30/09/13
Schizophrenia. What to say? He had a mean streak, but there are reasons for that. It's just a bad combo. He wasn't an evil person, inasmuch as I don't believe in the existence of evil as an ontological thing. But we've all a capacity for cruelty, and if the entirety of human history demonstrates one thing, it's that all the intersectional cruelties we've dealt to each other, magnified by our own eternally-internal bullshit... well, life is a feedback loop of self-perpetuating war. Life is war and hell. Hell is subjectivity.
He'd become kind and gentle. I only ever visited his place once in my adult life, and he was super-stoked that I was into music. He lent me his Kiss "Alive!" double-CD. He was maybe a decade older than I was, and I remember when I first started going to parties, it was kind of an oh-shit thing when he'd show up. By the time I'd moved away and would occasionally visit my hometown, he'd mellowed with the help of both age and meds.
I know I knew him long before, but my first resounding memory of him is this:
My mom and I are alone in my grandparents' house. I think it's before my grandfather died? No, it's gotta be after. But still, for some reason it's already strange that we're alone in the house. Grammy must be in Miramichi. My mom grabs me unexpectedly and says "We're going for a drive." I didn't understand what was going on until I looked out the dining-room window, and there he was, pacing back and forth in front of the house with an axe in his hand. It was pretty scary, and I sure didn't understand it at the time. I don't remember where we went or what we did. All I can remember is how freaked-out my mom was, and this guy stalking the place we were staying, on a rural route, with an axe.
I came to "understand" schizophrenia much later, with the help of a few books and some real-life experiences. I put that in quotations because even cognitive science continues to misapprehend exactly what it is, or if it even is a unified disorder. A mind is just not a quantifiable thing.
In later years, he always called when I came to town. He spoke slowly and with a kind of slow-motion precision--an approach to communication I revere.
He died last night, in an altercation with some cops.
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He'd become kind and gentle. I only ever visited his place once in my adult life, and he was super-stoked that I was into music. He lent me his Kiss "Alive!" double-CD. He was maybe a decade older than I was, and I remember when I first started going to parties, it was kind of an oh-shit thing when he'd show up. By the time I'd moved away and would occasionally visit my hometown, he'd mellowed with the help of both age and meds.
I know I knew him long before, but my first resounding memory of him is this:
My mom and I are alone in my grandparents' house. I think it's before my grandfather died? No, it's gotta be after. But still, for some reason it's already strange that we're alone in the house. Grammy must be in Miramichi. My mom grabs me unexpectedly and says "We're going for a drive." I didn't understand what was going on until I looked out the dining-room window, and there he was, pacing back and forth in front of the house with an axe in his hand. It was pretty scary, and I sure didn't understand it at the time. I don't remember where we went or what we did. All I can remember is how freaked-out my mom was, and this guy stalking the place we were staying, on a rural route, with an axe.
I came to "understand" schizophrenia much later, with the help of a few books and some real-life experiences. I put that in quotations because even cognitive science continues to misapprehend exactly what it is, or if it even is a unified disorder. A mind is just not a quantifiable thing.
In later years, he always called when I came to town. He spoke slowly and with a kind of slow-motion precision--an approach to communication I revere.
He died last night, in an altercation with some cops.
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