the war is over

I'd started to think it couldn't happen again. Perhaps my whole thing was, what's one of the annoying things to call it?, just a psycho-spiritual crisis. Ran its course.

Nope.

It's still schizophrenia. And "it came for me" again.

I made two mistakes:

1. indulging I can "simulate" people (via my own insight) with my imagination
2. accepting some notion of an "information realm"; i.e. degrees of astral projection/reception

And in the last long hours of the harvest, the latest things I thought in the tractor slid off the rails again until... these are not thoughts, these are the whispers... or was there ever any difference!? No, it's like riding a bicycle - normal is me feeling the moving of the pedals. But now "me" "feeling" "the pedals" are suddenly coming inside quotation marks.

Oh, but it starts as a brilliant day: the characters and continuity of about half of U.S.S. Al crystallized hilariously and I cleared out the muddled spots of the entire Chronotrono cycle. I filled almost half a notepad.

But then I felt facts dropping in - literally, a soft physical sense like they were downloading out of the ether... and it was only a hop and a skip to an eidetic hallucination (an extremely vivid "mind's eye" image) of myself, trim and younger than ever 300,000 years in the future - still grinning, so ridiculously human, the plan all along which I was now ready for him to tell himself about...

Then things got really weird.

I took the meds I'd kept for this emergency - a re-emergency of madness. I laid in bed to sleep but my mind flew through the night then the next day. I walked to the pharmacy for sleeping pills but they made no difference while I did what I could to resist delusion but I remembered, saw it again in the colors and the words around us, the Matrix of our shared, similar minds - no paranormal needed...

And I couldn't help myself that part of it; I filled half another notepad - this time with deeply personal things as I looked for a way to document my own schizophrenic experience, the parallel and tangential lines of my inner world. But I lived in aching fear that this time would be the end of that world - my mind - and everything else I've spent the last year and a half rebuilding. That the nightmares would come, then last during the day. The moments when another revelation flips your life over as a sham, sudden bursts of poignancy that leave your every emotion suspect of fraud. No genuine you anymore.

And I looked at myself in the mirror, saw the eyes minutely drifting apart... the visual hallucinations are the worst - what would I never be able to forget this time? and how would seeing them further the spiral of collapsing mind?

Well, the simple part of dealing with it was leaving my contacts out.

Remember continuity, I circled in my pad.

But I'm not sure if I should trust the Beatles when "Tomorrow Never Knows" plays on my brain's loudspeakers.

Still I had to walk past the mirror again and had to look at it and saw metallic streaks in those eyes - knives in my eyes I was glad not to see. But I wasn't afraid.

But I realized after the next midnight I'd made a horrible mistake - I'd taken anti-depressants instead of anti-psychotics! Great, now I was going to be insane but in a good mood about it! There was no finding the ones I'd left in the house. I woke up my brother and in what was a long, time-dilated drive for me, we drove to the shed where I'm keeping my truck with the remainder of the pills which had worked before. But is this a test? I asked whatever gods I'm mixed up in, a test to see if I'll do what I need to do to take care of myself, even ask for help?

I slept sporadically, finally. I remembered to do my other meds - I've been using meditation software since spring 2007 and I've found myself calmer and less splintered than when I forget it. I took more pills.

Things seemed to be calming down as I got ready to visit my psychologist. Then my face started twisting into a horrible grimace.

Twisting for real. My brother saw it and said "oh, shit." My jaw started jutting out and shifting to the right then to the left then wide open then to the right as hard as it could jerk. I had to grit my teeth, consciously struggling - I looked like a maniac.

I truly looked like someone dosed with the Joker's smile gas.

I knew, I just knew - this was my schizophrenia's last gasp. The medicine was beginning to kick in and this was its reaction; it wouldn't go without a fight. I could hear the whispers... "your schizophrenia loves you! your schizophrenia loves you!" Enough laughing it off, boy. Serious! Consequences!

Schizophrenia was gonna break my face. Like a loan shark, wanting payback for all the fun. And with total honesty I say - it was worse than being run over by a tractor.

Can I break my own jaw? Is my jaw strong enough to break itself? Is schizophrenia? I'd already learned to be afraid of how belief based it was - that if I believed schizophrenia could make my jaw break itself maybe then and only then it could?

It felt like it could. It felt like it was. If I relaxed a moment, my lower jaw went an agonizingly hard right. I tried re-focusing, trying to influence some direction. I let my tongue stick out and it strained like it was trying to break free. My entire head hung. My mom came to drive me to my appointment and I tried talking with her as a distraction, my voice laughable like someone who had been novocained. I thought of the ending of Fight Club.

Is this the ending? Do I need cathartic physical damage?

I needed medical attention, not cognitive-behavioral therapy. I wanted a shot or something, make it go numb. We called my doctor who agreed to see me but I need to be hospitalized... no, no, I can't afford it, not again... I stuffed my face with napkins and bit down for an hour's drive back the way I'd come. But I thought it was tiring.

This was outside his expertise, my family practitioner said, and he wouldn't give me a shot. He asked about the medication I took. He asked me how much I'd taken. Because he thought it was a side effect -

No, no, it's the schizophrenia... I tried to tell him, with a mouth of swollen tongue as I was lying on the medical bed..

The side effects of an overdose include motor disturbances, including facial grimaces. (Like Tourette's - in your face.) Because in 24 hours I'd taken two-and-a-half times the regular dose. Suddenly, without working myself up to it.

And as heard this I was literally seeing the light, staring up at the fluorescent ceiling light and thinking of a joke I'd invented for my plays - that the light you see near-death isn't quite the light of heaven welcoming you, but the light of doctors examining you in the afterlife when you suddenly wake up in a white room with their medical scope in your eye, looking for the medical reason:

Why did you have such problems? What was your major malfunction!? Another dumb miserable bastard we can't let into Heaven, because we want to keep it Heaven!

The tension drifted away almost immediately. The mistaken belief "my schizophrenia" was fighting me drove my side effects into the macabre. The error was deeper in my frame. I don't have schizophrenia like a parasite; I am schizophrenic - it's just a description of my physical brain. Maybe this is what AA means when they say someone's always an alcoholic. The pedals are mine even when I can't feel them anymore.

And a whole chapter of my life ended with the same ending I knew I'd use in the play, with the light all around me as I whispered "the wawr is ovahr... the wawr is ovahr..."

Driving home my Dad told me the kind of story you'd think the Trickster planned; he'd hauled a load of beans down to sell. He had to wait real long in line so finally he had to get out of the truck, get woke up, get the stiffness out. Then they told him - they found a weevil in the sample. He had a bug in there; they took it but docked him a nickel.

You see - I still had a weevil in me. Planning on a fight. Seeing a fight in me, when I just need to get my feet back to the pedals.

So I just took a few days where I did something you wouldn't think to suggest to a schizophrenic - I thought. I thought deliberately and consciously - as one person. Like Spider-man filling a thought balloon. Not running narration or free association, but deliberation. The OD had pretty well worked but I did hear a few whispers; but I asked myself what are my own beliefs and desires that could generate them?

And when, when did I start thinking in dialogue? Or the passive tense, without the subject "I"?

And one by one on long bike rides I stomped down on each bug I found in me. I could tell at night when I'd wake up that I was unglued, pieces of me could be lost. But the nightmares never came like two years ago.

After a week, when the medication I took should be long out of my system there were still no hallucinations. My family agreed I seemed okay; better, in fact, than before this started. My psychologist agrees. My doctor says I'm a lucky guy.

My damnation burst; the waters broke loose. I rode the river.

So I've been back to work and finished all the discing. In the irony department, I did not have time for my planned Halloween costume - I was going to be the Bat-Joker, clown make-up with the mask and an old bat-shirt and jacket, not to go anywhere but just ride around town cackling like a maniac and frightening children. Clearly, not a positive outlet. Once again, schizophrenia lets you live the adventure.

What was this truncated episode about? I decided, somewhere in me even among the broken places, in delusion and action I would do what I need to do. My worst fear, that the psychosis would return, has been met.

And handled.

The war is over, the peace has barely begun.

But, oh please, my readers, don't think I'm sane... Perhaps I'm simply experiencing the most mundane, boring hallucinations ever. Why, maybe it's all a pack of lies. More likely, I myself am one giant, mighty irrationality; it's all about the union of my madness. Because I remembered - I am schizophrenic. A crazy person. And now I've got my crazy back. I'm finally whole again, not denying that hole in my head. I slowed it down to manageable levels but I pump up new ideas every day... Maybe war is good for business, but enough's enough.

My economy of mind is flourishing.

The war is over... There was no war.

winner

Way to go, kid with the crazy name.

Portmanteau-bama (and other things one thinks of in the tractor)

[photoshops I don't feel like doing:]

Hello-bama (Barack face on Hello Kitty)
Snow-bama (on snowman)
Slow-bama (on caution sign)
sew-bama (on sweater)
whooooaa-bama (on bucking bronco)
GOOOOOOOAAAL!-bama (on soccer player)
Mo' bama Mo'bama Mo'bama (on In Living Color sketch characters no one else remembers)
Crow-bama (on goth superhero's head)
toe-bama (on one little piggie)
bow-bama (on bowtie)
blow-bama (face on Monica Lewinsky's dress)

Gobama: because it rhymes!

------------------------------

Ghostbusters 3:

Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II are in no small part inspiration for the style I want Chronotrono's employees adventures in this dimension to be like. Maybe one step to the left of Ghostbusters and two steps to the right of Get Smart, but around in there.

As most of us have heard, they're making a third film - regardless of the rightness of this action - which accidentally started me to thinking... what if I were suddenly and in complete disregard for all possibility called on to write it?

First off, let's be gald Harold "Egon" Ramis is our director. Seriously, "Groundhog Day" and a steady run of other quietly winning fantasy comedies.

Ray Stanz (Dan Akroyd) remains the lone ghostbuster keeping the firehouse alive. Behind his desk is the painting of the four originals with the baby from the end of Ghostbusters II, but it and other homages are kept in the background. The Ghostbusters have essentially put themselves out of their briefly international business - trailer can cut to Japanese and French Janines answering phones for the "Who ya gonna call" set up, but those days are long past. Also frustratingly, as the years pass more and more "retrograde amnesia" sets in for those who've had ghostly encounters, owing to the stress and psychic drain of paranormal encounters. More and more the Ghostbusters most famous are met with explanations like those of Holocaust deniers.

Winston drops in with a sack lunch for his embarassed son, who is training to be like his old man, then later demonstrates some fancy ghostbuster on the "proton pack shooting range" they've built in the country. (Lots of very cheap cardboard springing up and flying.)

Our story would mostly follow the hot young Hollywood actors from the Judd Apatow Actor's Petting Zoo I think he keeps behind his house. Or I assume I'd be pleasantly stuck with.

So Michael Cera as Michael Cera (as he's always cast) fulfills his lifelong dream and is hired as a Ghostbuster, a job that's considered somewhere between being an astronaut and a garbageman. The ensemble is filled out with Seth Rogen as Seth Rogen and James Franco as James Franco (aka the faded James Dean look-alike coasting on his charm). Also - Ellen Page as The Spunky Girl. Enjoy her scenes drawing elaborate harnesses for wearing the 50-lb proton pack and finally nearly crushing herself putting one on. Seth is the kind of lazy one, who nevertheless knows his 'busting and has a nice "Back off, man, I'm a scientist" T-shirt. James Franco actually got involved in the business to boast his career as an actor, but it has only translated into a series of sci-fi B-movies. He continually visits the firehouse, despite technically being a back-up 'buster, as it becomes clear he has no other real friends, except a few crew members from his last film. Nevertheless, the requisite Michael Cera-Ellen Page screen romance I assume focus groups would force me to include moves itself along.

One brief scene with Siguorney Weaver. She's in a huge, rich man's bed. The phone rings, she picks it up half-asleep then hands it over to her husband who sits up... and is Bill Murray. His one, and only one line: "How did you get this number?" Perfect response for after the trailer asks "Who ya gonna call?"

One extra possible scene: After the day is saved, Dr Venkman shows up for his business's parade. Young girls scream with signs that say "We love you Venkman!" He turns to Michael Cera, astruck by one of his heroes "Never call me before nine. But you did alright, kid." "Dr Venkman, I..." "Yes, and we appreciate that you do." then he's signing some young girls autograph book.

Oh, and I guess for the plot - well, it's a strange case that gets called in. Apparently... some ghosts robbed a bank. Oh yes, it's a small upstate New York town where the mirthy police recommended this one to the professional Spook-stompers or whatever they're called. "Why would a ghost rob a bank?" "Funerals ARE getting expensive."

Well, it turns out that ghosts are being controlled by a necro-mancer, a flamboyantly poor dresser who was summarily fired from the Ghostbusters over ten years ago for his controversial attempts at experimenting on ghosts. He needed the money to complete his ghost-summoning device, which will draw ghosts from all over the world to him - and then lead an assault right on the firehouse to complete his revenge. He's honestly not sure what he'll do after that. "Rule over all the living with the dead?" Unfortunately, it proves harder to control the ghosts with his magick-enabled technologies and the ghostbusters essentially have to built a giant trap in Central Park to catch them all.

Somewhere in there, Ray receives terrible news "Egon Spiengler is dead... Egon's dead!" Egon had gone on to do important psychical research in Prague. Ray then whoops excitedly, alerting everyone as he runs to a machine in the basement. "Egon... Egon Spiengler is dead?" Michael Cera stammers. "Why is Ray so happy?" "He's in the will?" Egon and Ray have made a plan so that if one them dies, the other would contact him on the other side with a machine they'd invited, essentialy a ghost Instant Messager. The experiment seems to fail, and Ray is heart-broken, finlly realizing he'll never speak to his friend again. They all go to the funeral ("Egon got fat!" "Shh!")... but at the firehouse slowly realize Egon's ghost has worked his way into the entire computer, posessing it. The new system, E.G.O.N. ("We'll decided what it's an acronym for later!" is the new general super-ghostbusting fact-finding system (like the Bat-computer) delivered in Harold Ramis's famous deadpan. Yay, easy science!

Less successfully, Ray tried to develop a ghostbusting robot - like a police bomb-sniffer - called B.U.S.T.E.R. also to be a kid-friendly public relations character. ("Ever since that unfortunate incident with Slimer and the kid holding the ice cream cone." Cut to case photo file of Slimer attempting to swallow an ice cream cone along with the hand of the small precocious child holding it.) BUSTER constantly broke down and earned the spite of the entire team as Ray still required them to take it and attempt to use it whenever possible. During the ghost attack, all the negative psychic energy surrounding the robot leads it to come alive and blast at the team with its own proton streams.

Then more stuff happens and the good guys win.

I shan't think of it anymore knowing the writers of the US "The Office" are working on it. But I am always available for Ghostbusters 4.

-------------------------------

rhymes for our times

My rush to tell the tale an aching dud
Leaving me ahold the bag: broken cookies and mud

Amongst so much confusion where to start?
(Please find attached a rough draft of my heart.)

At all points I had so many nice things to say
but me not near ready - how ensure she'll stay away?

It's not impossible my feelings could find return
But there's too much to be done for the life which I yearn

If I'd only abandon what was never much of a plan
That made it all that much harder to understand

fan mail

"Chronotrono's influence is considered in every act of creativity I pursue."
-a living person

Is Chronotrono's influence being considered in every act of creativity YOU pursue? Because it oughta be.

And soon it will - for all of us.

[Jim wears a plaid overcoat and gathers his suspects in a room, puffing on a pipe that blows bubbles. Then writes this instead.] last in a series.

My actual feelings upon seeing I was Failure were something like chilling disappointment.

"This is really creepy" was a thought. Yet I'd been expecting it for a long time.

Really, I don't get off on insulting people. But someone is actually paying to do this. Then, from the perspective of comedy writing... Ah, but they've held the domain for two years. This is serious. And this is someone who may have been hit in the head one too many times.

I'd know, because I think I'm the one who hit him.

It was the end of summer two years ago, at a party where I'd been drinking tequila through a crazy straw. It was an 80s party and I'd been wearing a huge cardboard Optimus Prime costume and perhaps feeling like Rodimus trying to fill in for that great bot, and - no, wait, it mostly the tequila - anyway, upset about the usual crap plus the meta-upset that the usual crap was upsetting me and a couple more twists of self-consciousness, I decided maybe I needed to change up my life strategies. Like a complete 180. I decided, for the first time since kindergarten, to commit an act of intentional evil. I was gonna start breaking those empty bottles over there over some heads. I thought it would make me feel better.

And in the end, it wouldn't matter ("like everyone else I've done in life!!!"). So I picked up all I could carry (four). And started looking for someone not to like very much. I found him making out with the girl who makes out with everyone except me, as she'd told me I was crazy and someday would start hitting people in the head with bottles. I'll never forget his exact words as I staggered up to them: "You have four bottles."

That's when I hit him with the biggest one I had. Disappointingly, it did not break. I tossed it aside to try another, missed completely, and he ran off. Someone was yelling at me. I laughed callously. I hate the 80s.

Then I heard he was bleeding. He was going to the hospital. Super-dumbass mode Optimus, no!, that was an entire freaking heavy bottle. All shit hit all fans within me and, man, can I shit. I went to the hospital to immediately apologize and pay for all damages but, for some reason, he didn't want to talk to me. Later, I heard he needed four stitches. Then, I tried to turn myself in to the police. The officer, with sad bemusement, said not to worry they'd come to get me.

Anyway, no one ever came to get me.

Yet I was told in no uncertain terms by someone who knew him that he would himself. Except soon, it didn't matter because a full-blown, greenhouse world full of florid psychosis came instead.

I'm not sure if I did what I did because I was going crazy or I went crazy because I did what I did. My roommate backed out of our lease at the last moment and I had to quit my new job. The morning I moved out my world began filling with my 'over-active imagination' but with strange, seemingly external controls over me. Concerned by my increasingly odd behavior - I thought someone had stolen a penny from me - everyone I could stay with kicked me out. As I walked nowhere with my bags I finally realized I'd been taken over by voices. And they were going to make me kill myself. Because they could. They were the final manifestation; we are all so much socially constructed poop. But before they could, I heard and felt a silver cord snap within me and I knew this was what it felt like to die. Except my body kept going and I was along for the ride inside the robot Jim Trapp, Jim Trapp, Jim Trapp...

I regained some of myself but soon I believed my friends had attempted to "brainwash me clean". They wanted me to learn RESPECT AND FEAR.

I knew this was schizophrenia, to whatever extent it'd been influenced. However, the doctors refused to diagnosis me, just gave me medications to try. "No one really knows what schizophrenia is... that's just what they call it when people describe symptoms like yours." It's an umbrella term, you see. But I like umbrellas.

For weeks they whispered. Then, to punish me, said they left post-hypnotic suggestions to fill my world with terrifying and painful hallucinations - auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory. Interestingly - I could only hallucinate one sense at a time. All day, invisible spiders crawled over me, pustules grew on my face and exploded, fish hooks cut through my mouth, my whole body stretched and skewed. I awoke from dreams where wolves devoured me alive and had turds hang in my mouth. I believed my family had been brainwashed - to hate me, possibly kill me. Then God Itself even got involved. But everywhere the world grew colder until finally I got the right dosage. But the echoes, confusion, the brokenness was everything left and - as soon as I finally trusted them enough to talk to them again - my parents had me hospitalized. A week cost me $10,000. No insurance would cover it. And I still faced the deepest, bleakest depression of my life.

Then I got better!

Until now, I have intentionally avoided any public discussion of the specifics of my illness as they are painful and unbelievable. I'm pretty much required to write a memoir now. But until then, I in fact go the long way about describing my life to avoid schizophrenia's real legacy on my thoughts and feelings. Against the meat you'd expect of such an experience and the "interesting philosophical implications" and while in the supermarket lights of the blogosphere, what I've put up may look like so much phoney baloney. Thoughtful, sensitive writing isn't its own reward for me like talking like a jackass.

But I assure you, I am the real deal. It was a war; grandpa doesn't like to talk about it.

I am not so melodramatic as to say schizophrenia is hell but I am so melodramatic as to say schizophrenia is heck. And I have been to heck and back.

So in other words, if the owner of my rival domain is who I think it is, I have received my karma. I looked it up - if the charges had amounted to anything, it'd been battery; the maximum possible sentence would have been a year. I got nine months in my mind, a harsh motherfucking prison. I suppose that's a little time-off for good behavior, it was my first offense, but still that long before I felt my ordeal was over. And I even paid a fine.

Then again, maybe if it's him, he doesn't believe in karma.

Maybe someone saw that I'd finally started again to build something worth destroying. Maybe whoever it is still believes I should be taught RESPECT AND FEAR - of course the real reason to deface my site. I'm sorry, but I've really been turned off of those two.

Beyond that this is the only person I know I've given cause to hold a grudge, who the criminal justice system was letting down two years ago at this time. I was specifically warned he would not let it go. I have indeed found stories of his creative revenge, where "just hating [someone] was his whole world for three days." But we're all characters these days.

So if he could finally know and be satisfied that life took care of this one for him, we could all close the case. I only hit people with wiffle bats now. But I am willing to drive a long way to hit someone with a wiffle bat. And God help me, I'll aim for the exact same spot. But I really, really don't want to have to tell myself I need to do that.

Or we can all just leave an ex-con in peace.

Not coming soon: my album of sci-fi inspired Johnny Cash covers, The Mind is a Harsh Motherfucking Prison

comic playwrighting wrongs

The jig is up. All I needed were a few clues. I just needed to push a few buttons for you to dispense them.

You didn't think I could possibly have a plan.

I provoked you for a response and you jumped all over. And, I admit, you broke a window. But worth sacrificing; anonymity - that "'hmm, but it says 'jimtapp.com' - perhaps it really is just someone who's also a Nigerian banker who picked up the domain..." plausible deniability - was the one thing that could save you from my wiffle bat.

Seriously - no, SERIOUSLY - you can't really brag to your friends about that script kiddie stuff can you? A program you downloaded from some seedy spot on the internet? Spraying someone else's graffiti. The wikipedia of "Failure"? Someone else's joke.

I know your M.O. I know your B.O.

But I also know mine.

It's not justice without the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so hold on and - together - we'll wrap this case up next time.

I pissed off Anonymous!

So at 1:05 AM the night after my last post the index file at www.sexaconglomotechcorp.com was altered. Please be advised we still supply only sexual innuendo, not actual sex; not only are those garish links not ours, we'd really really recommend you not install anything from them.

Dammit, I have to stop giving my enemies ideas.

Note to my haxxors: The links don't show up in IE. Please fix. You're making yourselves look bad again.

Ah crap, there I go with the helping... There was also a whole weird hidden folder; it looks like they actually got in sometime in September. Anyway, I'll take down the mess after I've checked out "passion for sudan" and "therapause hot flash strips". (Oh, and after my site-hosting transfer goes thru.)

In good news: Mad Scientists in Love is on googlebooks! Madness, Science, and Love Forever

Bad news: Lost five hundred dollars in potash stocks. (Wait... are THEY behind everything!?)