|
AUGUST 8TH, 1997, BEFORE I KNEW IT I WAS REPITITION
I stumbled from the psychiatrist's office at Glenside hospital, after I had sat there repeating myself, he was bored and asked me a list of twenty to forty questions, I meant to give him a different answer to every one, more to please him that anything else, but I couldn't focus on anything but his pen, and then his shiny brown shoe, the pen tapping the bench and then his shoe tapping the legs of the table, each time he asked a question there was a slight echo, that far away asking, and no matter how hard I wanted to give him the correct or clever answers, the same sentence came out of my mouth, oh I don't know why I kept repeating the same sentence over and over, it just seemed easier at the time and then I could focus on other things like the curtain or the door, then back to the shoe and microwave oven, until the shoe made me feel very sick because it was so big and brown, it appeared to be filling my whole eye socket, aside from that there was no oven, I knew that I was manufacturing the oven, I knew that something inside me was malfunctioning, was completing itself, the TCP man was causing a general protection fault, toothbrush, I thought, toothbrush, Dr. Hustig said, 'I can see that we're not getting anywhere today,' 'oh, but I'm trying,' then I suddenly got the stares up and my mind went blank, the absorption of his brown shoe had been too much, 'I think you should come back next week,' was that my name in reverse?, next week?, I felt disappointed that I now disappointed him, I was really here for some love and attention, but he was becoming bored that I would't take the drugs, his eyes were saying, 'See what happens when you don't take drugs, and now you've got to crawl from the room again, that because you won't take the drugs, and unless you are taking the drugs you are wasting my time,' 'How do I leave?,' I asked, not wanting to crawl from the room on the floor that was narrowing like a rope, he opened the door and helped me out, I was so baffled by this odd shift in my environment, that I went and lay in the garden for awhile, the plants were absorbing and releasing energy, I got sick and thought that they had stolen from me, 'someone stole all my energy,' I moaned, when I woke up and went home and fed my dogs, that night my ex-flatmate Frances got sick as well, she said over the phone, 'Don stole all my poker cards.' What she really meant was that Don had stolen all her energy, just like the raven had stolen the sun, I said to Nicki 'you say something to her,' Nicki was the social worker of the household, she took the phone from me, on the other end Frances said, 'I am going to come around with a poker and poke Don's eyes out for taking my cards', and when Nicki asked if it was a hot poker, Frances said 'No, but it's a sharp one', Frances was a well-built woman, none of us slept well that night, especially Don, later on we called the cops and they arrived in time to see Frances stabbing herself in the throat with her car keys, it was sad that she tried to commit suicide in this way as it could never have worked, and also that she was calling the police 'fascists' as they took her away to Glenside at 3.00am, because they actually were fascists and all the other things she said they were, but she was mad, angry and sad tonight, so no one would listen to her. |
