Day Eight

Portage La Prairie, 2510Portage Ave, 391 Balmoral

Suicide can be Fleeting

Back from the East Coast I had no plan as to what was to come next… Long ago I wanted to write a book, but was having fun with poetry. I stuck with that and churned out 5-10 poems a day some days… My record was 12 Haiku and 5 one page poems in a sitting. Quit the feat I though to myself as I grew more and more distant to the society around me. I thought the voices were bad enough, but now I wasn’t working… My last job had been Karl’s Smoke Shop on Long Plains. Now I couldn’t even bear to go outside and see the normal people like Max or Tommy the groundskeepers and maintenance men at the trailer court… I didn’t want to cut the grass as I thought there was a chance that insects would attract amphibians like salamanders or snakes… LOL.

I talked to my voices regularly… Beelzebub… Moloch… and Lucifer as I came to know the third… Although Lucifer was silent most of the time and pulled the strings. They fucked me up… My head that is and I couldn’t cook some times… but I still would manage. Living high on life had stopped… I subsisted off of my parents for a year and a half while in that condition still thinking my life would right itself… I refused help… I refused to use EI… J’ai Refuser. I thought that I was normal and the voices would just go away… All the while I got more and more violent… I started to punch walls… I started to stab furniture. I created a truth test for the voices.

When they told me stuff I doubted I’d stab my couch with a steak knife… If the truth was told the knife wouldn’t penetrate the couch… If not… Stab! I broke many a knife that way… Many more voices had figured out how to get to me… I wasn’t sure how… SHUT THE FUCK UP became a thing… I’d scream it at the top of my lungs… People tried to write through me to prove I wasn’t typing my own pieces of poetry…I told them to FUCK THEMSELVES TOO! I hated people at least the ones who screwed me up. During this fruitful time for poetry I wrote a book called Fucked Up ASCII.

It was about how society punishes people with mental illness and creates more problems then solutions… A needle in the fucking arm woulda been better… Like a stray dog. An jolt from the electric chair mighta felt kind after Bowes for that year and a half… I HATED PEOPLE. Still I prayed and meditated that things would change… Not sure how… Not sure why… Still believing that I could write a book… A full novel I wrote… Wrote… Wrote… Finally I came up with the idea that I could go to school to further that goal… And I registered for the University of Winnipeg… Stupid fucker that I was.

Good did come out of it though… I went to the Grace and ate soup and sandwich for seven countless and timeless hours till the shrink on call took me in… My mother wouldn’t leave… I was trapped into admitting I was crazy for the first time… I hated it… STIGMA… WEAKNESS!!! COWARD!!!! Not really but that’s how it felt. I was put on pills that grow female breasts and gained 10,000 pounds of blubber… Like a baby walrus growing up… They did nothing for me… NOTHING! I still heard voices for a long time… Can’t remember what they wanted… they were different back then… They jsut talked to me and distracted me… I can thank my parentsfor providing shelter when it couldn’t go on any more… GOOD SHELTER!

I was the only one in my room… Spiritually I remember.. I could close the door and keep the voices out… And I succeeded at school… I passed the first year and learned a great deal in courses like Astronomy, Intro to English, Rhetoric, and Intro to Criminal Justice… I thought I could make it the way I was going… NOPE! I moved out to my own apartment and did quite well fro a while… year and a half about… then crashed as the voices took hold… I often wonder how the environment changed seemingly over night??? I could no longer sleep in my bed… Couldn’t look pout for the cat… Couldn’t cook and crashed… Dropped school and quit my job as ESSO.

Off to the Funny Farm… HE HO… Off to Napoleon and butterfly nets I did go… I was committed to Grace Hospital’s One North. Still taking the boob growth serum I hated desperately I was there for a week and felt lost in space… Then I got out and had to rethink life… Doctor agreed to EI medical temp for 14 weeks. When that ran out I got a security job with SRG and went to the Millennium Library as a guard till the south entrance closed at thanksgiving. After that I was reassigned to 411 Cumberland and worked midnights five days a week… Finally full time.

I worked five days a week and wrote 7 days a week till I had a rough draft of my novel complete… SWEET!!!!!! A NOVEL!!!! A NOVEL IDEA!!! LOL!!! CRAZY FUCKING ROB HAS A NOVEL!!!!! I again went nuts at work and couldn’t sleep or eat and wasn’t looking out for the cat again… One week I slept 1 hour a day and still worked five 8hour shifts… I don;t know how but the sleep was even cat napping not a deep slumber. I quit and again found governmental aid… This time EIA disability till CPP Disability kicked in, a six month approval process. I also was approved for Rent Assist and I could at least afford to stay in my home… What a relief that was.