Public Comment

This is a quote from me, but I don't doubt someone else has said this long before I arrived at it: 

The wish in life is to do something, or be something or someone, you fill that, or you don't, you experience it, and it is or isn't what you wanted or thought it would be, but then it is finite - you experience it, and it is gone... 

Here is another one: 

Life: fairness has nothing to do with it; things happen and that is the nature of living in the physical world... 

I arrived at both, but I have no doubt that many, many others have said those things long before I came along. 

A break to the bone like the one Becky had to her ankle, doubtless, is the kind of pain you might have, one hopes, only a couple times in your life. I had surgery to remove four impacted wisdom teeth at age 30, and I was brought home in a van. It was the end of the month, and my debit card was declined at the grocery store. I had no food, I could not get my prescriptions for pain medicine filled because it was the weekend, so there was nothing I could do about the incredible post-surgery pain. The surgeons had been rushing it. I was under local anesthesia only, which was at my insistence. I am surprised I even survived the surgery--the two surgeons were awful, and it was a Medi-Cal funded surgery. 

I called the hospital and asked to be taken into psych emergency. My thinking was I needed food and I needed Motrin and Tylenol, and this would be the method of getting those things. I claimed I was suicidal because of the intense physical pain. 

The passing of Senator Feinstein is another mark of time, and someone other than me should write about it. But it is a reminder that we are all mortal. The psychotic person may get worse when we attempt to face ugly facts of life. The brain doesn't want to deal with it and comes up with illusions in the vain attempt to protect us from facts. 

I've been a frequent contributor in recent months to the Street Sheet - not to be confused with the Street Spirit, which is on hiatus until it raises the cash it needs to get going again. The stories involve a lot of hard work, and the act of writing well is usually hard work. But I've been putting off a lot of things I have to deal with. I've become a procrastinator. Procrastinating probably doesn't show up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that clinicians use to determine a person's diagnosis. 

If I take a bit of time off, you won't be aware of it because I can crank out a couple of good essays and store them to be used as needed. Nine out of ten or more of my essays in the Planet are not time sensitive, and they relate to anything that occurs to me at the time I'm sitting down to write. Or I might get a random idea--and if I'm able to, I will store it in my phone for later retrieval, to use as subject matter. 

We should be thankful to Becky and Michael for bringing us the Berkeley Daily Planet for all of these years - time and energy spent for which it may be hard to define the reward. Becky has told me that my writings are a help to a lot of people. If my goal in life was to make a fortune, I'm in the worst possible area of endeavor. 

My writings in the Planet demonstrate that a person with a psychiatric condition can use his or her mind and can compete in arenas in which you might not expect. I have a body of work which is searchable on the internet. I am a successful writer. The big money hasn't come and possibly never will. Yet these writings will possibly outlive me, and they might in the future be studied by historians as well as psychology and psychiatry students. I would hope. 

I keep pulling my books for sale off the shelf because I might believe for a moment that a book isn't selling well enough, or I might think that I'm not being compensated enough, for possible sales that aren't being recorded or renumerated by the various vendors. But currently there are books available. The three I left for sale consist of two short fiction collections, and a book I published in 2012, "Instructions for Dealing with Schizophrenia..." which over the years has consistently sold and has brought bits of money. I'm hoping to come out with a new short story collection, and this time around I might do a lot more to encourage people to buy copies. 

The way that I go about self-publishing only costs me the sixty-five-dollar fee to register it with the Copyright Office plus the cost of a proof copy from the publisher. I don't pay any intermediary to do any of it. There's no way that I'm going to pay someone to make my work readable; I will do that myself. 

Currently the publishing field is in a fight to the death against use of AI, which can now write a book or other manuscript better than most aspiring authors can--and can do this dirt cheap. AI is ruining the publishing industry and it its users are breaking a bunch of laws including infringement and worse. I was selling writing twenty years before AI became prevalent, and I'm now including this fact in my cover letters when I submit to a publication. Anyway, I've gone on long enough for this week, I conclude this with a big THANK YOU! to Becky and Michael for producing the Planet all these years, when it might seem like there could be easier and more fun things to do.