flowing around inside me.

If it began to pour, we’d end up in our garage, hanging out with the neighbor kids and rollerskating or playing with chalk or pretending something. I knew if the sky was green-gray it was dangerous, and I knew if everything went dead quiet, that was worse than a big storm.

When we were very small, a tornado ripped through Wind Lake. I heard the story repeated at various times when I was growing up; the whole thing was vague and hazy — I remember being woken up and brought to the basement with some donuts. My mom was worried and thus, my sister, too; my father, on the other hand was standing in the livingroom, watching the storm from the three sets of windows overlooking the lake. I wanted to be up in the livingroom with him — seeing what he saw, feeling the incredible energy.

But I was stuck downstairs with my nervous mom and crying sister, wondering if and when anything bad was going to happen. In reality, in later retellings of the events, it became quite clear that when my dad *heard* the train rushing through the neighborhood, it was already too late. If the tornado had decided to make an errant turn, there wasn’t a thing he could have done about it.

And isn’t that the way? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Even with all of our radar and smartphones and modem marvels of meteorology, if a hurricane or tornado or earthquake want to take us, they will. Regardless of our status or education or upbringing. We are still helplessly hopeless when it comes to defeating Nature.

As it should be, really.

Memorial Day. Start of summer. Nod to wear white. Day of picnics and BBQs. A reason for endless sales. The twin of Labor Day; constantly being confused and inverted, and equally misunderstood by those who are just so thrilled to have a three-day weekend.

But Memorial Day is to honor the fallen men and women who have served in actions past and current; it is a somber holiday if you really soak it all in. What makes it even more bitter to me is that by all rights, so many of those people should never have died.

Not because they were inherently better than someone else, or because there was a mistake — a plan gone wrong. But merely because in so many circumstances, we just shouldn’t have been where we were, trying to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish (and failing, many times).

It’s because people who ever-increasingly don’t have a stake in the matter send *other* people’s sons and daughters into perilous situations without a second thought. Because we do not learn from history — ours or other countries’. Because we insist that we have the only way to live and try to get to see others to see it — by any means necessary. All of these reasons are not reasons to fight. And there are so many more ridiculous reasons that people use to justify these deaths every day.

In the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millenium, there’s really nothing but our own fear, pride, greed and ego that send us traversing the globe, fighting unwinnable fights. It’s not saving the world from slavery or fighting Hitler. It’s us sticking our nose in other countries’ business and lying to convince the American people we’re doing the right thing.

What I find so fascinating (and by fascinating, I mean perplexing and infuriating and ridiculous) is the people on the right who are just CRAZED about the four deaths in Benghazi. Never mind that there were many embassy/consulate attacks under Bush (with many more casualties) OR that whatever ‘cover-up’ these people imagine went down *pales* in comparison to the litany of lies that Bush/Cheney told to get a war in Iraq. And that’s IF there was a cover-up, which seems dubious in light of the non-evidence. But, even if it was stone-cold calculated cunning, it is a pittance compared to the whole of the Bush Administration.

But, that’s not really even my point — Bush, Obama, all of the people in power. As the prison-industrial complex grows at an alarming rate, the war machine continues to crank out machines to kill and wars to fight. And all without a thought of the actual humans who are fighting them OR on the unfortunate end of the fallout.

Some people probably won’t care for the political tone of this post, but you know what? Bring the troops home. That’s a good way to stop anymore from dying.

Mental illness. Why do they call it that?

Mental. It’s in the mind. It’s an illness that acts on the brain. The brain is the center of all of human activity, so anything that affects the brain is going to subsequently affect speech and action, because thoughts drive those things and if the thinking machine is going haywire, everything else is going to go a little loopy, too.

It’s also tricky in that as “a broken mind can’t fix a broken mind,” people who are suffering from mental illness either 1. don’t know they are having an issue because the internal view is or has always been “normal” to them or 2. they have been able to identify the signs and symptoms of how the illness manifests, but they are still pretty powerless to do anything about it. Or, they have to work much harder to get to the actions that will bring them relief.

Speaking of … Illness. It means that it’s something pathological that is not a choice of the person who has it. You don’t choose to get diabetes and you don’t choose to get the flu. It’s an outside influence that wreaks havoc on your body, and while there are steps you can take to mitigate the illness, it isn’t within your power to decide that you don’t have it. With some illnesses, there are even ways to prevent an oncoming attack, but when your body does succumb, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

I’ve been unmedicated for a couple months. My own ADD/can’t get shit done combined with working on the low-income side of a psychiatric clinic means my patient assistance ran out. I’m getting a decent amount of sleep, so I’ve been rolling with it. But, despite my best efforts, I’m shorting out a little. Everything has started to become black and white, everyone has started to become hard to deal with, no one understands.

I understand this mindset. It’s a “mixed episode.” It means that I’m depressed and my brain can only think of terrible things, the most negative outcome, the spiral of fear and shame and hopelessness that leads to nothing good. But, I’m also slightly revved up — I have energy and my body tingles with a compulsion to be, do, exist outside the normal routine of being a regular person with normal emotions and some impulse control.

Instead, I have dark thoughts and no filter. So, I’m prone to starting (or finishing) fights and inserting my opinion places and being a shitstarter. Thing is, even as it’s happening, I feel like I’m slightly inside my body, enjoying the rush (normally, I care WAY too much about what people think of me and want everyone to like me SO much) and slightly outside my body, watching the trainwreck disaster roll down the tracks toward the cliff. Like I can’t really do a thing about it, so I might as well enjoy the ride.*

Needless to say, I find myself more alone and isolated than normal (which is a fair amount). People are not happy to try and hold a conversation with me in this mode. They become infinitely frustrated and don’t know what to do. I offend them directly, or indirectly, when I don’t want the solutions they’re offering or suggest that nothing will work anyway.

But, the thing is … as I drive these people away, there is also a portion of my brain that is indignant about it all. I am not DOING THIS ON PURPOSE. If they are annoyed, they can only begin to understand what it’s like to be INSIDE this mess. I start to become more angry and hopeless as I realize no one can get this and no one is wiling to try. To sit there and be, “Hey. You’re kind of acting like an asshole right now, but that is NOT HOW YOU NORMALLY ARE, SOOOO … I’m going to try and just ride this out with you. I know nothing you say is personal and the way you are feeling is clouding your judgment and making you react to life in a minorly irrational way and that you don’t mean to be so fucking out of sync.”

It’s a spiral of spirals, to be sure. What makes it worse is that a lot of these people are alcoholic, and I wish that they would get it. It’s the same thing … it’s a disease. Just because you tell me to do something, doesn’t mean I’m going to want to do it or see how it might help me … because MY BRAIN IS BROKEN. It doesn’t think anything will work or that anyone cares. It’s got the *wrong* filter on, and I am only seeing out through apocalyptic-colored glasses.

If I’m honest, I’ll sometimes say or think that I don’t want to be here anymore. A permanent sleep would be nice. But you can’t say that to people. I’ve been on the other side of some pretty hairy conversations, and I know that when people start sounding like they might want to kill themselves, it’s very concerning. I want them to get help. So, I understand the sentiment, but I know that as much as my brain tells me that I’d be better off dead or drunk, I still have the core understanding that neither one of those is a solution. They wouldn’t work. I’m not heading down those roads. If you want to worry, don’t worry about a suicide, worry about weird misery.

You want to help me? Pray for me. Let me know that it’s going to be okay — in an essential way. Stay my friend even when it’s hard. Mental illness is a sickness of the brain. It sucks. But as I have come to see, “This, too, shall pass” works here as well.

*Kind of like the time I had really bad turbulence on a plane once. It was pretty rough, but also roller coaster feeling. Since being up in the air still seems fairly unnatural, I’m not going to say the possibility of death didn’t cross my mind. But even if we were going down, there wasn’t a damn bit I could do about it. So, I went roller coaster, and laughed my ass off the whole time. Other people contemplating their mortality did NOT find anything funny, and I got a bunch of dirty looks. If you’re going to die, why not go down laughing?

I’ve told this story before, but here it is as I told it on Sunday in front of several hundred people at the Athenaeum Theater for Listen To Your Mother. Enjoy.

Blowing Up the Driveway by Jocelyn Geboy

“Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Prospero Ano y Felicidad.”

Jose Feliciano’s voice called out while my sister, her best friend, my mom and I made Christmas cookies. In many respects, it was an ordinary Saturday. My father was out and about, visiting friends, and sharing a few drinks. My mom was moving about with nervous energy, making sure that everyone had enough to eat, that things were comfortable, that she was silently keeping track of the time between when my father left and when he would return.

“I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas…

It was late afternoon, and my mom brought out some chicken nuggets for a snack. Mom and I were the last to heat ours up, putting ours on the same plate. Heading to the microwave, “Feliz Navidad” called out from the radio.

“Feliz Navidad, Feliz Navidad ..

Catching the chorus, I join Jose in his quest to fill everyone with the Christmas spirit. I dance around as I put the nuggets in the microwave and sing my heart out the whole time they are cooking. After retrieving them from our tank of a 1983 Radarrange, my mom has had enough of the dancing and prancing and tells me to knock it off.

In retrospect, I had a manic moment — not only am I grooving on my good times with Jose, but I’m feeling good about everything; I’m on top of the world. I have an inflated sense of self, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me, I have the right to do anything I want. Besides, I’m 16 years old — so, I push the envelope.

“I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas, I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas, I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas, from the bottom of my heart ….!!! I wanna wish you a merry Christmas …”

I just kept right on Feliz Navidading. However, for whatever reason, mom had her own little mental moment, and snapped. “I SAID, KNOCK IT OFF” and took a swipe at me. Being young and agile, I backed away, but I also dropped the plate of chicken nuggets. It was a paper plate, and they all stayed on the plate. It would have been no problem to pick up the plate and continue the meal, business as usual.

Despite my mother’s normally demure nature, she occasionally would have a moment where she flew off the handle. We almost could never see it coming. She isn’t a drinker or a dropper of F-bombs. She’s a stuffer, and like anything that builds up pressure, every now and again, it has to go somewhere. I think her anger and worry that my father was out drinking was being misdirected and the fact that maybe I was acting a little too much like him, didn’t help matters any. But dropping that plate on the ground was the last straw.

I was backed up against the microwave and you could have heard a chicken nugget drop. My sister and her best friend were sitting at the kitchen table in silent amazement. My mom yells “No one in MY house wastes food!” I’ve instantly sobered up from my manic high.

I offer, “I wasn’t going to throw them away. They’re fine. They’re all on the plate! I’m going to eat them.” She’s having none of it. She repeats that no one is going to waste food in HER house. I try and show her that nothing’s wasted, everything’s fine.

She suddenly announces my punishment: “You can go up to your room and you’re getting nothing but bread and water!!!” I’m bewildered. Nothing’s making sense. Why would I have bread and water, when there are chicken nuggets RIGHT HERE that I’m more than willing to eat? I start to look at my sister and her friend who are watching with morbid curiosity — Can I have a little help here?!

I switch gears. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I’ll just give her a little crazy back to show her how ridiculous she sounds. “Bread and water? I’ll just call my friends and have them bring me over some food.” Mom rebuffs this with some primo logic: “I’ll cut the phone lines.” I start to get concerned. Does she even HEAR what’s she saying? Cut the phone lines? I counter. “That’s fine. They know where we live. They’ll just come over here and bring me food.”

Not to be bested in this standoff, she utters the line that is so completely ridiculous, that even as I worry for her sanity, I realize I now have the upper hand. To ensure that my friends cannot bring me food, (because I will be on a strict diet of bread and water because I dropped the chicken nuggets), she yells, “WELL, THEN I’LL BLOW UP THE DRIVEWAY!!!!”

I stared — I thought, “She’s completely lost her mind.” I calmly said, “Blow up the driveway!?!? Well, Dad’s not going to be too happy about that.” Picturing my mother cartoonishly tying dynamite sticks together to accomplish this insane task, the picture became too comical to handle, and I broke down laughing. My sister, her best friend and eventually, my mother, seeing the picture herself, joined in.

I am the perfect mix of my mother and my father’s DNA. Split right down the middle, yet I often find myself distant and critical of my mother, while walking around the world wearing her heart on my sleeve. I, too, worry needlessly about that which I cannot change, and remain silent when the smallest bit of honesty could make all the difference. It’s why a lot of stuff comes out sideways with us. It’s why instead of just settling things the easy way, we sometimes blow up the driveway.