Party Beasts

[mindless1]

Party Beasts

It's autumn, and all the oranges and yellows of the sun have fallen. I hold your hand because I can't walk down the street. I am unable to move. Flashbacks permeate my brain; I fear that I'm going insane for good this time. I see memories, I relive a million of these theories. I wash down alcohol, pepsi, and DXM. I drift in and out of clothes and Zen. I am working up a tolerance to this BS. I'm gaining influence over the matrix. I'm breaking down the walls of reality; and I am falling every time I find him alone. When will such a strange man be coming home?

I drum my hands upon the cage of resistance. If only it were true. I smashed one thousand theories over a broken piano, screaming, thinking about you. I washed her hair and fell asleep in his eyes. I can't get him out of my mind. But he is only a lover of the man inside.
Inside of all these houses and rooms, they close in on each other. Every empty vein is begging for a hungry mouth to feed. I begin to unveil the possibility that I do not crave what I need. I have fooled myself, how vain of me! I go into another realm, zone in zone out. I dream of escape, and unending insanity. Love made me insane. Why does no one love me?


'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Lewis Carroll

Those voices beckoned her to shrill loudly, chaotically, beneath the evanescent sky. Voices, those terrifying taunting sounds, those identities and with her face came a new persona every day of the year. Her madness was unmatchable to the stars who poked their eyes lifelessly out every night, to see what the world was up to. Maybe Jesus Christ himself heard voices, or maybe he could heal her of them—someday, one day. He'd dip her into that holy water and absolve her of the sins that left her selfless, selfish, confusing. She'd crumble into his arms.

The man of the household kicked the dog, he has just been promoted and now goes to work three times a week instead of one. He had no time to address his cancer, or the dog, or the woman with the cast watching videotapes and dreaming of other lives. Now and then she would stop, and then she'd speak in hisses and whispers. This was not always my mother. Once, not that long ago, she fought against war and its assassins. She did her time in Muscogee jail, barred in between white cells with barely any bedding or food.

They taunted her, the guards, and shook her freedom away. She came home, glowing, but tired. She never protested war again. She felt it was useless, like she hadn't been heard. Now she speaks to ghosts who listen in third person to the woman she longed to become, I have also heard them before. It happened with the car accident,that I already knew my strange man was in a coma.

I heard him, dying. Well, it was true after all. And the first time, they were there screaming at the world to let her out, or me, between the confines of a hospital, where they sanitized me of sanity, and stripped me of my reason. I was there for fighting with them, and breaking a cup. When I was there had pushed the trap doors and told them all I was well, before they diagnosed this as an episode of defiance, of madness, of denial and freaking out.

The doors were all glass, the windows made you invisible. But the mirrors were for the important doctors to see all of you, no matter what disease you had. They would peer in, and justify their malady of panaceas that would never cure you, only dull your senses unto perfect, justifiable behavior.

And the doctor, who wouldn't cure your failing memories, only correct your errors of perception. But they haven't killed the memories, for I wrote the truth on the wall of justice. I am sane, after-all, only living in a deteriorating schizophrenic world. One of my own design, though by force. It's a world I can retreat to, now, that I am safe. One where dreams are reality, but reality isn't really even there. One with cotton candy clouds and a premonitions that come true too often to keep dreaming.

White blood cells, anemia, dementia, lost dogs lost minds lost friends. A pattern in the sky. A voice whispering on the wind, a colorful picture book that is too bright to call anything. I am schizophrenic. I am schizophrenic. I am schizophrenic. So I dull my hues to a perfect combination of blue and purple and yellow. I refrain from remembering, I stop myself from questioning, from asking anything. And I cry silently for the abused animal I have become.

Sometimes I want to smash through that locked door of hers and tell her that I'm still here. Can’t she love me too? Sometimes I just wish she understood what it means to know that you are loved. But it's not her fault, she never caught that bus to freedom and I was whisked into a dreamland. I will imagine she's still real, because she is here still. The mind never really goes anywhere—you can only hold your breath and count to ten. We can only close our eyes until they open again.
Heidi has this look about her as though she truly understands. Maybe that's what scares me about her. In our first session she asked me to write a letter addressed to my mental illness, and after I showed it to her she began to tear up,"You have so much potential, Gabrielle," she claimed. Success! I can now officially get from point A to point C by skipping point B. 0A---0---B----0---C0 Step One: Get Really High. Step Two: Imagine it's the 60's and that the entire universe is your wonderland.
Step three: Laugh while crying and scream while blood pours out your eyes. Watch the lights blink, pretend you know the end's and why's. Because schizophrenia is when you are past the point of no return. Heidi described it as going too deep off the edge; and it's so true. When you tap into God then everything becomes Unified, and that can be frightening indeed. Seeing each person as an element to your survival is a necessary feat. Running from fears is not the way to overcome this dreaded need for contact with the otherside.
Schizophrenia is only disconnection But we are wired to receive the alms of nature. If we never listen, we never learn. Absolution came after Christ was stripped of his garments and made a mockery out of. In the end, Christ found his peace in the arms of all who he left behind. To disintigrate into a babbling lunatic is a difficult task indeed, and requires much consternation. But, we're talking about how Mankind made a magical mess of time, and how we have progressed so individually, while God remains chained, a Plutocracy.

Of course, if you believe that by looking up at the sun you will sneeze, then you are a fool. Look up, the Sun has nothing to do with evolution. I want to use like I have been used, but something is holding me back...I am keeping myself far from the pain.
The dream is hard to escape sometimes. "I had a patient who told me, that while she felt more like herself without her meds, people didn't like the person she would become. She said it was ok "not to be me", because at least people would still like her." Heidi smiled and I smiled back as if I believed that sacrificing my integrity to be socially acceptable made any sense. But, the medication did make me feel like a bouncing cloud full of thoughts bounding off in circles. I had to admit, being a freak might work out n the end after all.
<I3

This story is about western deviancy. It is about modern progress and the barefooted bandit who dares traverse the unknown world between there and beyond. We who are the walking zombies, in a lost world whose chaotic leaps are zig zagging across time. We are a symphony of thoughts and ideas and dreams, and we withhold within ourselves a matrix of impressions. In awe, we are gaping into the unknowns and all whilst the wires of industrialism attempt to strangle us of our fountain of youth.

[mindless1]

It is too difficult to describe schizophrenia. One has to have walked those miles in someone's shoes before they can truly understand the depth of this Western illness. Modern science has failed (and will) time and time again to describe the loss of contact, the parallelization between thoughts, the language gaps, the identity crises that can accompany a delusional state. But, people are afraid of it. They are afraid because they do not see the inner beauty, the illuminating shining truth reflected in the mad souls of our generation.


The mind's wisdom, free will, or poverty? Existential crisis. Overlapping synchronicity. Where is God? Where is the woman dressed in robes, swirling with the colors of a forest's song? Earth. Mother Nature. Gaea. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I heading? Why?

I was fourteen when the world lost all color. The electricity in my brain, beyond space...into a world beyond the eye's imagination. Into a place where dreams had the ability to become reality. Tortured back to perfection, the voices in my head screamed “you're an animal now.”
Voices that only came after endless seconds turned into torturous infinities of isolation. I waited, in my dark cell, I waited to be let out. To be released for my crimes. I waited for sanity. Sanity did not arrive in the bottle of pills I had been assigned. The secret fix to assail my broken mind, hours after the machines measured my heartbeat.

I sat with the toddlers because the adults told me I wasn't like the other teenagers there. I was catatonic because they put me on a plethora of medications, and to fix what? My suicide attempt? It wasn't the medication, the anti-psychotic that caused fear to rip through my insides as I tried to run the car off the road and be free forever of this madness.
I try to remember a life of sanity before schizophrenia. I was two, standing in Giant Eagle staring at a white frosted birthday cake with choo choo trains on it and a big number. Number 3. I felt exquisite, oh to be older. There were balloons on the cake. Red. Green. Yellow. To be tall enough to touch things I wanted to touch, and be in charge at last of my world. And I was bright, I won't lie. I scared people and some were in awe, of my bright blue eyes and intellectual capacity. I can remember as far as infancy, possibly. But those memories are more of the depth of bright colors, thoughts and constant introspection.

My dad took me everywhere around the city in a blue strap on backpack. He took me to a large graveyard, and I remember the big stones and the awe and peace I felt...actually, give me a trigger and I probably remember everything about anything. At seven I had the kind of poetic depth of a writer and I was melancholy with bursts of blissful awe in experiencing the world. Maybe autistic wouldn't be the right word. I soaked up everything, turned thoughts and ideas around constantly. I loved museums and plants and stars and God.

In a coffee shop down the street from my family's house, I'm in a stroller and the adults laugh and smile at what a pretty baby. Little did they know, I would remember. I do not forget things. In fact memories are more than non-physical, they can never truly wiped out. That's because, God has a mind too. I loved my mother. My mother with her passionate ideas and constant beaming compassion for her children.

Whose suicide attempts still perplex me, and by this I mean. I sometimes wonder if they even really happened. I never saw the attempts, I never saw anything but bottles of pills, and then her leaving to go to a hospital where bad things happened and her coming back, and being better, and then...years later it returning. The mania. The bipolar or whatever. I think I got the disease just from watching her the battle, the constant rage and fury held inside, at doctors, at war, at everything wrong in the world.

She was a peace activist, a strong influence too. She was one of the 16 that crossed the line at Fort Benning, Georgia. Mom even flew to Palestine, to teach peace and conflict resolution to children. She was a teacher. When the local school asked for an explanation to the FBI interrogation when she was twenty-one, she threw her hands in the air.
Said if they didn't understand, then it wasn't worth it teaching at their school. Some people have insinuated that she might have been drugged or something to end up like she is now...maybe in jail, who knows? I certainly don't. But I know what I've seen. No one can prove something someone cannot see or wants to see. They have to be ready. The world is not ready to see what I can see. I've blinded myself for their sake. So now time is as timeless as it is meaningless.

Those voices beckoned her to shrill loudly, chaotically, beneath the evanescent sky. Voices, the taunting voices wearing strange identities and with a new persona for every day of the year. Her madness was unmatchable to the stars who poked their eyes lifelessly out every night, to see what the world was up to. Maybe Jesus Christ himself heard voices, or maybe he could heal her of them—someday, one day. He'd dip her into that holy water and absolve her of the sins that left her selfless, selfish, confusing. She'd crumble into his arms.

The man of the household kicked the dog, he has just been promoted and now goes to work three times a week instead of one. He had no time to address his cancer, or the dog, or the woman with the cast watching videotapes and dreaming of other lives. Now and then she would stop, and then she'd speak in hisses and whispers. This was not always my mother. Once, not that long ago, she fought against war and its assassins. She did her time in Muscogee jail, barred in between white cells with barely any bedding or food.

They taunted her, the guards, and shook her freedom away. She came home, glowing, but tired. She never protested war again. She felt it was useless, like she hadn't been heard. Now she speaks to ghosts who listen in third person to the woman she longed to become.
I have also heard voices once or twice before. It happened with the car accident, that I already knew a strange man was in a coma. I heard him, dying. Well, it was true after all. And the first time, they were there screaming at the world to let her out, or me, between the confines of a brick trap door hospital, where they sanitized me of sanity, and stripped me of my reason. I was there for fighting with them, and breaking a cup. When I was there had pushed the trap doors and told them all I was well, before they diagnosed this as an episode of defiance, of madness, of denial and freaking out.

The doors were all glass, the windows made you invisible. But the mirrors were for the important doctors to see all of you, no matter what disease you had. They would peer in, and justify their malady of panaceas that would never cure you, only dull your senses unto perfect, justifiable behavior.
And the doctor, who wouldn't cure your failing memories, only correct your errors of perception. But they haven't killed the memories, for I wrote the truth on the wall of justice. I am sane, after-all, only living in a deteriorating schizophrenic world. One of my own design, though by force. It's a world I can retreat to, now, that I am safe. One where dreams are reality, but reality isn't really even there. One with cotton candy clouds and a premonitions that come true too often to keep dreaming.

White blood cells, anemia, dementia, lost dogs lost minds lost friends. A pattern in the sky. A voice whispering on the wind, a colorful picture book that is too bright to call anything. I am schizophrenic. I am schizophrenic. I am a schizophrenic. I dull my hues to a perfect combination of blue and purple and yellow. I refrain from remembering, I stop myself from questioning, from asking anything. And I cry silently for the abused animal I have become. You will never know the true me, she's hidden beneath layers of darkness.

I remember her how she was once before this madness, she was full of bright-eyed sunlight and open to things that no one else was aware of. As a child I colored rainbows that laughed and together we vanished into the horizon.

She hands me a tearful letter, "You are my sunshine, my schizophrenic sunshine,”

[AshleyO]

Originally Posted by mindless1

Those voices beckoned her to shrill loudly, chaotically, beneath the evanescent sky. Voices, those terrifying taunting sounds, those identities and with her face came a new persona every day of the year. Her madness was unmatchable to the stars who poked their eyes lifelessly out every night, to see what the world was up to. Maybe Jesus Christ himself heard voices, or maybe he could heal her of them—someday, one day. He'd dip her into that holy water and absolve her of the sins that left her selfless, selfish, confusing. She'd crumble into his arms.

I haven't read all of this because I'm usually pretty dismissive of what you write. But I couldn't help but say something about this part.

The first sentence is a cliche' mess. It just is; but that's to be expected. Your stuff is usually cliche'.

The second sentence is almost interesting. I would have written it differently because you're still invoking a lot of cliched language. Every time you write something, it's always terrifying, dark, and awful; it gets old. I don't doubt your sincerity, but I doubt your dimensions as a writer. I do like that you used "identities". That's an interesting word but then you don't really play with it. There's power in that word, it can be pretty heavy, but then you don't earn it with the last half of the sentence and the first half basically gets way-leyed(sp) by the word. I can't even bother to remember the first part of that sentence because the "identities" word was really interesting.

The third sentence is kind of dumb. You're telling us that she's crazy and for some reason, not showing us, and this madness is supposed to contest with stars. You then go on to equate stars as being "lifeless" and yet again, that's a cliche that isn't even earned. I'm not convinced that stars are lifeless and you haven't really given us much reason to believe that they are. I would recommend changing "lifelessly" into something we wouldn't expect you to use like... "aloof", "benign", "casually". Anything would technically be better.

But the last bit of this paragraph was actually pretty good for a few reasons. We actually get a peek into your character's thoughts. She's not really religious and she's not really that spiritual, but we get a sense that she may be interested in an easy way out by embracing anything that could absolve her of her problems; even fantasies. This is good. The last couple of lines, we learn a lot about her and I kind of wish that the rest of your story would be like this; though I have no confidence that it is. The only thing I can say about it that bothers me is that you need an "and" in the last sentence or at least a semi-colon. Your grammar use there was a bit on the awkward side but that's easily fixed.

You're seeming to slowly get over the whole "goth" thing and the more you move away from that, the better you're going to be.