Today, Tomorow; There Is No Yesterday

Today, tomorrow; There Is No Yesterday

It is snowing quite heavily.  Visibility is maybe twenty feet.  And, I find myself going into full-on panic mode.  

I attempt to override, damp down this heavily rising anxiety.

I find I can think about tomorrow and stay pretty much stable and on-task with what I am doing today.  I make a valiant effort not to think, or plan, beyond tomorrow.  And, I find I have to limit any ambitions beyond what I must do today and I what I might do tomorrow.  “Might do tomorrow” is the best I can tolerate today.

This method, or maybe “concept” (philosophy) seems to bring my heart rate down and ease my panicky breathing.  When the mind starts to deteriorate, or succumb to a previous trauma occurring to the brain, for me, at least, I must take over.  Consciously, I must take steps to bring the whole thing under control.

And, that means within what is happening, or going on, right now, today, is NOT a forever thing.  Just because something triggers my panic anxiety mode right now, does not mean it will not go away.  I find there are two things that affect my life quality in the moment.  The first, and most damning and damaging, is to dwell on the past.  To allow all of my many big life mistakes to start looping through my mind; big big big mistake.  I have to force my thinking to just put a block on that.  The past is a ghost. It is gone.  It is fable. There is no yesterday.

There is only today and a vagueness on the horizon that might become tomorrow.  This not to say that goals for good, better or improvement, which will possibly require some work, some hard focused effort, are not possible.  They just have to be set and worked toward incrementally.  

“I need to get to a place (whatever achievement).  And, first I need to get this thing done.  Then, that thing done.  And so on, until I get my desired goal accomplished.”

“I can move any obstacle in my path.  First I find a fulcrum, then I find a lever and with concentrated effort, I can move that obstacle out of my path.”

The many things that have been said by many great and mindful minds, are mostly true and good.  “Day by day.” “One foot in front of the other.” “Love yourself.” They just need to put into practice, become a mantra and held like a beloved child.

So here is some other stuff.
Author’s Page. I have several books published, I believe you will like.

Suicide and Sunsets

I had ringworm once.  When I was a young boy, a weird curlicue started showing up on my face.  I was too young for actual acne, so my mother took me to a Doctor. Ringworm.  Treat it with a kind of cream and be very careful with laundry and don’t let anybody touch my face and don’t touch my face myself.  It wasn’t really obvious to others maybe, but it was to me.

I mean to say, other people notice if they look closely and they feel sorry for you.  They feel sympathy, but what can they do? It’s same when you have an obvious physical disability; maybe confined to a wheelchair or are carrying a white cane or missing a leg or arm.  Others feel sympathy and look away, but “it’s not their problem. Eh?”

“How did you get this condition?  What did you do wrong that brought this karma, calamity on yourself?”  “You must’ve done something really wrong, or bad.”  “You earned or deserved this bad thing.”  Which coalesces into “You’re just an inferior person.”  

Everything makes you sad.  A broken butterfly, a dying flower.  A squirrel squashed on the road brings you to tears.  Every minor criticism feels like a slap in the face. Every compliment sounds insincere, “What do they want?” Suspicion of every good thing that happens.  Confrontation brings out the hulk, “FUCK YOU!”  And, you know you are broken.  You have sinned somehow.  You are bad.  You are always wrong.  You are just plain bad!

And, you always will be.

IF we could just fix you.  We being your friends and family.  You being the “broken one”. But, it never seems to work.  All efforts to “fix you” seem to only last a short while, or until you get triggered beyond the capacity of the medication you are made to take, that is supposed to control  your “problem.” Or, the therapy you are made to attend.  

Maybe it was because, when you were eleven years old, you fell off a truck crate, ten feet onto the top of your head.  Onto concrete and broken glass. Or, because your mother drank too much, all the time, and turned from loving to brutal every day of your childhood.  Maybe it was because your first great love killed herself. Or, the time when you were riding your bicycle and an old lady made a left turn, without signaling, at 40 mph and ran over your head.  That was after you took out her left headlight with your skull. Maybe, just maybe, it was because you spent two years in a foreign war that was pointless and the images of that carnage, branded and scorched into your soul, will not let you sleep at night; ever.

All of those incidents were somehow your fault, really.    Nobody cares.  Nobody really cares.  If you were a good person and smarter or maybe some God loved you a little more, none of them would have happened.  Being told every single day that, “Everybody has problems” makes you feel sad, deeply sad, but somehow you don’t quite understand what that is supposed to mean.  It doesn’t take away the fact that you went to war with four friends and you are the only one who came back.

It doesn’t change that memory of your first great love putting a rifle barrel in her mouth and pulling the trigger.  Your child, your six year old son finding her and asking,”What’s wrong with Mommy?” Everybody has problems.  And, you, well you are just weak and a narcissist because you let those things affect you.  

Bad, weak, self-centered!  When are you going to just get over it and get on with your life?  You climbed to the top of the mountain several times.  You even achieved some minor fame, notoriety, several awards in your chosen profession.  You were the One.  And, every time you fucked it up somehow.  

The years ripped by and the bloom was off the rose.  Suddenly you seem to be under the thumb of overbearing bosses, and colleagues who made certain your accomplishments went unnoticed.  The gatekeepers and dreamstompers who held your career in their hands, made certain you went unrecognized and were kept in your place.  You are no longer young and beautiful.  Your experience makes you expensive to keep around.  The shine is off the chrome.  In a moment, an instant, quite suddenly you are irrelevant and expendable.

Any wisdom you may have gleaned from all that you did; all that you did accomplish counts for nothing in the present.  What you may have overcome becomes only a matter of comparative value.  “Other had it worse.”  You’re old. What you know doesn’t count anymore.  History is for whiners and fools.  

All the bad things that happened to you were the result of poor luck or because you were a bit stupid.  The good you did doesn’t matter anymore.

Driving home from my “job” (writing blogs) the other day, I was quite taken with the beautiful winter sunset.  Stunning cloud formations, backlight with a fiery setting sun. This ephemeral nature of one of life’s masterpieces overwhelmed all of my inner struggles.  “Go ahead; kill yourself.” That thought just cracked for a moment and my very damaged old soul quipped, “Fuck you!  You might see me as a failure, as deserving of being left out on the ice.   But, I’m sticking around just to see more of those sunsets.”

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Blind-Learn-Draw-closing/dp/1790576067/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1545341157&sr=8-1&keywords=Dale+Clarence+peterson

Drawing Blind

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Blind-Learn-Draw-closing/dp/1790576067/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1544467874&sr=8-2&keywords=Dale+Clarence+Peterson

As it is. “Drawing Blind: Learn to Draw by closing your eyes” is now in print.  Click the link.

I have kept the price quite reasonable … because I am not certain I won’t do some more editing and layout changes.  BECAUSE, even though I have had several readers and editors go over this publication - it still has some “problems” - ARGgh!  BUT, somehow I still like the overall nature of this recent redo.  

I intentionally used “Courier” font, because I fell in love with Courier when I recently wrote a screenplay. It does look like an old typewriter hard-key font. And, I like that.  I mean … why should a finished printed hardcopy book about Art not be an “Art Object” itself?  Why can’t do we have to let computers and top-shelf printers make everything polished to the point of being generic and losing all sense of humanity?  

I don’t have an answer, but I do get tired of everything being perfect, polished and gutless.  This new industry Amazon has set up where anyone can publish a printed book for a minimal investment and have the whole project be “as is” - as long as you fit everything within a lot specs (that part IS frustrating).  But, I t saves a whole lotta trees.  Instead of tons and hundreds of tons of books approved by various “Publishing Houses” sitting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble until they yellow and have to be “recycled”.  What a waste.

And, generally those gatekeepers, critics and dreamstompers are just plain wrong concerning what is good and what actual readers will like and what history will credit.

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Blind-Learn-Draw-closing/dp/1790576067/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1544467874&sr=8-2&keywords=Dale+Clarence+Peterson

The Invisible Prison of Mental Illness

The Invisible Prison of Mental Illness

In many states, if not most states, if I commit a crime, maybe a serious crime, I can do my time and get paroled.  If I prove that I am rehabilitated and am worthy of re-entering society, I can regain my freedom. Which is not to say, that life will be easy now.  Life for an ex-felon is pretty damn hard, I am sure.

But, I would be an “ex-convict”, meaning I am “no longer” a criminal.  I would face considerable barriers to employment, although this is not supposed to be the case. I am fully aware that it is.

Making a “criminal mistake” can be forgiven, as it were.  For those of us with neurological challenges that have resulted in “breakdowns” , there seems to be no possibility of “parole”.   The ADA laws are supposed to protect citizens with disabilities, however many employment forms make a direct reference to mental illlness.  Or, questions are “shaded” to indicate their possibilities.

The real difference  however, between an actual “crime” and “mental disability”, is that, in most ways, the former criminal can leave the jail walls behind them.  For the neurologically disabled, the prison (cell, jail) walls are carried with us. It is a turtles shell we cannot shed. Invisible, but still there, confining movement; heavy stiff leather clothing that always feels too tight.  

I have heard mental disability described as a “waking nightmare that never stops”.  A nightmare that prevents sleep and fills the waking days with an unappeasable addiction for sleep.  Spiders under the skin, ever spinning webs inside the mind. Centipedes that when cut in half become two and then four and then eight.

During the occasional stretches of time when we can fake normal behavior, the emotional toil is exhausting.  “The world is a stage and we are but players.” What to do when you can never leave the stage, change the costume, remove the make-up, or be pushed aside as a social pariah.  A leper to be avoided.

Continually told to “seek help”.  Appease, ameliorate, medicate. As you are is unacceptable.  You must become like us. You are broken.

That is the prison of mental illness; to know that you are broken and no one will ever accept your flaws, no matter much glue you apply.

When Failure Leads to Death

When failure leads to death.

This day in 2018, we are staring oblivion in the face.  Tribal factions all over the planet are in horrible combat, each with others.  Some with ALL others, not they themselves.

It is beyond tragic, because we all will pay.  

Where did it go wrong?  In this country, U.S.A., it began when we went to war against a foe, who wanted one thing only.  And, that was to be left alone to decide their own fate. Which, had no bearing whatsoever on us.  And yet, to war we went because they did not seem to want what WE thought everybody OUGHT to want.

In that misplaced threat, ALL Americans were held accountable.  Mandatory conscription was the law of the land, so ALL American men between the ages of 18 and 25 were required to register with the government AND to “serve” as soldiers if called.

A short period of peace followed the American defeat - yes, America LOST that war.  The last personnel involved leaping into helicopters from the capitals rooftops. Truly like Nazis in the bunkers in Berlin.  Leave or die.

To stay out of that horrible mistake, young men who were in college and maintaining decent grades, were exempted.  That meant that a lot of young men, who were not anxious to die, did their utmost to get into and stay in Higher Learning.  Failure meant death, or probable death (it seemed)(at the time).

During the very brief peace that followed, Mandatory Conscription (the “Draft”) was, step by step, repealed.  Very quickly an over confident culture became lethargic as to their global safety. College, higher learning, became an expensive, very expensive, “treat” appealing only to those with really high ambitions and maybe, those from families with a lot of expendable income.  

The result has been a culture-wide devaluing of “learning” in general, with the mind-widening study of honest history and the Arts dropping nearly out of consideration “et allus in totum”.  As the few with the mental energy to rise have risen, those with lessening mental discipline have fallen lower and lower on the scales of accomplishment and reward.

And, they have become mindlessly resentful of this fall.  They grasp onto many of the concepts recorded history has proven to be fatal.  Racism, religious zealotry, economic persecution, nationalism over basic moral humanism.  And, as history has proven over and over, when the plowshares are beaten into swords, the death toll mounts and mounts until victory equates to one thing - a snake consuming its own tail.  

Mental Illnesss Is A Disease?

Mental illness is a disease.

Wikipedia; “In humans, disease is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, or death to the person afflicted, or similar problems for those in contact with the person.”

This has currently been applied to alcoholics, opioid addicts, or anyone falling into the category defined (above) by Wikipedia. Which means, obviously, those of us with neurological conditions are diseased (?).  Seems kind of scary, doesn’t it?

I am beginning to notice a conflict with the term “disability” and references to “diseases”.  Fer instanz - the alcoholism and opioid debate. Why are those two conditions referred to as “diseases” and bipolar disorder is a “disorder”, or a “disability”?  Really? Why isn’t alcoholism a disability and not a disease?

If you have a mental illness (“illness” v. “disease”)(?), how do we make the jump to “disability”?  Neurological disorders can be genetic and/or the result of injury to the cranium. Problems with neurological abnormalities can be the result of environmental pollution, too.  Lead in the water system can lead to retardation, we know this. Medical science has proven the effects of lead poisoning; like 100 years ago this was a known fact. Maybe before that?  

I have begun to refer to my condition, diagnosed as Bipolar plus PTSD, as a disease.  As opposed to a disability. Somehow, to me, it’s easier to feel more “normal” referring to my neurological challenge as a disease.  I mean, I am not really disabled physically. In fact, for my age I am able way above the curve for physical “abilities”. I don’t need, nor do I ever use, a “Handicap parking spot”. Don’t need ramps or Braille or a hearing aid.

Are diabetes and thyroid conditions “disabilities” or diseases?  Well, both are more commonly called “conditions”, medical conditions.  With diabetes we just say “diabetic”. ? … ?? (?).

No! I don’t have answers or solutions to this conundrum.  

Days of Hate, Days of Rage

Days of Hate, Days of Rage

Right now in October of 2018, we seem to be living in a historical time of darkness.  There are many undercurrent causes for this.  Each day seems like February in Cleveland, Ohio.  Gray, overcast sludgy skies.  A threat of either rain or, maybe, sleet.  No sunshine breaking through anywhere overhead and no scent of snow.  

If you’ve ever lived anywhere it does snow a lot, you learn to smell a sharp crispness in the air, just before you see, or feel, the first flakes of a new snow.  We do not have that now.  There is more of a foulness on the wind.  A mixture of car exhaust, with a tinge of oily asphalt and dumpsters.  Like behind an abandoned warehouse.

We want to feel better.  We want to say, “Hey, smile.  It’ll get better.  This is just a tough time for everyone.”  And, “The economy is doing great.  Money is flowing.  Fewer people are out of work.”  But then, why are we at each others’ throats all the time.   Why when it seems to be a prosperous time, do so many people feel such inner despair?

Why, when an acquaintance asks, “How are ya?”, is it so painful and feels so hypocritical to simply say, “Great.”  Or, even “I’m good.  I’m Good.” ?  When in your mind you’re really thinking, “Everything is totally fucked up.”  Of course, you can’t do that.  You can’t really say that, or how you are really feeling.

My theory is that this is because our current world as we know it, is hanging just below the sword of Damocles.  And, the tiny thread that holds it, is in the hand of either one idiot or another, every other day.  Massive numbers of people are being shoved from one hell-hole to another.  And the reason these places have become hell-holes is so obviously because of greed or ignorance or bigotry.  Or, all of these plus insanity over issues that are essentially because of one Divine Notion Cult attempting to annihilate another Divine Notion Cult.  Completely oblivious to the millions of people in between.

Destruction and death are the only goals, if these maniacs do not get “their way”.

We all know from history that “trickle down economics” doesn’t work, because the rich love their richness and never let it trickle anywhere.  However, “madness” does trickle down.  It only took one Mad Emperor to bring down four centuries of “The Glory that was Rome”.  It only took one mad Chancellor of one country to bring on a World War that killed millions and millions of people everywhere.  As it is said, “The fish rots from the head.”  This seems to be very obvious.  Especially today.