In-Sanity c1989 BROCK F. HANSON IN THE MIDST OF THE MADNESS "What are you writing so furiously?" "Insanity. Know anything about it?" "Don't we all?" KO PHANGAN, THAILAND 1988 I'm stumbling over my words, punctuating weighty statements with silence. My audience waited, listening hard, ignoring their Macongs and lasses, till someone broke my struggle consolingly, with these words: "You're trying what people have tried to do for centuries. I don't think it can be done." There was a general nod of agreement, and the tension evaporated. My mind reeled. "He knew what I was talking about?!" What exactly was I trying to say, that made communication so difficult? The assembly broke up, and I wandered, watching the full moon rise. I finally sat on the beach, and for the next three hours thought: Where is all this thought coming from? What am I even thinking? I'm manipulating a bunch of other people's ideas. A lot of thoughts that are my social conditioning, advertising's impact, what-I've-read-who-I've-heard-fabrications-I've-seen, the explanations I've embraced, the models I've emulated, the goals-that-led-me sort of thinking... Do I even have an original thought? What's really important? The manipulative search for money and power means nothing to me, its entire program is an illusion. My traditional culture is narrow-minded and exclusionary, other people's philosophies relative, science is a good guess at best from inbred test results, love is completely intangible, intuition and emotion are totally irrational... What is my world based upon? The physical laws don't even apply uniformly! there's nothing to hang onto! There is no real basis for what the majority of this world has become. It was a perfect warm night, with waves lapping a softly-lit beach, and wind whispers through dreamy palms. I stared blankly at the moon's shimmering ocean swirl and everything began to drop away. I was there on that beach, and nothing else mattered. It was as if no other place, or thing existed, I was stripped of every memory except the awesome beauty in that moment. Soon this too took an unreal quality, blurring my peripheral to a fuzzy granulation. Reality was dissolving. Every object faded into an overlapping motif, assuming a growing feeling of continuity, of non-separateness, into which the "I" also was plummeting. "NO!!" I screamed, overcome with sensations indescribable. "It's not time yet!" I had to fight my way back... everything was coming too quickly... soon I'd know why I was here on Earth, and it would be too late. I groveled in the sand, tried to feel it, to hold it, to see its individual grains. "The-physical-world-Brock-holy-shit, you're losing it!" My body was feeling my mind's suspicion, that everything was primarily illusion, created by some strange force. I ran for the dark waters and plunged in, praying to whatever would listen that this act should draw my terrified feeling away. The sea was cooling and alive, buoyant to the part of me that was sinking, enveloping, containing all that expanded out. I swam till my muscles burned, and felt a little better. "I have to use my body! I have to live through it, instead of through my mind." I felt better (a little bit better) and went to where music played for most of the night. I dance till I forget to remember. --Three days later--- New Years Eve. The group of acquaintances I'd enjoyed, sat with me at the bamboo hut bar. I had no desire to drink, but the evening promised much festivity, so just for the hell of it, I thought I'd try a ganja cookie. "Where are the best ones?" I inquire foolishly. For 45 minutes I nibbled minute crumbs of that omnipotent cookie, concentrating every thought on the images of its taste. Not long after the second third of my wagon wheel evaporated, I encountered the novel sensation that I'd be unable to deal with other human beings in approximately ten seconds. I did my bows, and walked to the ocean, disbelieving how high I was getting. I only managed to cope until this rushed through my head: "What have you done Brock?! Three days ago you almost went crazy being completely straight, and now you've taken this drug, enhancing its effect by eating with all that attention!" How could I have blocked out that other night?! I must think I'm invincible to some drugs, or not want to believe my impending collapse of everything might not be isolated instance. I fought for my life, trying to keep that brain in check, trying to curb any thought, for every thought led to the oneness; that horrible dissolution, the unity everyone sought. "You've become too sensitive to do this to yourself" Played over and over in my head. I swam in waves of lightning flash luminescence, watched my body brightly lit in stupefying beauty, and prayed I'd live to remember it. "Look how far away the beach is!" Scary. I'd gone straight out to sea, literally. "Pay attention Brock shit, what's happening to time?!" I paced the beach, felt connection with several others fighting death on the island, and I fought all inclinations to be rational. I was at the dead end of rational thought... in its way lay only insanity, for the larger world defied description. Drug's days had ended. I had no use for them anymore. --One Month Later-- I'm deliriously sick traveling to Bangkok, on a luxury bus with a video movie blasting its soundtrack to my disbelieving brain. It was about a guy who owned a Sherman Tank, a common good-guy, bad-guy, down-south confederate plot, but I couldn't relate to any of its characters. "This is America?" I felt acutely embarrassed, and frightened. It was the first inkling of how different the world had become. I was going home to the known (or so I thought). The fever broke, (finally). I got a date to fly home. Old programs, desired achievements rose to prominence in my fevered aftermath, their facades seemed reassuring. As weeks passed, their destinations posed the terrifying thought I wasn't the harbor of some mysterious illness, but something much more profound had happened, like my entire perception had changed. I was in a delerium reality, it swept my precious props away. One by one, things that "mattered" began to fall. Their taboos showed wear, they wrecked, my birthplace was no different than any other place, my desires proved unnecessary, and empty. I fled to work as I once had the ocean, looking desperately for some relief in knowing this wouldn't last. I felt my waking world becoming a dream, where money, and appearances lost all value in my deep symbolic abyss. I crammed a four hundred dollar paycheck in my pocket, lost it, and didn't care at all.. Not caring scared me. I'd ask for another only from the alarm of how little it seemed to matter. "Will I even be able to communicate with people on a day to day level anymore?" Many fears began to surface. There was no question something serious was wrong with me. "This society is founded on the acquisition of power and the very things that either mean nothing to me, or seem unattainable. It's beginning to form an awful sinkhole, a terrible void of what to do next; where to turn, or, is there anything to do at all?" I wrote in panic. "Gifts have lost all value, being products of the acquisition, the expenditure... money holds no symbolism of deep feeling to this state. People govern their interest by candor to fads. The consistency of time is also awash, it no longer murmurs any marks of emotional value to me." Listening to the radio became an infuriating confrontation with, "I'm only getting this music because of the ads it attracts!" Their manipulation was an insult to transparency. "All this is about hoarding creative expression, overvaluing it, then doling it out bit by bit. A true artist's will is to give, with compensation being secondary. Hanging onto things dries the creeks of creativity." I wrote letters on the back of my favorite drawings, and mailed them off. "There's plenty more where that came from, the ability, novice as it is, is forever mine to hold." I rationalized. Actually, I was preparing to die. I walked around in an agony of heightened perception, akin to magic mushrooms, whenever my eyes were open. It was only in sleep that I reveled, for here I drew strength from my dreams being "normal". It seemed that shutting off vision lowered the influx of sensations to copable levels, and let me relax a little. "If my subconscious is still intact, I must not be that bad off." Was an anchor falling prey to sirens' call. I had somehow acquired an X-ray vision, for everywhere I looked, essences leapt through their mirrors to confront me. My perceptive tools, it seemed, had somehow gotten too sharp. I'd been using a bone club to dissect the world, and now my hand indexteriously weighed a scalpel. The errors were bleeding me to death. "Too much power!..." My body constantly shook with energy, my vision altered, revealing holographic auras around living things, astigmatic red dots, and wild, particle chaos of motions. Things flitted through my peripheral vision as mythical beings of folklore, and I took them seriously. "Well, why not?" Who says myths aren't "real" somewhere? And I drove my body into exercise trying to ground it out, hoping to short this energy somewhere else. Every night I affirmed my desire to feel more connected to the earth. I was a balloon hovering high above its surface, half-canted to ethereal space. I wrote in free thought, looked for subconscious clues and realized the schizophrenic rift these personifications of my subconscious tended towards, could easily empower themselves to the "voices", the demons of the psychiatric ward that told me I needed to integrate their abstractions, not fuel their separateness. I wrote, but words came out wrong, missing letters, were backwards, or without definitions. I'd try to accept this, but underneath I'm whispering: "Oh shit!" Writing was getting too stressful. On March 9th, 1989 I stopped. At my parent's house late one evening, the news aired a feature on a young murderess who was so crazy it scared the seasoned interviewer to speak with her. I listened intently, glanced at my parent's pinched faces, and was soon overcome by a hopeless panic. I understood everything she was saying. She was making a kind of sense the "normal" mind couldn't grasp. Then I recoiled, remembering our before-dinner conversation. My parents had voiced their concerns over my brother's future. The irony of this situation was exquisite. Inside me, hearty laughter broke the fear. "Fuck, he's attached to the center of the goddamn earth compared to me! How can you worry about him? That boy's the best earthquake-protection San Francisco ever had!" That's why I didn't say anything. Talking about my situation was impossible, except with those I managed to joke its seriousness away with. I was utterly convinced I was losing my mind. Life became a matter of holding onto enough rationality to appear normal. That was it. I had a feeble self-confidence. If anyone looked at me wrong, in judgment, or condemnations, I'd lose this too, and then it would all be over. An institution, even an analyst, was eternal living death in permanent mental dismemberment. From those eyes, being "normalized" by a crazy society made the sense of punishing murderers by making them watch late-night TV. I packed baggage while I still could. "If worse comes to worse, I'll just get my bags to the mountains somehow." Sure. Incoherent in the Alpines. Sounds like a fucking movie. I knew the folly, it was just my preferred method of suicide. Through all this, there was another awareness, that I was onto something tremendously powerful, for when you glance at a book of Buddhist koans, and know their answers immediately, it's obvious something is up. I felt a tremendous weight of knowledge hidden inside me that would show itself in odd ways. It awed my morality with a responsibility it carried. "No wonder there's a fear of success... I'm scared shitless." Judgments of other people arose everywhere, much as my learning of diagnostic medicine in Nepal had provoked. I hated it. Maturity must be getting knowledge as an acceptance state so you can integrate it. I tried to look without judging, but I saw things in people as x-rays show broken bones that need mending, and I couldn't help criticizing the fall that brought the accident. Soon after came a form of foreknowledge which told in certainty whether or not I could roar around a blind corner on my motorcycle without being hit. How much fun is it to know what's around every twist in a near environment? Kindred knowing- action removed the mystery, the thrill of it all, and I tried to suppress this ability. Street crazies began to take my attention. They recognized me, and we connected in ways I never deemed possible. They told me their stories, I watched where they'd gotten stuck, where their thoughts had gone circular in a vacuum of support. I looked deep in their eyes and thought: This could be you. Don't lose your bearings! And I sympathized with Vietnam vets, imagining their return to the hostile, empty order of home with the chaos of unspeakable experiences. They said their peace, I crept inside and looked away from their pain. Too much. Imagine body-bagging your best friends, then flying home for a God- graced good'ole Thanksgiving with all the relatives. He had to be hospitalized, sent back to war, glass mind broken by unreal change. My world narrowed for enlarging. Those who sought wholes stopped each step, breath, and sight, connecting to me in some immensely inexplicable way. Here, individual things lost their distinction against the unity they reflected. This was capital F for frustrating. Sunsets lack splendor when you don't see them as separate from the entire "body" of Earth and cosmos. Unless some item's cells can be studied, its whole existence is far less spectacular than the complete medley of a physical entity. Then, five seconds later, it was intoxicating. Each piece, no matter how minuscule, was an integral component in this utterly magnificent machine of cosmos, God, reality... I'd fallen from all solid form. "Belief systems don't go crazy, they exist. People appear to go crazy, but what is it in them that goes quizzical? Pursuing the ultimate, that's got to be it. Is "it" science-based, pseudo-religious, or one-time bliss; they all have a systemology of underspeak that grounds out shocks of new discovery. Religions answer their philosophical problems in an abstract language of all the questions they've followed. Because a belief structure exists for followers of anything, their methodologies (regardless how esoteric) control their madnesses, ordering all the findings in known time and symbols, deriving individual experience from a group's collective. Their last step is to go beyond this structure... not so easy for a fully indoctrinated seeker, but then again, who cares?' I'd done something very backwards. Why get out of here too soon if time is imaginary? If I don't find my way back through all this confusion, I'll be gardening Zagozinnias on IO-9 for an epoch or two, trying to sort the nonsense out. Okay, okay, I admit it. Some worldly structure is definitely good. My interest in spiritual and philosophical development hit the skids. I thought: Here we are, inside time, continually trying to escape time by focusing on our own transcendence of it. Because strivings to God (future satisfaction) happen primarily in the symbolic forms, they're cast at expense of the very moment wherein they're contained. It's a crude joke really. Where better to hide the answers of existence from goal-crazed seekers? God laughs hard at this one, I'm so sure. And Voltaire's Candide never seems more relevant. For once I'm jealous of all the people in the world, not the Saints, Sages, and Don Juans of life. It was well past time to be in here and now, without worrying about the otherwise mysterious next... It was a nice aspiration. Meanwhile, the "real world" continued dishing out trauma. Thoughts, no matter how radical, are relatively safe things to play with when they're confined to your head;, but slowly - surely - thought will infuse to every fiber of your being. Now the brain can't fondle its prenubile treasures, or poison itself with their opposites for a short, sweet time. From your head, through your imagination, thoughts will enter your bloodstream, integrating, altercating, making sensations from what were a few neurotransmitters of mental fancy. "I used to think certain thoughts, now I've become them, seeing whole new worlds through their eyes. The rung of the ladder I step up is confusion, I must drag myself up it calmly, though it threatens to topple every level of understanding I've gained. The moments I've gazed at the world with, all the learnings I've gathered... they're from the old ways of perceiving things, from all from the lower rungs of the ladder. I must listen, but the slightest doubt will start the fall of dominos, vaporizing my world into the greater unknowns supporting its trestles. There's love-the-sublime wringing inseparably through everything, indistinguishable from flowers, people or concrete... they're drawing past these individual forms to that awful, ecstatic finality... the shapeless, matterless, oneness. Here lies pure energy, unconnected to any shape or cause, emotionless, yet it's alive. No understanding lies outside of this force, and nothing sacred survives its insides. To be close to it is to offer up fear and joys at every instant, to be totally stripped, as paint is torn from a house. It is magnetic draw and paralyzing fear all rolled into one nothing spot---the place where everything begins, and everything ends. Enlightenment looks different at this non-point of vantage, for it is death in every sense of the word." I said it. I had to talk to myself. The fears I saw there were too many to describe. There was a pointlessness to my utmost core of being, and Earthly removal was its only cure... and then quite unexpectedly, I would illuminate this boarder, disconnect with it, and simultaneously merge with a picture so large, no reflection back was possible. Emotions were declassifying, all times were undefined, I became utter silence until the person I was screamed its distant terror. It was scared and abandoned, calling me back to the verge of whence I came, but could not answer it. There was an entirely new language to speak. No action, or process was immune from a total dissolution... cereal went in the refrigerator and milk in the cupboard... everything had to be thought down to its rules, their whys, and assumptions... from dialing a phone, to putting a key in a lock, the things I'd once done automatically broke down completely, requiring intense concentration to reinvent their steps. Everything I'd grasp at eventually slipped through my fingers. Support came unexpectedly, never from where I looked for it. It would let me drag on. I clawed at a reason to not go over the edge, for I was standing at a precipice, where winds unexpectedly blasted. They pushed me off balance, and my calm fell prey to predatory gusts of my own making. Fear brought on the disaster, for I could not lower my weapons to the oneness, and get its gifts' strength waning there. That time was passing meant nothing, I bided nowhere, without condolence in its passing, for I didn't know if I'd be better, ever. "The security of breaking your leg and assuming you're going to get better is far from my reach. This is the only knowledge that makes pain bearable." I couldn't count on time to flow properly. It stretched and crunched crazily, often sending my attention so profoundly into the moment of my surroundings, my past and future became nonexistent. The bright non-reality of large supermarkets made me forget what I'd gone in to buy, parking meant trying to decipher where I'd thought about parking from where I did.... Things I'd picture in my mind took on a life of their own, telescoping out to a jumbled present as animated, parallel worlds. In their instants I had no short term memory. I'd pick something up, put it down, and find it hopelessly lost, as no sequence of steps existed to retrace. These sensations of the sequential, endless, instants of time were so intense, they washed all previous ones to oblivion. This left my mind, ranting and raving, to boil it's frustration into violent screams of: "Get A GRIP! This is not out of your control!!!" I'd punch the table, banish my voice to hoarse coughs trying to let out the frustrations churning inside me. I couldn't glue thoughts and tasks onto linear time any more. Life lost its beginning and end... it simply was, was, and was again, existing far outside our perception of a normal 75 year allotment. There was nowhere to go and nothing to escape. Death was a transition to another stage of challenges. If I went out in suicide fleeing this awful disorientation, I sensed it would be harder to deal with what came next. If I died in an accident, I would have subconsciously chosen suicide to get away. I wished to be conscious, to see it through. "I have no options, but to simply deal." "Some struggle makes like worth living I've found, but this is ridiculous!" Materially, it felt as it I were keyed into magic. Whatever I wanted came about in mysterious ways, in shorter and shorter turnarounds. Getting things became so easy, that what I got lost meaning. Except normalcy, which (whatever that was by then) remained distant and unobtainable. Although I tried to talk to people about this, its gravity was unimaginable to anyone who hadn't experienced this particular form of terror. He appears normal, ...so surely it can't be that serious! they thought. Paradox: I need someone to worry about me, but it's good they don't worry, for it gives me confidence. All I really needed was the belief things weren't as bad as they seemed; so I could cure myself. I was told I needed professional help once and it threw me awfully. "If they get a hold of me, I'll never escape with the gifts this experience contained, if I escape at all all." I could have walked into any institution in the country and been admitted, spouting only a few fragments of what I was thinking, but I was convinced that being reprogrammed into the psychiatrist's world created rubber-band-recoils somewhere down the line. Professional Help equaled another form of death, in my vocabulary. Because I seemed okay, expectations of daily tasks were pressed upon a very limited ability to function. Sometimes I'd want to scream, "Who cares about this shit? of course I messed up, I'm going fucking crazy!! The fact I can even make some sense out of what you're saying is a minor miracle!" But I didn't. Even my girlfriend didn't believe I was having trouble, taking me to task on the most trivial sorts of things. "Hiding in excuses will only make it worse." I told myself over and over. "The challenges these people give you put some purpose to your ship that's very much adrift." All ideas clashed, and I fought to reconcile them, lest they build themselves a Babel of conflict through my blind adherence to either side. I'd walk outside to mail a letter - with only a towel on.. far more coverage than your average bathing suit, just like a sarong; what's the big deal? In the end, I humored everybody by not doing what seemed natural to me. I quenched my far-out suspicions, and started accepting the "unacceptable" as possibility, not fact. The truth was, anything was possible; or, the impossible had become itself. Concepts of what would and wouldn't happen ceased to function, becoming relative to whatever I dared to be open to. Bizarre things happened everywhere, all the time, while our blindered perception called them as imaginative fiction. I felt a constant danger of seeing things around me nobody else would, or magnetizing all manner of irregularities around my person (any of which being as real as the population's accepted "reality") ....for all I knew, my surroundings hinged on collapse into grey nothingness, replaceable by totally different scenarios at any given instant. Ghosts were waiting to speak to me, and the fire department might hose down my perfect, unburning room. Catch 22: Giving these probabilities energy only increases their likelihood of happening, but if you're focusing on not trying to focus on them.... on the things that are happening... (Christ! This spaces me out hard to even write about it. My hand shakes with anxiety at how close this state still is to me.) I was living in a severely altered state and was stressed from head to toe because of it. My hair fell out in clumps, my memory was disappearing, my mind was choked with other people's ideas, who was I? Was I getting better, or trying to get used to this state? This must have happened to many other people through time! I struggled to realize. In other cultures this would be easier. My transformation would fit within a context, a frame of attainment... so what if "the structure" itself might prevent my ultimate freedom? Mightn't that be a good thing? My society has a sieve-like catchment system for people like me, where we either loose our grip completely, or have to shut everything unusual out. It had never occurred to me before that point. Structures might be useful in pursuing the ultimate! I'd always used people's structures as a basis for judgment, and philosophical attack. "One measly immutable would do me a heap of good right about now!" I bemoaned. One single rule to someone who'd fought them all his life. How sublime. Stripping away the rules is like removing your car's suspension.... it's a hard fucking ride, and what necessarily follows? Without the comfort in even a few simple laws of physics, I would often find myself in very unnerving situations. One night I was sitting at the top of a tall tree being asked if I thought we could fly. My gut feeling responded yes so quickly, rationality tailgated its caution loudly. At the first moment I knew, in the next I didn't. Could so-rationalized a deterrent stay put, by finding no need to test itself? Fear... "Come on now, who wouldn't want to test an anti-gravity theory?" There's plenty of fables, myths, and legends lending dance to the proposition of flight... but I knew I'd have to reenter that oneness to do it, and quite frankly, that thought scared the shit out of me. Not long after this nocturnal episode, I connected with an old friend of my brother's, a charismatic genius of sorts who appeared to be going through a similar process as mine. We reluctantly exchanged our respective tales of disorientation, and met with mutual understanding. How could we have come to such similar conclusions?! He reduced my tears to laughter with the gravity of his situation that was all-too-close to my own. The story that really broke my funk was his heightened feeling that matter was merely a mastication of mind and energy. He was scientifically preparing to pass one hand through the other, much as I could have jumped from the tree, when one thought stopped him short: "Damon, What are you about to do to your world?! Once you do this, nothing will ever be the same again!" No kidding bro-thr! I clung to that story, recalling it in desperation when living got too dark to grope through. (Don't ask me why it was funny... for us it was too true to do anything but laugh at. Just to know you made it through that state was funny.) All he'd had was his confidence, locked in a downtown dive hotel for two weeks dealing with his madness, his oneness. Confidence, I realized, was the only true ally. It was the only law that survived dissolution. Here, with this man, we talked about our (surprise!) mutual friend who'd gone crazy on his first try of LSD, and I decided I must write this book. When I wasn't spaced out, or panicking, I sought the release of repressions that might have caused this problem. Slowly, as I scoured my memories, a strange thing began to happen. I realized most of my old ways were rebellions, not any essence of me, the individual yearning to get out of the war. With public exposure I had nothing to lose anymore. Without worries of how stupid an act threatened to be, I expressed what was natural, be it art, comments, music or dancing. When my brain didn't trip me up, these results were liberating. I realized I'd been waging battles with society's expectations and "the individual" my whole life, thinking MeMyself&I expressed opinions, when their noise was only the sounds of sword clashing! The course to resolution was simple. I needed to live my intuitions instead of ignoring the voices of self. Self didn't argue. It was not attached to results. I taught this rarely-heard faculty to be shy by ignoring it. I stressed it hopelessly, by claiming I wanted to hear it, but being afraid to hear it. I wangled paper again, writing: "With confidence, I will become that voice, dissolving the artificial separation between it and myself. I need to purge my brain of all the shit it's acquired, other people's ideas, experiences, philosophies, getting down to the core of Brock. That's the essence of my individuality." So I embark on a scourge of cleaning and assessment. It was an examination of the motivations behind my thoughts and actions, that came to depressing, self critical conclusions. I again faced questions of what, if anything, was intact, imputably mine, pure... spiraling downward to unstructured reactions, and oblivion. There's stimuli... the difficulty in casting out the smallest, silliest, media's imposition, let alone the wildly-abstract daily beliefs! It was unbelievable. "What the hell is me?!" I lamented, flinging old notions of healing away like a yo-yo, "And the things I continually proved faulty! How do I get rid of this Brady Bunch media marathon playing over and over in my head?" Once again, I was a war, and I was losing. The only thing to do, was accept the compulsions my thoughts led me to, seeing their acts with amusement while rewriting their scripts. No longer would I look in the mirror from the point of vanity and punish myself for it; now I enjoyed vanity, and the vanity the act procreated. It made life much more pleasant, clearing my self-ingested smoke screens. I was still perpetually "out there", but familiarity was softening its edge (a little) and night was still my domain. Night's mysterious, fuzzy, chroma fit my state more than the surreal, razor-sharpness of the day. In its grasp I took refuge in a thought: Lots of people smoke pot continually to achieve a state I arrived quite naturally at. The excuse let me explore and accept my perceptive predicament. "Hell, they arrive here voluntarily, as a preferred way of being. They're often totally able to cope with whatever comes up...so why shouldn't I be able to?" I pushed the boundaries voluntarily, enjoying their discoveries... how come I'm making this result out to be so 'bad'? I'll bet there's lots of folks whose boundaries are shattered by terrifying outside events. Facing death, cancer, serious injury, loss of a loved one, bankruptcy... the possibilities are endless. Regardless of the route to new perspective, the destination, the collapse to nothingness, must be the same. No wonder suicide is so popular! It's the optimistic choice when inexperience tells you pain may last forever. I thought about a woman I knew who suffered total amnesia, one year later loosing her before-accident fiancee who represented the total recall of her new life. And there was that 22 year old in the LaBoheme bar, penniless, drunk, at her wits end. Four kids, a restraining-ordered husband, no family, sick... no skills... Both of them grasped at the razor's edge, where suicide beckoned through a life gone transparent. I knew neither of these cases were remarkable ones. How many people have felt this around the world?! Lots. Fuckin' scads! I'm going to pull through this. I'm not going to take No for an answer. It's that simple. Other people have made it, so will I. Period. My EXISTENCE tipped either way until I decided that. In-Sanity 4