kirarand

This is a work in progress but the opening of the book I'm working on...starts with the creepy right away!

It’s idyllic. Really, it is. There’s been rain for five, maybe six days. It’s May 2004. The Hudson River is an aqua blue and the sun is finally shining. The river’s current is gentle now, and the birds have at long last made their appearance, starting their show, their mellifluous twitterings grandly announcing: Spring! It’s here and so we are.

And so she seems. The sun’s rays stretch through the trees’ branches and leaves that gently sway in the soft breeze to dance slowly, softly, on her body as if she’s given permission to our oh so special star.

You know how things can look different from afar? Or how a person can seem really nice? That is, until you get to know her? Or him? And then you get hints of that person’s dark side and you get this funny feeling in your gut? No. I think I’ll pass. We Americans like to look at things from afar. War. So long as we don’t see exactly what happens – and so long as we don’t see the coffins of our youthful dead – we’re all for them. And no, we’re not going to look at the pictures of the children whose bodies have been blown to bits by our weapons. Collateral damage is now a familiar phrase. We all know what that means. And somehow most of us have come to implicitly accept the idea of this phrase. The impressions, the images, the pictures of collateral damage? We do not look at them very much.

If you move closer to her and you peer through the trees and get a closer look, but not too close, it’s still idyllic. And look, she’s naked. She’s sunbathing in this space she’s created. She’s surrounded herself with these lovely yellow petals. Roses? Tulips? No matter. They’re still lovely. I’m impressed. How creative. What a sight for sore eyes. She spread them there just to give herself a sacred place, a sacred circle, a sacred altar that rises above the river.

Only she didn’t put them there. And she’s not really there anymore. Go ahead, look closer. She’s not really there. Look at her face.

Beautiful wide blue eyes not staring out into space cannot tell the madness that has happened here.
 

Going to start posting some short fiction pieces I'm working on. I'll be editing them here and there as they'll be rough. Just playing around. Memoir stuff doesn't interest me right now so moving to short fiction for a while. So here's a little piece I'm working on.

A Matter Of Hours

The cat lay on top of her, unmoving, his orange eyes staring back at her. She lay there too, with this creature who made a couch of her body and simply was content to stare. The room was silent except for the very distant hum of the traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Her thoughts went back to the contents of the safe.

She got up slowly, displacing the languid animal. Not to the safe. Took the garbage out to the kitchen. Every move was slow and carefully made. She wasn’t heavy. A little tall with some curves, curves the Dominican men in the neighborhood liked, but those curves didn’t account for the slowness of her movements.

She started to clean the kitchen. The white counter brought to mind the white safe and its contents again. She put it out of her mind. But the bottles of pills flashed again. Put them out of her mind. She started at one end of the counter and worked her down methodically, the bleach cleaner erasing the stains in the white counter. If only other mistakes could be erased so easily. If it only took a bottle of Clorox bleach cleaner. [Flash to commercial: she holds up a bottle of Clorox bleach cleaner and says “erase all your mistakes in one wipe -- guaranteed! In the background you see images of a life: a man shoving her, she throws up all over a table at a fast food restaurant, looking drunk or high, yelling at a boss, walking into an abortion clinic. She turns around, sprays the images with the bleacher cleaner, and wipes them away. She then turns back to the camera and smiles brightly].

The black and white commercial tile floor was spotless when she was done and turned out the light. She came back, turned the light on, squatted down beside a tin bowl of water, picked it up, kept her back very straight as she used the tabletop to assist her out of the squat and then then push herself up, washed the bowl and put fresh cold water in it and put it back down the same way. Change the water. They deserve fresh water.

She watched two movies after taking a handful of medication not from the safe but from the pillbox. Spent 20 minutes on the elliptical trainer while she watched The Secret Lives of Pippa Lee. Spent time on the floor stretching. Pippa Lee’s having a nervous breakdown and sleepwalking. It seems the extent of the nervous breakdown is sleepwalking. I’d like to have that kind of nervous breakdown. She’s not thinking about a load of morphine in a little white safe, is she? And then she goes off with Keanu Reeves in the end? Hmm. I got two cats here, no Keanu.

The cat looks concerned. It’s not the breakdown. They’re not that sensitive. He wants food. Can a cat kill himself? Would it want to? It’s only humans who can choose to end it, isn’t that so?

Animals and suicide. Saw a baby monkey on a documentary lying beside its dead mother for three weeks. Then it died too. The narrator said it died of grief. Humans have too strong a capacity for grief. God, I think that was a mistake. You shouldn’t have made us so needy. I wouldn’t be in this predicament if you hadn’t fucked up on so many levels.

It could be over in a matter of hours. Her roommate wouldn’t notice for at least 24 hours. Maybe longer. She wasn’t the kind to check on her. She stayed for the cats mainly, favored the orange one. She’d notice the cat was dead long before she’d notice the woman was dead. Maybe I’d have to start smelling even. The large soft grey cat sleeps on her pillow with his head next to hers, his paw on her arm. A matter of hours.

Icarus. It would be like Icarus’ death. The world would go on. Few would notice. They would for a minute and then life would go on. Don’t be foolish. It won’t matter that much. People move on. They have to. Didn’t you say God gave us too great a capacity for grief? Yeah, but that doesn’t count in my case. You believe that? Yeah, I do.

Like I said, it would only be a matter of hours. I never flew too close to the sun.

I was at a Hamburger Hamlet in Hollywood. And yes, I was waiting for my hamburger. Had time to kill before a dental appointment in the building. So, I'm waiting for my burger, as I said, and there are these two guys sitting at a round table just across from me. Both are a bit on the hefty side -- and that's being kind. I don't even recall how we started talking but they asked me to join them and being the friendly and curious sort, I did.

I'd never heard of Harry Nilsson. And the other fellow was the son of Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, Tony Jr. Harry didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that I didn't know who he was. He told me he was a songwriter and mentioned a few songs. "Me and My Arrow" and the theme from "Midnight Cowboy." The other song that was a big hit when I was a teenager, "Without You." So, I knew his music but not much about the man.



He asked me out. I was 25 years old. Did I mention curious? Not unattractive. Have always had a bit too much ass for the men in Los Angeles but I was rather thin at the time and had long curly red hair via a perm and hair color. My natural color was dirty blond and my hair was extremely straight. I looked pretty good with long red hair. I supposed he was attracted to me but was at the age when I thought that a man might want to spend time with me just to talk. Funny eh? He was wealthy and that intrigued me. After my parents' divorced, we'd been pretty poor. I spent most of my childhood buying clothes from thrift shops. So, a guy with some money interested me. Not that I expected to get any from him. It was just interesting to spend time with someone who was very rich.

So, he picked me up outside my mother's condo in Culver City, California. I was living with her temporarily after having broken up with a boyfriend. Or was it a husband? I married a few times, you see. The marriages never lasted longer than a year. I was a runaway bride. And rather ashamed of that fact many years later. By 25, I'd already married and divorced twice.

We went to Marina del Rey. Outside the restaurant, he snorted some coke. I'd never done coke and wasn't interested and was a bit perturbed that he did it so nonchalantly but I've never been one to get too uptight about what others do. Or not uptight enough to tell them not to do it. We went inside and were seated on the second floor of a large seafood restaurant overlooking a stage. Below us, a beautiful black woman was singing. We ordered drinks. I think I had a Mai Tai. Always loved rum drinks.

I spoke of my desire to write. As you can see from my journal, I'm not the most motivated writer despite the many stories I'd like to tell. To be fair, I've got work and back pain and work and more back pain. Don't usually feel like sitting at a computer since sitting is extremely painful. He encouraged me. I've always been grateful to him for that. Here was a successful musician and songwriter telling me I had talent and even if he was telling me that so that he could get into my pants, I didn't even consider that possibility. My ego wouldn't. Of course he saw how smart I am. And he told me that I could do something I wanted to do. I hadn't had a lot of encouragement in my life so I guess I was hungry for it.

What bothers me is that when Harry died, I remember reading a People Magazine article about his death. Said he had died of a heart attack. He was in his mid-40s. The writer said that he had cleaned up his act before he died. No more drugs. And that pissed me off because it wasn't what I saw. I didn't like the lie. I've never liked lies and to me, Harry's death was a tragedy and because of drugs. I'm still mad about it.

While the woman was singing, Harry said "I hate singers. Let's get out of here." I didn't get why he said that but I was going to follow him wherever he would take me. I was the tail and he was the dog. By this time, he'd had the coke and some booze and I still got into a car with him. He wasn't too wasted at this point. Drove me to a restaurant right on the ocean in Malibu. Geoffrey's.

What was astonishing to me at the time and still astonishes me to this day is the power of his money. He had no cash on him. But he pulled a credit card out and presented it to the waiter and said that he didn't have any cash, would he get him some cash, pay for the food, and also bring us some weed? And within a short period of time, Harry had cash, we'd eaten dinner, and we also had some pot.

The waiter took us up some rickety wooden stairs above the outside patio. There was a little landing at the top with a small table. I seem to recall that there was only enough room for the two of us. And we smoked a joint together. It became an incredible evening.

Harry was a poet. He used language in a manner I've never been able to. It was as if music was playing while he spoke even though there was silence. And there was a full moon hanging above the water and bright light splayed across the ocean. In the waves were little silver grunions flickering. Here we were, getting high, looking out on the Pacific underneath the whitest full moon I've ever seen, and this brilliant and rich man was speaking like a poet to me. And, of course, I was getting high.

He told me that he'd been working in a computer center in the Valley before he was famous. He'd released an album but it hadn't gone anywhere. Someone asked the Beatles what American musicians they liked and apparently one of them had said they liked Harry Nilsson. And, Harry told me, he became a millionaire overnight. Overnight. He was a fascinating guy with an incredible story and here I was sitting with him, smoking a joint, and talking. I didn't need much more. I've never been that greedy.

But then he ruined it. I think he was getting more and more smashed between the coke, the alcohol, and the weed. I rarely overindulged in these things and certainly didn't that night. I recall he started coming on to me and it became clear that he expected to sleep with me. I knew he was married and had six kids. I just wasn't that type of girl. I was just curious. Not interested in his money or his dick. I became angry and I told him "I'm not your sinkhole." He asked me if I'd made that up. I had. He liked it.

You see, he was clearly fucked up and not only because of the drugs and alcohol. I could see he was miserable. I don't know why he was miserable but it was evident. And I just didn't feel like allowing him to bury his misery in my vagina. And so that's why I said what I said. He became angry after it became clear to him that he wasn't going anywhere near my pants so I demanded he take me home.

We drove out of the restaurant parking lot but he drove in the opposite direction of my home. I kept asking him where he was going and seem to recall him saying that there was a motel somewhere ahead. HE WAS KIDNAPPING ME! I couldn't believe it. I kept saying this to him over and over. I can't believe you're doing this. I just can't believe you're doing this. Turn around. And shaking my head.

I guess I shamed him out of it because he did turn around and take me home. We didn't speak at all. He dropped me off in front of my mom's condo complex in the middle of the night but before he let me go, he had my hand in his mouth and was sucking my knuckles. It was so pathetic. Poor man. That's what I said to him. He was a very poor man.

When I got out of the car, he pulled away and weaved down Jefferson Boulevard. I would never see him again and can't say that I wanted to. It was incredibly sad to me. Here was a man who had what I never had. Lots of money. I thought at that age that he should be happy. I certainly would have been. Not having money was a big problem in my life and continued to be a big problem until about six months ago! LOL. I couldn't figure out how someone could be a millionaire and be such a mess.

I learned that he had been with John Lennon when he was thrown out of the Troubador and that didn't surprise me. He was the first degree of separation between me and John Lennon. Although I was never a big fan of the Beatles, I have met more than one person known to John Lennon and my life has been changed as a result. It wasn't Harry Nilsson. It was later when I did Primal Therapy and met Vivian Janov. But that's also another story.

Demons. Lots of them. I never read very much about Harry's life. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that this guy had been through some shit. I'm a therapist now so it's even easier. I didn't need to know the why or the what. I saw the end product.

So, a few years later, I heard Harry died of a heart attack. I read the brief article in People Magazine saying he had cleaned up his act. Why people feel they need to lie about drug abuse, about the reality of a poor sob's life, to make it something it wasn't, I really don't get. Despite Harry's rather bad behavior with me, I still thought he was an interesting person and not a bad person at all.

And I thought that whatever happened to this person was important. People Magazine took that away. And perhaps others did too. Perhaps Harry's PR people. Perhaps his wife. Perhaps it was America's unceasing need to deny, deny, deny all the elephants in our livingrooms.

I still can't figure out why.

I have been working mucho and have been wanting to write a few stories...I've got a Harry Nielsen story, homicide in Paris, meeting the man who invented the laser, all in addition to the insanity I lived -- there were some interesting times back in LA.

Anyway, I came across these images and thought you'd all like them given your predisposition towards creatures. I was in Naples, Florida with one of my much older and very successful colleagues and she took me to a wolf sanctuary. We were allowed to go INSIDE the cages with them and I got these beautiful pictures. It was the highlight of my trip.

I had no idea wolves were so tall! They're just like dogs but their legs are very long. I love these pictures and have been meaning to get them reproduced in a larger format for my home. Let me know what you think of these.

Stories later.
Alison

No one (of the three of you!!!!) has asked me but I thought I'd let the cat out of the bag so to speak. What happened to Ayn's cat has always been a sore spot to me. I used to say that Ayn must have been not only rolling in her grave but doing somersaults over the treatment her precious guy got at the hands on an Objectivist.

My memory is somewhat sketchy but I recall going to an Objectivist conference in San Diego. I didn't actually attend the conference itself. I hung out there on weekends. I met a nice fellow from the New Orleans area. We later became roommates. I was in my early 20s at the time and so was he. We were both in treatment with Edith Packer (she is George Reisman's wife). George is the Objectivist economist who was later to have a falling out with Ayn Rand's "intellectual heir" Leonard Peikoff. Over what I can't tell you. Schizms within this movement are common. The Reismans and Peikoff appeared very close back in the 1980s and they did nothing but sing each others' praises but eventually, I guess, everyone's got to be EVIL!

Through my roommate, I met the painter Michael Newberry. We were friends for many, many years. And through Michael, I met a young woman I will call Susan. I've no desire to uncover people here at least for the time being so her identity is not important. She was a bright, vivacious young woman who was more educated and wealthy than myself. She and my roommate had been boyfriend and girlfriend at one time. I wound up living with her as she liked me and didn't feel her boyfriend was being the nicest roommate (boo hoo).

All I can recall was that he didn't like that I would swear and chew gum. He told this to Edith Packer who divulged this to me in my sessions. At the time, I didn't know that she was being unethical by divulging the content of his sessions. I still swear and chew gum so you know how far that criticism went. I don't recall taking it that seriously. I mean, really, who cared? Cares?

Susan paid more rent than I did so I offered to do more of the cleaning. Susan liked living in a certain style, a style I couldn't afford. Susan taught me an important and painful lesson, a lesson one wouldn't think would have been taught to me by an Objectivist but hypocrisy runs rampant in every cult/cultlike environment so it's really no surprise.

My parents, as you all know by now, were divorced. When Susan would socialize with people from work as well as other acquaintances and I was present, I became aware that she was distancing herself. She seemed embarrassed. Perhaps it was the swearing and the gum chewing? Hmmm?? No, it wasn't that because I do know how to restrain myself in polite company. At some point, she told me that her mother would not have allowed her to play with me when she as a little girl because I came from "divorced" parents.

Because I had swallowed Rand hook, line, and sinker, the one thing I never expected was to be looked at by an Objectivist as somehow "less than" because of something beyond my control. Rand would never have approved of that. I realized that Susan had been wealthier than me and more educated and that she considered me to be of a lower class than herself. Now, I view that kind of thinking with either contempt, indifference, or amusement depending upon my mood. But, at that time, I remember being deeply, deeply shocked and hurt. It never occurred to me that others would judge me because of my family background or my income.

What was worse was that she began to treat me like her maid. Although I had offered to do more, I didn't recall answering an ad to be the help but more than once there were comments like "Kira can clean it up" even though I had not agreed to any kind of open-ended I'll do anything you ask type of arrangement. I think she even referred to me as the maid at one point. Sue was a rather shallow young woman (more shallow than I was even) and was always in pursuit of a guy.

Tommy was a huge cat. I'm going to dig up a picture of him and post it. He was primarily grey and white and had very short hair. He had to have been at least 20 pounds, perhaps more. He was the sweetest animal. Always, always, always had to be on someone's lap. What was upsetting to me was that Susan neglected Tommy to pursue her fellas. She'd disappear for days at a time and both of her cats wound up going to the bathroom in the bathtub. You can imagine that this maid was becoming quite angry at the situation. Waking up every morning to shit in my bathtub was not pleasant. There I go again. Swearing.

It made no sense to me that Susan would neglect Tommy. Besides being a professed cat lover, she professed to be a great admirer of Ayn Rand and to be an Objectivist. Well, according to the ideology, Tommy would have been a creature of great value having been deeply loved by Rand. I am given to understand that Ayn loved her animals very much. One thing Ayn and I had in common. It broke my heart because I could not give Tommy the attention he needed as I had two animals of my own and had problems of my own emotionally.

Don't get me wrong. I did care for Tommy and did give him attention. It was just incredibly sad to see Rand's cat neglected. I couldn't see that would have made her happy.

Now you must all be saying this isn't so bad and it isn't. It's what happened that disturbs me to this day. Susan decided to give Tommy away because she clearly wasn't going to take care of him. She did a very stupid and careless thing which was to take him to the adoptee's home without putting him in a cat carrier. When she got to the door with him, he leaped from her arms and ran away. We lived in the Laguna Niguel area (close to Laguna Beach, California) where there are many hills there filled with coyotes.

So, truth is that I don't know what happened to Tommy and I don't know that anybody does save a coyote or two. Am I the only one that finds this very, very sad? I was so angry at Susan that it took me years to get over ranting about her behavior with Michael. Michael had not been so impressed with other aspects of her behavior and so we shared our thoughts on the matter.

To this day, as I feel with any of my animals who have either disappeared or have come to a tragic end, I feel great sadness when I think of Tommy. I'm quite certain Rand would have believed that whoever she had entrusted Tommy with (I believe it had orginally been an historian named Steve Jollivette) would have taken great care of Tommy until Tommy's passing. I know I would have.

Oliver and Nikki are entrusted to my Israeli roommate who adores them. I know that, despite the fact that she does not feel secure enough to have a cat of her own, she loves Oliver and Nikki so much that she'd make the sacrifice to care for them properly. I do not worry about what will happen to them.

I come across my pictures of Tommy every so often and remember how loving and sweet that big old guy was. I hope he wasn't eaten by a coyote. Perhaps someone found him and cared for him. I'll never know.

Although my childhood was a dark place and I still inhabit it at times, my life as a "mother" is centered on two cats (both boys) and a young woman I call my "false daughter." My false daughter also deserves a chapter of her own. For now, I'm providing pictures of my beautiful boys who are very much in love with each other. The orange one, Oliver, is about 2-1/2 years old. The grey tabby is Nikki, almost 9 years old.

Oliver worships Nikki. You can see that in the photos.

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A more recent photo showing how much in love and how committed they still are:



My roommates and me as well as false daughter used to joke around that my cats are gay and since we're a gay-friendly household (false daughter is bisexual and I probably should be gay or at the least, consider all my options but let's not go there tonight), they feel accepted and loved.

That's all for now folks. Got to get some shut eye so that I can brave the darkness in my patients' worlds and provide a more empathetic and therapeutic place for them to be. To do that, I need my eight hours.

Sorry for the delay, folks. This isn't hard to write about anymore; I've been working many hours hence the six week delay between "parts." I think the circumstances leading up to my hospitalization are harder to meditate on but the hospitalization itself was life-changing and enlightening in the long run.

I couldn't believe that I was in THE psychiatric ward. It was the only time in my life when things got so bad that I was hospitalized. I was mortified and figured life as I knew it was over. It's December 2009 now. Over 10 years later. I'm in bed, two of my cats beside me, one of them snoring. I've got the window open because the radiator makes my room as hot as a furnace. I'm listening to a Fleetwood Mac song on Pandora radio. I spent my teen years listening to Fleetwood Mac. The cool breeze coming through my open window feels good even if my nose is becoming cold.

I'm still here.

It was the people I met in the hospital who changed me. Changed my entire outlook on life, on people, on my view of human strength and frailty. I no longer see people in the black and white terms my mother did. I feel the ambivalence, the indecision about my judgments of them, the astonishment when I realize a patient is much crazier than I thought, and then the next thought: What do I do now? I wonder what Charlie, my therapist since that time, thought when he couldn't keep me from hurting myself. What did he go through? I've never asked him.

Besides the patients, Charlie also changed my life. Saved my life. I was quite suicidal when I left the hospital and there was always the risk I wouldn't make it. He had to have known that. I asked him once why it was worth it, this thing, living. What was so great about it? And he said very simple things. Things like loving people, like art, like the moon and the sun, like making love, my cats, stuff like that. I can't remember exactly but that was the essence of his response. And, when I thanked him many years later, tearfully, telling him that he saved my life and that I was so very grateful, he replied that it had been "his privilege." Every time I think of that moment I either cry or want to cry. How did I become so very lucky to have met this person?

Charlie runs a community mental health clinic in a Hispanic section of the city. He hasn't charged me a dime in 10 years. I remember so many times asking him why he wasn't insisting I pay something. I wasn't raised to take anything without paying for it. It was alien to me to take help from somebody who asked for nothing in return except that I live. That wasn't in accord with Objectivism. You always PAY for things, you earn them. With Charlie, I had already earned his help simply by being a human being and needing him. There aren't many psychotherapists out there who will work for free. Charlie made me into one of them.

In the hospital, I was frightened of an elderly black man in the next room who used to wake up cursing. He was using pretty misogynistic words. I would wake up to "Bitch!" and "Cunt!" and I was quite worried this guy meant to harm me as a female representative of our species. I would sit in a woman's group and there was an older black woman who was very quiet and clearly very depressed. She had a problem with depression and with alcohol and this was not the first time she had been hospitalized. And there was a young man named Joseph, a paranoid schizophrenic. He was one of the gentlest people I've ever met.

I managed to get to know the man in the next room even though he scared me. It turned out he had Tourette's Syndrome. I asked why he would swear in the morning and he told me that he was cursing the sun. The woman who drank too much, her son had thrown himself in front of a train. She had never recovered. I don't know if I would have either. Even though I've never had children, I can imagine drinking myself to death if a child of mine did such a thing. What horror. Mothers lose their sons all kinds of ways but to lose a son to a moving train and in such a deliberate, wild, sudden way. Imagine the few seconds it took for him to do that -- and the lifetime she had left to suffer.

We all have to accept death. We can't fight it. I'm now 46 years old and I'm learning it as my patients die or their spouses die. I've had a patient leap from a roof to his death six floors below. At least, I think he jumped. It's also possible someone helped him along. I have two male patients both of whom have lost two wives, four between them. Both of them incredibly loyal men. With all the flaws that heroin addiction cultivates, both of these men were loyal to a fault. Perhaps I admire that even more because my own father was not so loyal. Certainly not to his children. One of my patients died, quite unnecessarily, last year. She was my age. And she died because she was on a steady diet of ice cream and was diabetic. Death by ice cream. It happens.

Joseph. It's hard to remember the details. I remember he and the other men teaching me a game that I guess is played a lot in prison. It's called Spades. As smart as I am, I just couldn't get that card game right. And Joseph would become frustrated with me as I was his partner. I was 37, he was in his early 20s. I would have these crying jags. I just couldn't stop crying. I remember him watching me. I remember his soft brown eyes and brown hair. His big glasses and sparse mustache. And soft pale skin. My memory is not being kind to me. I'm having trouble remembering many details.

They fed me well. I got rest. I cried and cried and cried still very panicked and depressed. I didn't know what would follow this. I was discharged with prescriptions for a tranquilizer and an anti-depressant. You know, when they let you out of the mental hospital, you go home as you would from anywhere. It's not like they call you a cab or have a special car or anything. You arrive in an ambulance and you leave in a bus. I went home alone. Of course, it was a cloudy, dark day. The weather was in the same mood as I was.

I was still in what I came to call the "abyss." An abyss that had been created over 20 years before. I had fallen in and didn't even know it. And now I had to climb out. That was the interesting part.

I know that children of other Objectivists haven't become suicidal as I did. I'm not sure what happens to the children of other Objectivists. There's so few of us out there and although Ayn Rand has had a powerful influence on American culture, Objectivism is not widely known. I don't know how many of us are out there and I don't know what their experiences are. I can only write about my own and how disastrous the arrival of Ayn Rand was into my life. Had my mother been introduced to the writings of Kahlil Gibran, would it have been different? Probably. I've always thought that "The Prophet" says it all. Or at least most of it. I don't know that people need to read others' ideas of the nature of the universe, of relationships, of politics, of art and the like in order to live a good life. Plenty don't. Rand always asserted that peopled NEEDED philosophy and it was HER philosophy they need. I'm not so convinced.

On the other hand, I've been positively influenced by many writers but not just one. Viktor Frankl and Oliver Sacks were inspiring. Sylvia Nash's A Beautiful Mind was just that, beautiful. Beautifully written and engaging. Conquering Schizophrenia by Peter Wyden fascinated me and was the best introduction to the nature of schizophrenia I could hope for. Peter Wyden's son had schizophrenia. He tells the story of his decades long journey trying to find a cure for his son's illness and spending every dime he had trying to help his son. He never abandoned his son even when his son was of age. With my parents, at 18 years, they figured they were done and I was on my own. And really, they both abandoned me long before that age.

But I know parents can be devoted beyond measure. My siblings and I have had to come to terms with having parents who haven't been devoted. And trying to forgive them their shortcomings. My parents' shortcomings, and my own, however, landed me in the psychiatric ward. It was the beginning of a fascinating journey. I often thought, a few years later, to write a book or story called Suicide Looks Good on You. It was coming back from that very dark place that changed me so dramatically.

I wouldn't have been able to do it without Charlie. But he gets his own chapter.

I just watched the season opener of "House." House winds up in a psychiatric hospital after detoxing off of Vicodin. At first, he resists the doctors' efforts to help him and engages in one of his most typical defenses -- narcissistic and sadistic social games. When he brings significant harm to a patient, he wises up. Gets better. The end. Of the episode at least.

This episode reminded me of my stint in the psychiatric ward. It's not so easy to write about this so early in the blog. But perhaps it's important talk about. I mean, trying to kill yourself isn't a minor lifetime event. Many of my patients who are quite ill are often suicidal and some hospitalized many times. I had one very serious episode of full-blown major depression. And there was just so much of my past, that past so influenced by Ayn Rand and Objectivism, that past that so devastated me that I became completedly overwhelmed. And I could not see past the waves of my grief.

I never recovered from the loss of my father. That separation, of all the separations, caused anguish that is indescribable. I believe a huge part of me wanted to die way, way back. When he was gone. But it was never stated or even thought about. But the subconscious wish had to have been there.

As a therapist often confronted with patients who need hospitalization but are terrified to go, I can say that I completely understand their fear. I can't exactly tell them that I was almost killed by a hospital myself, can I?

I had a chronic pain condition that had resulted in being unable to work and also being in chronic pain -- chronically. What else? I went to doctors to try to get help. One gave me an anti-inflammatory that did nothing but make me nauseous. It didn't help the pain at all. It was the middle of summer in New York City. Very hot. I had no air conditioning in my apartment. And I couldn't eat a thing. And if I can't eat, you know I'm in trouble because I've always had a healthy appetite. My heart rate was racing out of control. Later I found out that in 1% of all patients, the medication caused cognitive dysfunction. I went from one doctor to the next begging for help, confused, sick, and terrified. I was either turned away or given an EKG and told I was fine and sent home. I often say that if I had been a celebrity, I would have been hospitalized for "exhaustion" and, most likely, wouldn't have had to try to off myself to get a little tender loving care.

When I was falling apart, I tried to get help. I checked myself into a hospital on New York's Upper East Side. I figured it's on the Upper East Side so it's got to be a good hospital. That's a good neighborhood. Should have a good hospital. I had insurance. I was quite suicidal. Thought it was time to check myself in. Didn't know what else to do besides kill myself.

Well, thank you Gracie Square. I spent three horrible days at that hospital. The food was disgusting. I was already exhausted and under-nourished and my anxiety level was through the roof. When I would fall apart, the staff would admonish me and tell me that my depression was causing my pain. And there was this old woman who must have had dementia who never stopped screaming. For three days and nights. So, I went without food and without sleep and without compassion while I was suicidal for three days and nights. It didn't take me long to figure out a way to get out of there.

I told them I was fine, that I wasn't suicidal anymore and I wanted to go home. They dispatched me pronto. Pronto with benzodiazepines (tranquilizers) and anti-depressant prescriptions. I bought a bottle of wine on my way home. I climbed into bed, swallowed the bottle of tranquilizers, drank at least half the bottle of wine, and laid down to die.

This was the end result of the 25 years of Objectivism's influence on my life. It tore my family apart (because where in this fucking philosophy was the importance of family even talked about?? -- and what fucking philosophy doesn't address the role of family -- and what fucking philosophy doesn't address the role of family in one's life and then have the audacity to claim to be comprehensive? What bullshit!). You can see why I don't have a whole lot of tolerance for the meanness, the spite, the paranoia, the narcissism, the rigidity, and the elitism birthed by Ayn Rand. It was one thing to have some ideas. It was quite another to pronounce oneself a philosopher and to pronounce one's outrageously incomplete and poorly thought out "philosophy" as THE guide that others must follow should they want to be seen as "good" souls.

This is how cults nab people. They nab people like my mother. People who are injured and confused and looking for something to quell the pain and the fear. And these words and ideas come along and they are so black and white and it's then all so easy. One just has to look up the answer to any question in a book or turn to the leader and ask "what is reality?" because one really doesn't know. Suddenly, things seem easy for just a moment. And then they turn to pure hell.

Well, I am still here, aren't I?

Part Two to come.

Gear_Eagle -- my one friend so far -- you'll find this interesting! Thanks for the tip on embedding.

So, after many, many years, mom is finally doing therapy. She's 70 years old. I've got to give her a lot of credit for that.

Most of my life, my mother's attitude was that of a victim's. She was a victim of my father, of the non-Objectivist world (most Objectivists consider themselves victims of the non-Objectivist world), and of her family. Oh, and I forgot to mention, she was a victim of her kids. My sister is 45 years old and I just turned 46. Neither of us have had children. I can't speak for my sister but I can say my mother's attitude had a pronounced effect on my choices. She never made it a secret that she was miserable because of her role as a mother and the burden of her children. Always said that she wanted to live alone and that she should never have gotten married and had children.

Now she's in therapy and has decided to start being nicer. She wrote in my birthday card she sent to me that it was time to focus on the good things from the past and said that my birth was one of the most ecstatic and joyful days of her life.

I guess I'm supposed to feel good now that she said something nice, right? Heartwarmed? Touched?

Thing is I remember asking her some years ago what my birth was like. She told me she couldn't remember. I remember being astonished. She responded that she'd had five kids.

So was this one of those joyful repressed memories suddenly come to light?

In working with trauma victims, I've found that people do, in fact, recover repressed memories. But the memories are usually TRAUMATIC memories. Perhaps it is possible that depressed people do repress their happy memories. The focus is so often on the negative. If this goes on for decades, maybe it's true that she did repress it. I don't know the research on this but it's an interesting thought.

Still, I'm untouched. By the time I'm 46 years old, being told for the very first time that my existence brought my mother joy seems rather ill-timed. I think that imparting of knowledge would have been more useful when I was six. Or seven. Or eight. Or nine. Or 10. Or...you get the picture.