I’m still slightly off guard about the idea that society has many people who don’t believe that mental illness is real – or that if it real, that it affects people so dramatically in their daily lives. The criminal case I was involved in a few weeks ago still echoes in my mind. Last night, I woke up with the remnants of dreams about it slipping away from me. I’m still astonished that people who think mental illness might not be ‘real’ were involved in a jury case that was predicated on the concept of mental illness. Whether it is a question of mental health assistance or counseling, disability assistance for those who need it, or being judged from the rational perspective of mental health issues, I am having a problem with those people around us who can’t even agree that it’s a real issue that affects all of us. I wish that anyone who needed it could get substance abuse help or mental health treatment without any conditions or limitations. What makes the denial such a problem is that most of those who don’t think it’s real know they sound ridiculous when they say it – so they whisper it or don’t admit it at all, even while they are voting, sitting on a jury, or making decisions that affect treatment for those who suffer. It’s likely that you are reading this and thinking that none of your friends or family believes that mental illness isn’t real. I promise you that you do and they do.
All posts by X Teri
A Colorful Alternative
As I look out upon the sheer magnitude of weird and inspirational, I laugh and rejoice when I see people who have the same ideas that streak through my mind. A Canadian man named Jeff Janzen lost his son in an auto accident in 2012. His son was an artist, while Jeff works with cars. Jeff spent a while fixing his son’s car and then painting in black. He and some friends signed the hood in celebration – and then the stroke of genius hit him. The car now has 4,000+ signatures and messages adorning it, from people all over the world. People hear his story and share theirs. It is an incredible way to carry forth a person’s memory.
I’ve written before about how interesting I think our lives and cars would be if we could paint them all in chalkboard paint – or paint to allow friends and strangers to write on our vehicles. Not only would it break our ridiculous obsession with the superficial appearance of our vehicles, but might inspire everyone to think more creatively.
Likewise, I keep meaning to start another signature wall inside my house or garage. Each time someone visits, I could ask them to write their name or the date. In no time, the wall would be a testament to a shared life and something noteworthy. I don’t know if you can picture in your mind how glorious something like this could turn out to be. Imagine if your grandparents had done this starting when they bought their first house. It would now be filled with personal memories for the world to see.
In time, of course, time and circumstance will eventually erode everything around us. But for these brief butterfly moments that delight us, the world would be a brighter place.
Not What You Expected
I got into a knife fight. As you know, the “k” in “knife” is silent – but the screams certainly weren’t.
(The above phonetics reminder was brought to you by the We Need to Retire Now Teacher’s Alliance.)
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You’ve already lost – I’ve won ten thousand, two hundred and thirty consecutive games.
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The people who invented Silly String were angrily thrown out of the first meeting to sell it, as the potential marketer got sprayed unexpectedly during a demonstration, and didn’t respond kindly. Not only was Silly String originally created to act as a spray-on cast for broken bones, but it also came about accidentally after the inventors experimented with different nozzles to discharge it. I’m telling you all this in anticipation of a Trump campaign for President. Silly String is a goofy and fun invention, but it can also burn your eyes out of their sockets if you discharge it near an open flame. Trump is no different. Ignore him at your peril. (I wrote this in response to a request to make a political analogy by being educationally absurd. I give myself a B+ for this one.)
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If I’m ever inside a bank, I hope there is a robbery. I’m going to act as if I’m one of the robbers just to piss them off. It will be sort of like “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” Imagine if I run out with them and jump in the getaway car and call Shotgun. I might end up in prison, but what a great story!
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One of the vilest conversations I ever had in my life was with a Tyson plant manager in the late 80s. I felt so sorry for him – and told him so, telling him I wished he had more years ahead of him to remember the feeling he thought of as superiority turning into the bitter memory of vinegar. He became literally outraged that a human castaway like me (in his opinion) would dare feel compassion for him, lord of his apparent realm. I think about that encounter more often than I used to. Honestly, I think my words struck him like an actual curse.
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I imagine that having zebra-print carpet could be fun, especially if an actual zebra were standing on it when the carpet cleaners show up.
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I wish more people were cannibals. I don’t want innocent people to get hurt, of course, but things would be much more interesting around here. (random thought…)
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Legal disclaimer: This is a joke… Trump’s presidency will result in the first-ever would-be assassin shooting HIMSELF outside the White House.
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Don’t Put Me On Your Email List…
I’m getting more frequent and accidental calls for someone at Tyson. The urge to start helping these people is almost overwhelming. It’s like free entertainment.
A few years ago, Dawn and I bought decorative window film for a door glass. Due to a problem, I e-mailed the company, after carefully investigating and finding an email instead of a phone number. Through some accident of their own, I started getting included in their very private internal email chains. After writing them a couple of times (to inform them what was going on and telling them there was some sort of mix-up), I started participating in the emails, providing specifics that I created from thin air. And a couple of them started answering ME, even though the email was clearly under my real name and in no way resembled theirs. In one scenario, I gave them advice on endcap displays in a large home improvement chain; during another, my input involved some sort of scanner implementation that I knew nothing about – but nevertheless offered some solidly imagined solutions. In the last, email, I also recommended that Bob be left out of the display design, given the mess he had created before. Naturally, I didn’t even know whether the company I was getting emails from even employed someone named Bob. If they did, I giggled at the idea that a nonexistent employee like me might have made his coworkers wonder whether he might be doing a bad job.
Pictures below not related to above post.
Why Think?
A satirical nugget of truth I wrote for someone needing anecdotal evidence. If you spew it, you don’t notice it coming or going.
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Shielding my eyes from the onslaught of the descending summer sun, I ran as fast as my middle-aged body would grudgingly allow, my arms pistoning in an obscure pantomime of speed. As I neared the open sliding door, I dove into the sleek helicopter, hands stretched in front of me. A button ripped off the collar of my shirt as I skidded across the soft rubbery floor. I sat up, grabbing the lanyard hook next to the open door, looking down and to my left as the helicopter rapidly lifted away from the parking lot. Lines and arrows on the pavement blurred quickly, and passersby shrank rapidly to the size of toy figurines below. Within seconds, I was several hundred feet above the ground and the whirling ferocity of the helices of the helicopter finally reached my ears, the adrenaline-fueled deafness relenting only slightly. I smelled the sea, calling me forward on the winds that now swished across my smiling face. I knew that a bonfire would soon be ferociously consuming a mountainous array of driftwood along a nameless beach, unknown faces surrounding the ember-laden air near it, as if giving homage to an ancient god. So it begins, so it begins.
(I wrote this in an attempt to accurately describe one of those crazy dreams that possessed me around 3 a.m. this morning – the kind that most love having but detest hearing about from others. I woke up feeling as if I had just dived inside the helicopter and as if there were such a beach waiting beneath the dusky sky. Reluctantly, I went about my day, waiting for the feeling of ‘next,’ the anticipation of a thing to come, to dissipate. Like an impending sneeze in the back of my nose, the tickle of the dream left me disjointed.)
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“The rumors of his demise are greatly exaggerated but the likelihood of such isn’t.” – X (My apologies if this is too dark.)
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“Trump is pro-gun, as he is always shooting off his mouth.” -X
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“Be your own boss,” they advise me. I’d rather be the boss of my boss for fifteen seconds. Please, dear Aladdin, lend me your lamp that I may make it so.
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My publicist messed up badly. It wasn’t until after the ceremony they told me it was a eulogy rather than a motivational speech. But I totally killed it, so to speak.
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I knew my friends and I probably weren’t going to finish our first movie, mainly because we are lazy. So lazy, in fact, that every time we’d start a scene, the director would grab the megaphone and yell, “Nonaction!”
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Typically Atypical
If you come into work early, no one ever notices.
If you leave early, everyone thinks you’re a slacker. – Reddit
Sincerely, (Someone who is at work before you even think of hitting ‘snooze.’)
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Yesterday, I put my foot in my mouth on purpose, just to demonstrate that hypocrisy has its limits, only to find that the hypocrites own about 400 shoes.
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Constantly overheard quote at work: “At ____________, we are family.” If that is the case, you won’t mind if we pop open a few cold ones and proceed to scream at each other about things we did to each other 10 years ago?
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“Faith is knowing that the stairs are still there at 4 a.m. Experience is not running down them three at a time in the dark. Wisdom is not pointing at your spouse at the bottom of the stairs and laughing.” – X
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“You can choose your own opinion, but not your own facts.” The contradiction of this cliché is what leads so many not only to walk the path of willful ignorance, but to prance along its way. Or, as a scholar might say, “The reason it smells like flowers to you is because you are mowing your neighbor’s petunias.”
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That moment of sublime perverse celebration; seeing the blue sky above and knowing that although you might not be here in 10 years to see it, someone else will gaze up and notice.
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Saturday Night Fight = Arkansas Theater
(Just asking, after a friend posted about yet another brawl where she lives.)
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When you’re hungry, you hear weird things. Watching HGTV – and I was certain the voiceover person said they were buying a property on the island of Santa Marinara.
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Here I am again, wishing I had been a pro football player; at least with a history of concussions, all of this nonsense might seem more reasonable – or I could forget between days.
(A brief commentary on a Monday workday…)
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The most accurate and stupidest picture I’ve yet created. Unfortunately, not only is the circus mine, but I’m one of the monkeys. Millions of years of evolution has led us to these ill-devised systems that mulch us like discarded leaves.
(No matter how weird your friends are, I’m fairly certain that none of them have made a picture as ridiculous as this one.)
Thursday de Almost Friday
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Normal moved out of my house – and I kicked it in the butt as it tried to leave gracefully. Me and weird are now sitting comfortably on the couch.
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Mary had a little lamb, but after a while, she also had a really dirty carpet.
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They said a storm was brewing. I hope it’s not decaffeinated. (My apology to yet another cliché…)
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I hope that if a SWAT team ever breaks into my house to arrest me that I am on the toilet. That way, it will be awkward for all of us – and not just me.
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With apologies: That awkward moment when you look at a picture of a posing couple and momentarily think “Is that a before-and-after picture?”
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The secret to musical harmony is to hear the other notes even when the trumpets fall silent. The secret to feeling connected in life is to picture the orchestra when all you see is an empty podium.
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“I wrote a letter to all my fans. It was returned as undeliverable.”
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We have a budding tradition at my house: as the likelihood of visitors increases, my wife begins the primarily-female ritual of “straightening up,” which now leads me to hang underwear on the front door hook outside. Invariably, everyone’s first reaction is now one of “Ha, ha – Look, there’s underwear on the door!” – and subsequently forget to measure the apparent dust found everywhere. I’m considering buying a colorful assortment of undies to better match the occasion. (In this picture, you can see our faithful cat, seated, awaiting n̶e̶w̶ ̶v̶i̶c̶t̶i̶m̶s̶ new visitors to the house.)
If enough people show interest, this might be something I could market to husbands/boyfriends, and other idiots.
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A Possible Story to Frighten
(This is a story I wrote for a friend of mine. Some of it is true, some of it is embellishment to amuse and delight him.)
I am telling you this story so that you can better understand Jay Hill. Like all interesting people, he has some history that he keeps well-guarded; not just from fear of being judged, but as a sort of superstitious protection. Sometimes, giving words to fears grants them life.
Years ago, Jay lived in a house that had been abandoned for 13 years. A new owner spent the minimum necessary to get it habitable again. Jay’s family rented it for much less than they would have paid anywhere else.
The lady who previously owned the house, Marjorie Wilson, died under suspicious circumstances. Even though the police investigated the adult children of Marjorie twice for suspected foul play, they could never bring charges. Within a year, both of Mrs. Wilson’s children disappeared after having last been seen inside the residence. You might be able to google the mysterious death, as a semi-famous investigator spent months trying to unravel the mystery. He wrote a story for the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette – and that story was later loosely used to make a movie. The house no longer exists, having been torn down two years after Jay moved out. It was once known as the Fuller House, sitting slightly off West Center Street.
Jay’s family had lived in the house for only about two weeks when he began to experience sleepless nights, imagining a figure at the foot of his bed. He would wake suddenly, thinking he could feel fingers slide across his feet. If he covered his head with a blanket, he could hear a female voice, softly asking him to go downstairs. Jay’s sister teased him mercilessly about it, accusing him of claiming there was a ghost in his room in order to get more attention. After a month in the house, Jay began to feel himself being pulled in the direction of the windowless wall on the East side of the house. He would wake up, hearing the irritated female figure demanding that he get up and leave with her. In two months, Jay began sneaking out of bed and sleeping inside one of the two closets in the bedroom, curled up with his feet bracing against the door. He could hear the ghostly figure scratching relentlessly. No one else in the house could see or hear any of it, which only worsened Jay’s already frazzled composure. He lost several pounds and his hair started falling out around his temples.
A school counselor pulled Jay aside and talked to him privately. Even though she didn’t believe that Jay was actually being visited by ghosts, she recommended that he wake himself up during these dreams and imagined visits. She was certain Jay was imagining it all, due to some family or personal issue that was robbing him of his ability to sleep deeply.
On April 15th, Jay awoke, feeling a face within inches of his. He was inside the closet with the door closed. He realized he could hear a low, guttural voice repeating, “We must go.” Since Jay half-believed he had been imagining it all, he reached up to pass his hand had through the empty air above him in the musty closet. And touched a face, one covered in what felt like small bristly hair.
Just as Jay started to scream in terror, the apparition grabbed his arm and took him threw the wall, into the back room used for storage. Stunned, Jay curled himself into a tight ball and rocked himself.
Before he knew how much time had passed, he woke up, feeling his sister shaking him and asking, “What are doing sleeping on the floor back here?” Jay told her the story. She of course laughed and teased him again.
Twice afterwards, Jay witnessed the female apparition walking past open doors. Once she looked his in direction and seemed to say “Some day.” Jay spent every night doing anything possible to prevent himself from falling asleep.
Before Jay could lose his sanity totally, his family had to move again, as a developer had bought the property for cash and wanted it so quickly that he paid the first and last month rent on an apartment on the other side of 6th Street.
For those of you who know Jay, he might have told you this childhood story and about the woman visitor in the Fuller House. I think he honestly sleeps with one eye open some nights, wondering if the ghost would follow through on her promise to visit him again. I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t half the reason he rents instead of buying a house.
Until this morning, I hadn’t thought about his old story for at least 10 years. He walked up to me, cup of coffee in hand, frazzled and nervous. He told me that he had awoke last night, after dreaming a female ghostly form had walked past a door in his apartment. Jay told me he lunged at it and instead of disappearing or recoiling that the ghost had grabbed him – and dragged him through a wall. Jay said he awoke to the feel of the claw-like fingers on his arm, the sensation of literally having just went through a solid wall still echoing in his body, his heart pounding like a symphony of hammers.
I could see it in his eyes. The fear. The dread. But I joked, trying to relieve the discomfort of what he was probably really thinking. That’s what people do when they are truly afraid.
The apparition isn’t waiting for him to be in a house. I think it’s started again.
I hope that Jay gets a good night’s sleep and walks into work tomorrow, tired but still there. Because I think I might be the one who loses my mind if Jay doesn’t call in and then doesn’t show up to work. I’m afraid that if I visit his apartment, I might find it to be perfectly empty, with no clue as to where Jay might be. Or worse, hear a small female voice asking me to come downstairs.
Jury Duty Aftermath
As I predicted, the jury pool for the trial of Samuel Robert Hill in Washington County, Arkansas ignored his mental illness defense and threw the book at him.
Whether he was really mentally ill isn’t something I can be certain of, as I didn’t get to hear the evidence that the jury heard during trial. On the other hand, I didn’t enter the jury process with a predisposed belief that mental illness isn’t a ‘real’ thing, either, or that even though the law says juries must take them into account, that mental illness should never be used to defend someone – and if it is, it should be ignored. Also, while I didn’t hear the evidence in the same way as the jury did, I did read it, including many things which were kept away from the jury during the trial. In some ways, I had a more complete picture and better information than they did. That’s how trials, work, though. The distinction in my case is that I heard some of the potential jurors say they didn’t believe in mental illness and that it can’t be used to mitigate a crime or its punishment. While I was dismissed for some unknown reason, citizens were left to serve on the jury who legally didn’t qualify, given their beliefs and biases about mental illness. Maybe the opposing psychiatrists had different levels of credibility or the defendant’s mother was a better witness than her sister, who testified for the defendant. Truth be told, though, none of it really mattered if enough mental illness-deniers got seated on the jury. Most of them wouldn’t admit they believe such things, as it sounds stupid to admit, just as bigots know they can’t claim that certain minorities are better at sports or that some are just angrier people – they believe it in their hearts but have been conditioned to conceal these bigoted or stereotypical ideas from everyone else.
I know that there are people who don’t believe in mental illness, people who think such sufferers can just ‘snap out it,’ or just get busy to distract themselves. It’s almost insurmountable to get past that kind of attitude in people. It’s not based on evidence or science, so argument and reason won’t get you around their mental block.
Likewise, many of those in the jury pool said that they were certain that if a defendant didn’t get on the stand, that this indicated either deceit or outright guilt. Despite the judge and the defense pointing out that this attitude was not acceptable if you were going to serve on a jury, several of those people also remained and undoubtedly served on the jury. Deciding to not testify is a fundamental right in criminal trials. It’s a foundation of our system. Especially if a defendant’s case rests on the idea that he or she is mentally ill, it is ludicrous to hold that against them. The law is clear: you can’t hold it against a defendant. As a citizen, of course you can. Many of the jurors ignored the law and should not have been on the jury deciding a person’s fate. Like most people, those who believe it know they can’t just admit such a belief in the face of scrutiny; they’ll justify or rationalize their bias and tell us that they can decide a case, not realizing that such a bias infects everything that filters through their eyes and ears.
(PS Another bias that I heard people admit to: people charged with crimes are overwhelmingly guilty. Which may or may not be true – but again, jurors aren’t supposed to have this bias.)
I wrote the defense attorney in the trial a couple of times, as he wanted to know my opinion as an outsider. Much of what I wrote in my previous blog post I included in my email to him. The premise of my reply was that I knew before I ever left the building that day during jury selection that the jury pool wasn’t one I would ever want on a trial wherein me or my family was a defendant. There was too much bias. I told the attorney that I guessed every major aspect of the trial and its outcome, both in its decision and punishment. I was careful to not point fingers at a specific person, but I did my best to convey the overwhelming specifics that I observed, all of which combined left me with the idea that the jury pool wasn’t one that should have been hearing that case. In sort, I told the attorney that no matter what he had said or done once the trial started, the conclusion was predetermined. Had the prosecutor been the worst to have ever served, he would have won the case with that jury pool.
Some potential jurors knew more about the case than they admitted, too, and some had access to information after jury selection started. In the age of cellphones, it’s probably impossible to eliminate such temptations. I had some recommendations for different kinds of questions to help weed out these people. I could easily sit and watch a jury pool and come up with easy questions to make them uncomfortable- and more forthcoming and honest during jury selection.
The defense attorney told me that it was apparent that I was exactly the type of juror that both sides needed.
But we’ll never know. My opinion of jury selection and trials went down a notch and I’m left with the feeling, no matter what ‘really’ was the case, that the wrong jury was probably seated.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 