The Lost Decade – Part Four – More than a little crazy

Soon after moving into apartment #127 I began to show the type symptoms of mental collapse you might expect from someone in my situation. The woman who could have and should have been my wife and mother of my child, Gloria, had told me she had suffered a nervous breakdown several years before. Since she chose Death, perhaps interpreting the twelfth chapter of Revelations to be her, it might make sense I would follow my twin flame down the path to a nervous breakdown. All of the influences, real and preternatural and my reactions to them led to some bizarre behavior on my account.

One particular episode that was especially bizarre involved me assaulting the statues of mammoths at the La Brea Tar Pits with a slingshot. I armed myself with a shield, which I devised out of a round plastic snow sled I had painted with spray paint concentric circles. I had bought a modern slingshot with metal pellets. I wanted the mammoths moved. After I shot them with about ten shots security guards came out to stop me. After a short, but very plaintive explanation I told them the statue tableau was like watching a frozen tragedy. Soon after that, I walked the short distance back to my apartment.

Perhaps the last straw for my psyche was understanding that my enemies could not be stopped from using my invention which lead me to smoke pot without respite. One night I got up off the couch after taking a very large hit, convulsed and passed out. It was not the first time this happened: near the end of my pot smoking days I often had seizures after taking a hit.

On this particular night I passed out on the floor just on the edge of my bedroom’s entrance way. When I awoke, I felt disoriented and was unsure of how long I had been unconscious. I was very agitated and afraid of what I would do next. I decided to go to the hospital and check myself in for observation. The wait to see a doctor took a long time. When my patience with the delay could stand it no longer, I took my sport sack and started to choke myself with it. That got people’s attention and doctors took me in immediately. I unloaded what was bothering me, perhaps exaggerating a bit, and was soon in an isolated chamber at the Thalian’s clinic at Cedars-Sinai hospital. After an overnight rest in the isolated room I was released to the rest of the clinic’s population. I met a variety of men and women there who suffered from a wide array of illnesses; some relatively temporary and others more long-lasting. After a few days the rest of my family came to visit me there. I saw some things there I could repeat, but to avoid sounding like a “name dropper” I will refrain from doing so.

What I learned during my week’s stay was that overall the aim of the staff is to move people out of there as soon as possible. We speak with a counselor every day and get together as a group and end the meetings with the Serenity Prayer. As soon as the staff believes you have “someplace to go” and can care for yourself reasonably well they will release you. If you can imagine a very high-class, coed version of “Cuckoo’s Nest” then you have an idea of what that environment is like. In the one week there I was able to get myself reasonably grounded again, ran up a substantial bill that would be mostly covered by health insurance, and an appreciation of the wide causes that send people to such a place. I make some good contact with people there that did not extend past the door once I left. I did not stop using drugs once I left and my problems were not even close to being solved but I was back at the battle after this strange bit of “rest and relaxation.”