Saturday, October 22, 2005

MRS. OMED OPINES: Hearts like Knives by Els Sat Oct 22, 2005 at 10:52:52 AM PDT Lashaun Ternice Harris took her children for a walk.  Small children, smooth faced and open.  A blue stroller.  I imagine them as trusting as children living in a homeless shelter can be.  Lashaun took her children for a walk and carefully, perhaps lovingly undressed them and calmly, deliberately gave them to the sea. Lashaun Ternice Harris stood there blankly while the world swirled around her, police arrived and good Samaritans, and quietly allowed herself to be placed in the back seat of the car and taken away.  I wonder if the arresting officers had stuffed animals in their back windows like they do where I live.  And I wonder if they noticed that Lashaun, with her disheveled hair and "focus on me" t-shirt, smelled of goats. The prosecutor hasn't ruled out asking for the death penalty for this young woman who stood with one hand over her face and the other holding her attorney's hand throughout her arraignment.  But have you?   Lashaun Ternice Harris has a history of mental illness.  She struggled with schizophrenia, even taken medication for it for a short time this summer.  Had stopped.  Lost her fragile grip on the tether that kept her in this world and not her own.   In Schizophrenia: Questions And Answers, a booklet available online, the authors say those who suffer from schizophrenia don't experience reality the same way the rest of the world does.  "Living in a world that can appear distorted, changeable, and lacking the reliable landmarks we all use to anchor ourselves to reality, a person with schizophrenia may feel anxious and confused. This person may seem distant, detached, or preoccupied, and may even sit as rigidly as a stone, not moving for hours and not uttering a sound." Did you know that they think it might be cats?  Or not so much cats what they carry and shed.  Milton M. McAllister thinks that part of the problem is a tricky pathogen.  McAllister is a professor of no small reputation.  He gave a paper earlier this week at a conference in New Zealand with a laundry list of action items that boiled down to: Keep pet cats inside, stop feeding strays, cook meat sufficiently and reconsider the way the veterinary profession and public health agencies think - and teach - about the zoonotic pathogen Toxoplasma gondii. Cat scat is making us sick?  Frankly that seems unreal to me, evidence of a distorted, changeable universe.  Hardly believable.  Tin foil hat worthy even.  A trickster god's gift to humanity: the door to neverwhere opened through a litterpan.   Did you know that they can take a picture of your brain and see schizophrenia's changes?  Ventricular enlargement.  Signs of atrophy.  Potentially a smaller thalamus.  The stigmata of a broken brain.  And yet this ravagement is anything but rare.  One in a hundred people are diagnosed with schizophrenia.  More than insulin dependant diabetes.  More than Alzheimer's.  More than MS or Muscular Distrophy.  Like cracked pots with frizzled glaze, they strain under the burden of the everyday, lost to themselves and to us.  They are the distant cousins of Manic Depressives, the opposite end of a scale of misfiring synapses and pain and redemption.  And no one holds a telethon or invites them to make a wish. Dr. Omed is bipolar, so I live every day with the uncertainty of profound mental illness.  We dance that dance together, he and I.  I love and hate his medications and his moods.  I know far more than I want to about Risperal and  Remeron, Wellbutrin and Lithium.  I fear his part time connection to that world where schizophrenics live at the four hammer end of mania when the sidewalks move to meet his feet.  I once spent a vacation to Paris in the waiting room on the psychiatric floor, begging him to come back to me. THE FLOOR 13 MUG SHOT (HOSPITAL POLAROID) But about the goats.  You can tell a schizophrenic by the way they smell.  In your hind brain, even if you don't much register it, these people don't smell right.  Not to the rest of us.  There is a chemical explanation that hardly matters.  And for their sins, they are largely rewarded with homelessness, with drug dependence and alcoholism, with suicide.  Dr. Omed has a schizophrenic friend.  A brilliant man, writer of rants so good that Dennis Miller used them back when he was still funny and relevant.   We met this writer on a trip to Denver.  I'd been warned, so I didn't flinch at the sight of his arm or arms, I hardly know how to say it.  Mostly, he has only one.  One day, years ago, God demanded that he sacrifice his arms under a train.  So he did.  Reconstruction made him into a child's clay rendition of a man, all akimbo.  Or maybe a cubists deconstruction of a man.   Dr. Omed and he talked.   I sipped coffee and watched their hands puppet talk an entirely different conversation, the kabuki dance of the damned.  This went on quite pleasantly until I couldn't be there any more and dragged Dr. Omed out into the Denver winter cold and snow where it felt safer and far saner. Lashaun Ternice Harris undressed her three small boys and gave them to the sea, her heart like knives, consuming them with the fierce love of an altered world. I fear for her.  I fear for us.  Grant us mercy as we judge her.  Grant her peace. 3:02:44 PM    comment []

SCISSOR DANCE POSTCARD #1 THE EYES HAVE IT I had it in mind for some time to start making Scissor Dance Postcards. That I did, sending out scanned and completed scp-cards to various pilgrims by snail mail as...something like a cross between a party favor and a holy relic...a little piece of Dr. Omed in the mailbox. I like postcards. I like buying them, sending them, and recieving them. I have a lot of them. Hundreds. I liked the idea of doing collage in a smaller format, and working over the pre-existing image and text on the postcard, incorporating it into the composition. Most of these little collages I made as gifts for specific friends. I do both sides of the postcard, and mail them in an envelope. Oddly enough, it usually takes longer to complete a postcard than it does to do a full size Scissor Dance. The card you see above is a bit different. It is the first one I made. I used a blank watercolor stock postcard, and just did one side. I wondered if I was done wih it for a while, thought about sending it out, but somehow I didn't. Then I found a frame that was perfect for it. So now it's hanging on my wall.  Those of you in the congregation who have not recieved one of these cards, and are suddenly feeling neglected, please email Dr. Omed a current postal address (even if you think I already have it), to get your very own personalized scissor dance postcard. I'm not promising quick delivery; it may take some time, but eventually it will arrive. 12:55:06 AM    comment []