OK...let's do a sanity check, shall we? Bipolor brother has stepped up his 2nd Coming of Christ emails. Like homing pigeons, they come back to roost with me. Sometimes, it's like the 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon but it usually only takes a daisy chain of 2 to 3 friends for them to get routed to my "in" box. They are mostly the same long diatribe but there's more urgency to the language these days. Waiting on God to fulfill your grand destiny can be so tiresome. But he's God...what are you going to do?
My son is back. He's convinced that he has cancer. He's even diagnosed his stage. It's 3. Three is a nice round number. We had a biopsy done on a lump in his neck and since then, he's become Dr. Google, M.D. This is very real to him. He's just made his 2nd trip in a month to the ER, where they always patiently explain what "emergency" actually means. I've told him that they really prefer car wrecks and heart attacks. But I guess the time passes more quickly - all 9 hours of it - when your health becomes the center of attention to more than just you. How disappointed will he be if this latest round of medical roulette lands on "benign." It becomes hard to justify going through all 5 stages of grief every hour for a week. Yeah. He has never been much for suffering in silence.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Mom's full of sh*t
My son and I are "estranged" as of 5 days ago. We have a rocky history, so this is not surprising.
He is a tortured soul and seems to be most satisfied when all others in his vicinity are also tortured. His misery knows no bounds.
I have unorthodox beliefs. I visit psychics. I read Tarot. I think it's just as legitimate as Tom Cruise's religion, if not more. When people live in anxiety and fear, take drugs for relief, refuse to take responsibility for their actions, I tend to think they've got some kind of cosmic crap to work out. When you live with them, it doesn't so much matter if it's from this life or the last one. You just hope like hell that they can work it out.
All my beliefs don't matter and all my prayers to any cosmic being don't change anything when the object of my concern is in his depths of unhappiness. He will describe his white middle-class childhood in terms so Dicksonian that I don't recognize it. I should probably stop opening emails with titles like "Mom's full of sh*t." I keep looking for a daisy to struggle up from his crap.
He is a tortured soul and seems to be most satisfied when all others in his vicinity are also tortured. His misery knows no bounds.
I have unorthodox beliefs. I visit psychics. I read Tarot. I think it's just as legitimate as Tom Cruise's religion, if not more. When people live in anxiety and fear, take drugs for relief, refuse to take responsibility for their actions, I tend to think they've got some kind of cosmic crap to work out. When you live with them, it doesn't so much matter if it's from this life or the last one. You just hope like hell that they can work it out.
All my beliefs don't matter and all my prayers to any cosmic being don't change anything when the object of my concern is in his depths of unhappiness. He will describe his white middle-class childhood in terms so Dicksonian that I don't recognize it. I should probably stop opening emails with titles like "Mom's full of sh*t." I keep looking for a daisy to struggle up from his crap.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Field Pea Salad and Jesus
Today, I took my bipolar brother to my other non bipolar brother's restaurant. They're closed on Sunday. The idea was that we'd have the place all to ourselves. Over delicious field pea and fresh tomato salad, we carefully explained that people who truly believe that you're the second coming of Christ don't generally take out a restraining order to keep you away (with the possible exceptions being maybe a Hindu or a Buddhist or persons of the Jewish faith). I believe we made some in-roads but it's hard to know for certain. My bipolar brother has been known to nod knowingly, as he secretly wonders if Tom Cruise will abandon L. Ron Hubbard and follow him instead. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Chihuahua Bites
The risk of having a family, especially a big family, is that on any given day, one or more of them will be "off balance." For the past few years, one of my brothers has been hogging that territory and even bought property there. To be fair, he has a legit diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He's not my first experience with that, but he does have the distinction of being the first one I know who believes he's the Second Coming of Christ (or as he likes to sign his title "SC of C"). Egos abound and flourish in my family, but as far as I know, he's the first one to take it to this level.
He's been in "the system." He's medicated. That stabilized his bouts of "let's drive across the country in two days without stopping to eat, sleep, or pee," but it did nothing at all for his "SC of C" syndrome. But as his state-provided team of psych experts will tell you, there are lots of functioning delusional people out there who seem just fine as long as you don't ask questions that probe their psyche. When properly medicated, some people with delusions learn to keep it to themselves - mostly.
In his properly medicated state, I traveled with him to California to help him find an apartment.
We saw a variety of overpriced run-down places before he became obsessed with a sinus infection that required medical attention. After being misdirected twice, we ended up in a ratty-ass clinic in Oakland where drug addicts were stumbling around like Extras in "Night of the Living Dead" and our rental car was the shiniest thing on the block except for a stolen grocery cart. After two hours of being the token white people in the waiting room, we found out that (a) the doctor had left the building, (b) he would NOT be coming back after lunch, (c) my brother has a really hard time filling out a pound of paperwork, and (d) he was not eligible for a Medi-Cal card without an address which (e) we didn't have because our apartment hunting had come to road-kill standstill due to his runny nose.
The good news was that, when we emerged, we still had all 4 hubcaps.
After 3 days of apartment-hunting and clinic-hopping, we had one happy apartment prospect in Temescal but apartment manager "Nick" wouldn't call me back. Maybe it was my brother's blank stare while I asked the functional questions about utilities. Maybe it was my brother's confession about his 2005 bankruptcy. Maybe I reminded Nick of his mother, so he wasn't going to call back even while I was offering to wave 3 months rent and a hefty deposit under his nose. Who knows? Ultimately, our pleas for a return call, fax, or email accumulated in the black hole of Nick's voice mail.
At the end of the trip, as we dragged our jet-lagged butts back into a 92-degree Atlanta evening, all I had to show for it were my toes. My BBF Berkeley friend Whit took pity on my grimy feet of the sainted sister pilgrimage and treated me to a really thorough pedicure. I chose the most defiant glow-in-the-dark orange-red on the shelf, "Chihuahua Bites." It's more than a color. It's a synopsis, a summary, a whole damn treatise.
He's been in "the system." He's medicated. That stabilized his bouts of "let's drive across the country in two days without stopping to eat, sleep, or pee," but it did nothing at all for his "SC of C" syndrome. But as his state-provided team of psych experts will tell you, there are lots of functioning delusional people out there who seem just fine as long as you don't ask questions that probe their psyche. When properly medicated, some people with delusions learn to keep it to themselves - mostly.
In his properly medicated state, I traveled with him to California to help him find an apartment.
We saw a variety of overpriced run-down places before he became obsessed with a sinus infection that required medical attention. After being misdirected twice, we ended up in a ratty-ass clinic in Oakland where drug addicts were stumbling around like Extras in "Night of the Living Dead" and our rental car was the shiniest thing on the block except for a stolen grocery cart. After two hours of being the token white people in the waiting room, we found out that (a) the doctor had left the building, (b) he would NOT be coming back after lunch, (c) my brother has a really hard time filling out a pound of paperwork, and (d) he was not eligible for a Medi-Cal card without an address which (e) we didn't have because our apartment hunting had come to road-kill standstill due to his runny nose.
The good news was that, when we emerged, we still had all 4 hubcaps.
After 3 days of apartment-hunting and clinic-hopping, we had one happy apartment prospect in Temescal but apartment manager "Nick" wouldn't call me back. Maybe it was my brother's blank stare while I asked the functional questions about utilities. Maybe it was my brother's confession about his 2005 bankruptcy. Maybe I reminded Nick of his mother, so he wasn't going to call back even while I was offering to wave 3 months rent and a hefty deposit under his nose. Who knows? Ultimately, our pleas for a return call, fax, or email accumulated in the black hole of Nick's voice mail.
At the end of the trip, as we dragged our jet-lagged butts back into a 92-degree Atlanta evening, all I had to show for it were my toes. My BBF Berkeley friend Whit took pity on my grimy feet of the sainted sister pilgrimage and treated me to a really thorough pedicure. I chose the most defiant glow-in-the-dark orange-red on the shelf, "Chihuahua Bites." It's more than a color. It's a synopsis, a summary, a whole damn treatise.
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