If you were sent to prison for an undefined amount of time, what would you miss most?

I actually think about this a lot, especially since I feel like my art and thoughts could potentially get me into trouble. The more oppressive globalizationists and theotechnocrats become, the more this paranoia comes to resemble an eventuality. Yet, I cannot violate my principles as a human being and say nothing. For this reason, I must prepare myself mentally to deal with the possibility of imprisonment by the will of a modern gestapo.

I've been "voluntarily" imprisoned in "mental health" facilities. I have a firm understanding of what it's like to be deprived of freedom and basic human dignity for extended periods of time. From what I understand, after talking to many prisoners, it's a very similar experience. When you're in the slammer or funny farm for long enough, you become "institutionalized" in the head.

If you figure out the game, you'll learn how to be a "better criminal" while still being a "model prisoner." Going home will be scarier than staying locked up. It has to be that way. Otherwise, the dehumazination gets to be too much and you'll need meds to erase emotions that make it impossible to survive. This is why I hold on to my insanity and regard it so dearly. It reminds me that I am still a person.

I would miss the outside world in general and I would never forget it. But, if I am a captive, I must dispatch myself of any hope if there is no freedom in sight. Hope of escape or rescue is the worst curse that can befall on the captive. The notions of escape beyond the confines of imagination are only useful when you are beyond hope, and are ready for "do or die."

I would try to be a model prisoner and adapt to my culture. This should buy me enough freedom to be myself. Superficial assimilation sometimes is the best way to not lose yourself. A pirate who smuggled some Aleve for me and my mom taught me that.

The exception to this rule would be if my captors were forcing me to commit treason, betray my loved ones, or violate a fundamental part of my moral directive. At that point, my goal would be to escape by any means necessary, including deadly violence. If escape is not possible, I will commit suicide before I can be restrained and tortured into violating my principles. Should suicide fail, I will try to stay as quiet and calm as possible while being tortured with the hope that death will come soon. I know I am capable of doing this. I must be.

This was a downer post.

Humanity does not need laws against drug use, but against rather drugged up behavior and, drugs that do not meet quality or labeling standards.  Ending all prohibition would effectively end the war on drugs, remove the incentives for criminals to sell drugs, create valuable products (such as textiles, medicines, food and fuel,) help the environment by significantly lowering the need for synthetics (why cook meth when you can grow it,) reduce prison overcrowding, free up police resources to pursue violent crime, save millions on health care, provide a new stream of tax revenue, create jobs for farmers... shall I continue?

My maternal grandfather was the son of a Taino spirit apprentice and my grandmother was adopted into the tribe as her successor. Great grandmother Cruz considered herself a loyal Catholic. For this reason, she refused to pass her birthright to her "bad" heathen daughters, giving it to the nice Catholic girl that her son married, instead. Needless to say, her daughters hated my grandmother and did everything in their power to induce my grandfather to leave her. They failed. My abuelos remained wed for over 50 years, and they did everything to encourage my "gift" and introduce me to my tribal birthright, in the most Catholic way possible.  Interestingly enough, grandpa was a skeptic, a science buff and preferred Western medicine, in spite of his cultural and religious heritage.

My sweet paternal great grandmother, Carmen, was a "good Catholic" Santera priestess. The gentle old lady was the widow of fisherman/Voodoo priest whose real name was Encarnacion Pagan (translated as Pagan Incarnation) and whose practice she took over after he died under circumstances that she refused to discuss.  In fact, she refused to discuss anything related to him, aside from chanting the spooky mantra of "I am Carmen, widow of Encarnacion Pagan, " in Spanish.  Nobody in the neighborhood where she lived dared say anything negative about her out of fear (except for her highly abusive daughter, who would beat her for infractions like getting a letter when she didn't.)  Although my maternal grandmother felt that calling the mild-mannered old lady a "bruja" (more or less translated as witch) was a vulgarity, she pretty much told me that great grandmother Carmen was one.

My mom has never made her interest in the metaphysical a secret, though she tried to suppress such activities in my brother and I when we were kids.  She wanted us to grow up to be as well-adjusted as possible, so winning too many bets by instinct, cold-reading skills and the ability to hallucinate were definitely out of the question. My brother complied because he was a good boy, and like mom, he was terrified of the demons my "brujo negro" (evil witch) backyard neighbor conjured up.  Fortunately, for my imagination and art career, I actually got pissed off at the demons in my backyard.  I told the quasi-invisible stinkers to quit being scary under the threat of holy water or me hiring my next door neighbor, Hortencia to go after them.  (Hortencia was a Santera spiritist and an exorcist-for-hire.) They eventually became friends with me, because they thought it was cool that a little girl was ballsy enough to stand up to them.  Me and some of the demons are still friends, and they make themselves useful under the threat of me taking medications.  It would be my preference to dismiss the whole demon hypothesis wholesale as just schizophrenia and PTSD making my life annoying.  However, when I first started working on the puppet version of Rasputin Catamite, my mom confessed to me, in great detail,  that for many years she had been tormented by horrible visions of a psychopathic Russian cannibal who did "horrible things" to girls. I asked her with a deadpan expression, "You mean Dmitri Shapinov, right?  He was really pissing me off with the nightmares too, so I made him into a stupid puppet, so he'd cut it out."  Independently, and never having discussed it with one another, mom and I apparently had shared the same ugly hallucination for many years.  I don't really have a logical explanation for that weirdness.

From what great grandmother Carmen told me, I understand that my dad used to be into Santeria, but was REALLY, REALLY, incompetent about it.  He was the type of guy who was good at pissing off other witches, and could successfully summon up stuff that made him run like a cheetah when it turned out to be nasty, belligerent and bigger than him.  Mom confirmed assertion as well, with a hilarious wedding story, where his psycho ex-girlfriend decided to mess up the weather and throw curses at him.  This is why dad is better off as an Evangelical Christian.

My ex-husband was an exorcist-for-hire.  His philosophy was not to destroy or disrupt the activities of demons, but rather to reason with them and find the root of their problem.  My current husband was a demon, according to most palm readers and my ex, since he didn't have a life line on either hand, until after we got married.  Loki used to be one of those annoying Native American New Age D&D Shamans, until I taught him the actual spirit apprenticeship of my upbringing.  Once he saw that being dedicated to the occult arts was a pain in the ass, and a big downer, he became an atheist Taoist. 

For a large portion of my youth, I fancied myself a rather skilled sorceress.  However, I now prefer to dismiss that as too much mental illness in my childhood, and too much drug use in my adulthood.  But, even if I still were a believer in the arts, I wouldn't admit to it or share to many people, because I am an even firmer in keeping the specifics of the occult arts, hidden.  I will admit however, that I do practice some of those weird occult things that worked for me, much in the same way I still practice some Catholic doctrines that still work for me.  With this said, I am not really much a believer.  I certainly don't buy the concept of a higher power (which is why I consider myself an atheist,) nor do I buy the concept of  the supernatural or paranormal, as I believe that all phenomena is natural, unless it's explicitly artificial.  Regardless, I have seen too much weird stuff in my childhood and amongst friends to discount all metaphysical activity wholesale.  Science is about empirical observation.  Until I have enough information to discount or verify, I choose not to make a determination either way about the metaphysical.

My favorite X-Files episode was the one about the ergot ink tattoo.

The Baby (With Rasputin Catamite Comics Loosely Inspired by the Actual Events)

My Friend the Pirate
Continued from here...

My anarchist friend, who called himself the Pirate, was probably the most intelligent, lucid and interesting law-breaker I have ever met.  He looked like an extraordinarily normal middle-aged guy with a mustache and  balding head and a sunny disposition, but he was anything ordinary.  I still have his photograph, so I know that he really was real.  He got himself thrown in FFTC after beating the shit out of two police officers in a drunken rage.  He pretended to be mentally ill in order to avoid jail and to have a vacation from the world.   He told me all about the ins and outs of changing identities and making fake IDs (now known as identity theft,) before it was popular or even possible on the Internet.  He made me aware of many strategies for social protest and thievery.  He taught me many awesome relaxation techniques, information about my rights as a patient (hence why I was able to read my own chart in spite of the staff trying to convince me I could not.) and gave me some great suggestions on how to work the system at FFTC for my personal gain.  If I ever needed anything that I did not have or was not allowed, he would smuggle it in for a reasonable price.  For a Molly Mormon, such a person was not just a novelty -- he was the coolest.  After talking for the Pirate for a few days, my fear of fun-loving criminals faded away.

As time went by, friends at the loony bin mostly consisted of very Christian people and fun-loving criminals (which included the  violent attempted-rapist who got sent to the top floor.)  It was a very  strange mix to be sure.  The Christians helped me convince myself that I was still a good girl.  The criminals taught me how to party.  The Pirate never brought me anything stronger than Aleve, but those who were younger, drug-addicted and similarly trying to avoid jail time did.  During my comradeship with these gang members and hoods, I was introduced to the art of faking symptom to get more "legal" speed to share and enjoy.  I was introduced to cocaine (only did it once,) the joys of cooking (what I now realize was) meth, making designer drugs, and mixing psychiatric medications for fun and amusement.  The staff didn't seem to realize that I was on a crazed drug binge, so their solution to my bizarre behavior at the time was to give me more drugs.  It was during that time of excess and chemical glee that they decided to release me.  I wasn't having temper tantrums anymore, and in fact I possessed an air of docility,  cooperativeness, creativity and general delight.  Sure, I needed a cane to walk, had slurred speech, constant tremors, the beginning stages of blindness and a propensity to end up in the hospital for overdosing on my meds, but I was no longer a danger to myself or other.  My first husband and I actually got along really well, because I was too high to give a shit anymore.  He was incredibly kind during this period, and he actually learned Spanish to read my books, and transcribe my dictated essays.  He even bought me ice cream.  See, he wasn't all bad.   I was getting good grades to boot because I never slept.

Admittedly my time-line is rather scrambled, because frankly, my brain was scrambled.  I was scheduled to travel to the cities in the hopes of getting officially diagnosed for narcolepsy (which I secretly hoped would get me more speed.) I was told that I had to get off all my meds for three weeks.   The first week was pure hell.  My then husband thought that I was seriously going to die from the withdrawals.  We were told that this was normal.  I eventually went down to the cities, and stayed with my mom for the second week.  Once the withdrawals were over, my mom noticed that I looked and acted in a more healthier way than when I was on my meds.  I went to my sleep analysis. I didn't have narcolepsy, so as a result, I was cut off from my legal supply of speed.   I went back on my meds before I went back to my spouse.  My mom watched me go back to needing a cane, acting weirdly, shaking and being sick.  She begged me to quit, I told her that the doctors said I needed my meds to live a normal life.  Without my clean supply of speed, I made my own upon my return to Moorhead.   The smell of making the stuff got to me, so I made the "herbal" version with ephedra as the main ingredient.

One week before my finals, my doctors readjusted my meds.  I learned from a former tweaker that my love for speed was the reason my gums were receding horribly, my hair was falling off in clumps, I was skeletal and getting acne.   Being vain and wanting to look good for graduation, I quit cold turkey.  The beginning week was uneventful.  By the time graduation and finals rolled around, the first wave of  withdrawal symptom hit me.  I was very paranoid and anxious, and completely unable to function.  For some inexplicable reason, I was able to finish my degree with honors, but I was barely able to finish my graduation walk.  I slept though most of my rehearsals and needed help walking up to the stage to get my diploma because I kept falling down.  It was a proud moment, but very sad at the same time.

I was more or less stable after that, because I actually found a competent and caring psychiatrist.  He cut out all  drugs and gave me clonidine, a wonderful heart medication that was often used off-label to help severely autistic people like me function .   (How severe?  He told me that without medications, my brain functions as if I we're using 500 micrograms of LSD, all the time.)  I later learned that it is also a great medication in helping ease drug withdrawal symptoms, which only serves to reinforce my notion that the Doctor knew what he was doing.  I was addicted very addicted to clonidine and I was overly docile, but it really was better than the alternative of quitting cold turkey or losing my physical health again.  My husband and I were working together to rebuild our marriage.  Unfortunately, my friendship with Loki (one of the few people who remained my friend after the ordeal) reignited his jealousy.  Also, watching Iva, my "substitute grandma" die, while I witnessed her kids fighting over the inheritance before giving up the ghost, devastated me.  The Fargo flood didn't help matters any.  Our apartment fell apart.  There was quiet infidelity on both our ends (not with Loki who I did not like very much,  someone else.   When I got caught, it earned me a huge public beating that involved two long walks back and forth from Moorhead to the Dilworth Walmart.)  By the time our apartment went underwater during the Fargo-Moorhead flood of 1997, my then-husband told me that I was not to move to his new apartment (which I was paying for.) Instead I "needed" to stay at my mom's place so I could get a better paying job to support us while he continued school (with a low-credit load and no job.)  I was too tired to fight about the fact that he would keep most of the possessions I bought, and that I would pay for an apartment that I wasn't live in, nice clothes I would not wear, a credit card I was not allowed to use, and a car I could not drive, (as well as unintentionally helping him save up for a trip with his girlfriend to Spain, that he thankfully did not take after she embezzled him out of our life savings.)  I was just happy to be out of there and to find work in the Cities right away.

[Edited to correct typo:  Thank you Tim!]

Continued from here:
http://vaslittlecrow.livejournal.com/412453.html

Have any of you ever watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?  I have not only watched it, I lived it.  After spending the 1995 winter holidays at FFTC, I realized that committing myself had been one of the worst mistakes I ever made in my life.  Still, that place provided me a strange from of solace that I could not get in the outside world.  Let me explain:

I was able to continue my college education through correspondence courses at a very slow pace, while I was in and out of that institution.  There was no way in hell I was going to lose my free scholarship ride, over a case of what I viewed as a case of temporary insanity.   Every day was chaos at home.  Sometimes my then-husband was a total sweetheart, compassionate and helpful.   Other times not-so.  As my mental health fell apart ZNLArts (Zitro No Loca Arts) went down the tubes.  ZNLArts was an publishing firm I started at age 15 which its peak boasted a regionally syndicated comic strip and an entertainment monthly with a circulation of 15,000.  My marriage was not faring much better either.  One more than one occasion, I would run like hell for several miles and hide in the home of the first friend who would let me into their home to avoid my first husband's wrath.  When I could not run, I had two choices -- take the punishment or fight. 

I usually just took it, but during one of my visits from the loony bin, while on meds, I fought back with a knife, again.  I locked myself in the bedroom knowing I wasn't going to win.  I called the YWCA (I think,) begging for shelter, while I carved a butterfly onto my belly with a ballpoint pen.  Stupidly, I told the truth about what was happening.  I was absolutely terrified that I would kill my then-spouse and I needed a safe place to stay.  The woman politely informed me that they would not take violent people into the shelter.  The old husband managed to get into the room by the time I finished the call.  He saw the butterfly I carved onto my belly, freaked out, and beat the crap out of me as I was on the line with 911.  I couldn't speak to the operator about the situation.  I've always stuttered horribly when I am nervous or scared, so I couldn't spit out my thoughts.  He hung up the phone and beat the shit out of me, in an effort to "get me back to my senses."  The cops showed up at the door a few minutes after he subdued me.  When they asked him what was happening, he simply told them, "She just got out of FFTC and I think that she needs to have her meds adjusted."  Predictably, I was throw back into the loony bin.  He was very good at making the situation look innocuous to those who were not in the know.  My neighbors and most of our friends didn't even realize what was going on.  "So-called" friends, just thought I was overreacting or that I was nuts.  To be fair, I probably was, but my home life really was chaos and I dreaded it.  My three-month vacation was a welcomed change.

FFTC was a shithole, don't get me wrong.  It was miserable place that only served to remind me that I was a nut.  Most of the patients were frighteningly normal, and I couldn't begin to understand why they were there.  We were thrown in together with gang members who were feigning illness to avoid jail time, severely ill people, sexual predators and a wonderful (seriously) identity thief/anarchist/pirate with a drinking problem who helped me more than any of the staff working there.  I almost got raped twice there.  That moved me to organize women patients who were sexually molested by a predatory patient, in order to complain .  The guy was allowed to stay in our floor, because they managed to dope him into submission, but that was no comfort.  The violent predator/meth fiend gangster was sent to the top floor.  This mental health facility had about four awesome staff members (including a financial aid worker, who seemed to be the only person who realized I was more abused than crazy.)  The rest of the staff, wasn't overtly abusive, but it consisted of overworked people who didn't give a rat's shit about the patients and dealt with them by feeding them a steady diet of TV, meds, dubious "group therapy" and inane crafts.  Thankfully, the food was better than the shit I had home, I could do my college studies in peace and I didn't have to deal with "my other half."  My discovery that meds could actually alter my thinking and elevate my mood was the icing on the cake.

I fainted a lot from hypoglycemia, so rather than testing my blood sugar, they deemed me narcoleptic.  To deal with my "sleep disorder", they fed my gateway to homemade meth: Ritalin and  Benzedrine, a.k.a. delicious speed.  I was especially fond of Depakote.  It was like getting drunk without the hangover, so I did what I could to get as high a dose as possible.  The tranquilizers/anti-psychotic (which are usually entirely inappropriate for autistics) made me hallucinate about me drowning,  They also made Dmitri "real" and other unpleasant monsters into a 3D hallucinations with sound, taste and smell, so I didn't like them much.  I often pulled the hide the pill under the tongue and spit it out trick, but far too often, I got caught.  They also gave me tremors, and Mellaril along with the speed, in specific fucked with my eyesight, gave me dyslexia (which I still have,) and made me the dizzy. Tylenol made my liver hurt (I found out a few years later than combining Tylenol & Depakote can destroy the liver.)  It also made my tranquilizer hallucinations worse, so I refused to take it. 

I begged for Aleve to deal with a particularly bad spell that involved me gaining 20 lbs in a single week, me lactating profusely, and having a horribly painful and long-lasting menstrual cycle that contained large amounts of tissue, when the heating pads one of the nice staff members gave me failed to mitigate the pain. It was written in my chart, that my reaction to the pain and my rage over not being given adequate pain relief, was due to a "temper tantrum."   Having heard my screams of frustration and seeing me overturning my bed to prevent a staff member with the personality and looks of Edna from feeding me those dreaded tranqs, my anarchist friend smuggled in some Aleve as I was trying to flee.  The moment I popped the pills into my mouth, my panic attack ended.  I still had to take the tranqs, but at least I was on the path to pain relief.

I will never forget my friend's words, "If you need any painkillers, or anything, just ask and I'll get it for you."  That single sentence was my introduction to the world of illicit drugs.  It's kind of weird to think that it started with smuggled Aleve, but everybody needs a gateway drug.

I Was the Most Unlikely Basehead

Those of you who knew me in high school probably remember that I was a total teetotaler.  I didn't drink, smoke, drink caffeine (to the extreme where I wouldn't touch chocolate unless it was decaffeinated,) or take over-the-counter pills unless absolutely necessary.  I rarely swore, avoided R-Rated movies like the plague and had no desire to engage in pre-marital sex, even though I was already known in some circles for my trademark offensive drawings, at that point in my life.  I made it through my first two years and half of college without any desire to visit a bar or be anything more than an LDS Sunday School teacher, a good student, a hard-worker and happy wife.  At that point in my life, I could be described as the stereotypical Molly Mormon. Unfortunately, life happened.

I was incredibly depressed, because of my brutal school and work schedule.  My first husband's insistence that I not speak about our domestic problems with my close friends, his assertion that my art was "satanic" and his constant accusations about my fidelity, did not help matters any.  I felt trapped in this situation, so I began drinking behind his back.  Often times, I would show up completely wasted  to my creative writing class, because I figured that everyone else there had substance-abuse problems, and no one would really notice another drunk. I was feeling fairly hopeless about the situation, so I became suicidal.  I didn't really tell anyone about my pain, outside of Ashbet, who desperately wanted me out of the situation.  Eventually my ex-husband went out of his way to sever my ties with her.  Lonely and trapped, I began to suffer from panic attacks and massive bouts of depression so severe, that I had to be sent to the emergency room.

I was put on Zoloft, and that seemed to help until my 30-day supply ran out.  No one had instructed me to keep on taking it.  Within a week or so my depression became much worse, and I was put back on Zoloft, after a second hospital visit.  Unfortunately, my second time on the medication yielded some rather disturbing results.  I became enraged to the point where I chased my husband around the house with a knife, intending fully to kill him.  Thankfully, I realized what I was doing before it was too late.  I called 911 and asked them to hospitalize me. They sent me to the FFTC.  I was optimistic that I would find some help there and perhaps a way to get my mind straight.  Little did I know that what awaited me behind the doors of that fortress like building, would be the beginning of a horrifying downward spiral into substance abuse.