A haven for creative people living with mental illness. This is the place where you can tell it like it is, not yet another place where you have to pretend to be someone you've been told you should be.
Other than substance addiction issues, one might not think that Bon Scott and Amy Winehouse have much in common. However, both of them were involved to the point of obsession with people who were incredibly bad for them, and although musically speaking they are both artists I can't get enough of, I have to stop listening after a fairly brief period of time because I know what and who they're singing about and it's really depressing.
The other issue is the fact that I can relate all too well to being obsessed with a person who is really, really, really horrible for you. I did it more than once. People think that all-consuming "love" is wonderful. It's anything but, and usually, it isn't really love, it's an obsession. So, yanno, no thanks to ending up in the ER with bloody wrists over some asshole who doesn't deserve my pain. Better to be alone than to be with someone toxic.
Although, unfortunately, in my case, more often than not, I'm alone in bad company.
Plus, in the case of AC/DC, I can only listen for just so long (and that isn't long these days) before I start getting really pissed off about the way Malcolm Young went out. Dementia is the absolute fucking worst, particularly when it takes out someone whose intelligence was a key part of who they were. Malcolm Young was a high school dropout, but he was smarter than a lot of people with strings of letters behind their names.
The late Glen Campbell's wife said of dementia "It's better to die some other way," and she's absolutely right. Fuck dementia.
As Bob Seger once said, sometimes I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.
I've come a long way in keeping my temper in check from the days of my youth, but there are a few things that make me really hot under the collar, and then I overreact just a teeny tiny little bit and hit the red button with the nearest sledgehammer, sending the verbal nukes a-flyin'.
One thing that sets me off like nobody's business is the implication that I'm a liar or one of those self-important twits who would create a puff piece minimizing the struggles of a person with a cognitive, physical, or psychological impairment to prove how Deep and Poetical (TM) I am. I have ripped shit more than once on the kind of people who say things like "he's so autistic" or "she's so bipolar" when what they mean is "he's withdrawn and not socially adept" and "she's mercurial." Do NOT use people's health conditions as adjectives. It's really fucking rude. Recently, I fired a real estate agent who believed that questioning my credibility would inspire me to "move quickly." Say whaaaaaat???? In what Universe does that even make sense? I remarked that this guy must have watched American Psycho and thought that it was a business training video. The lack of logic in this line of thinking is astounding.
Having my credibility questioned is a real sore point for me. All my life I've had people imply that I was "just looking for attention" or "being dramatic" or straight-up lying about my symptoms. I have a lot of physical issues that have never been resolved, and the scars on my arms are not the result of "seeking attention," fuck you very much. They are the result of having been in one whole fuckload of psychological pain and feeling like no-one was on my side.
Point of trivia: my ex-husband has Asperger's syndrome and I have bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. This combination proved to be oil and water. He is one of my great friends in this life and I have been very worried about him as he is having some serious health issues. But a marriage between such polar opposites in the neurodivergent spectrum proved to be a volatile combination and not sustainable.
Our son is autistic and has ADHD. He's strikingly intelligent, but his way of thinking and problem solving does not jibe with the modern education system. He learns by doing and is incapable of learning by reading textbooks. Yes, he can read. He is a prolific reader of the likes of Roger Zelazny (whose works I sometimes have trouble wrapping my brain around), Fred Saberhagen, Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He simply is unable to conform to the textbook-and-lecture style of learning.
I feel like the world is missing out on a lot of great talent by insisting that everybody look alike and dress alike and think alike and talk alike. The Stepford Wives was not an instruction manual.
One of the things that I loved about AC/DC, outside of their badass marriage of the blues to garage rock, was the fact that these cheeky-ass working-class bastards gave the middle finger to propriety at every turn. This doesn't mean they believed in being mean and stomping on other people. They themselves had been bullied and belittled and had quite enough of it. They were speaking up for the "mongrels", for the "ugly" people, for the people who had been told that they would never amount to anything because they were weird and different and not conventionally attractive.
They were not a band for the ever upper-class high society. They were a band for the outcasts, like me. So, when I stood up for them when people started accusing them of "devil worship," I got pigeonholed as a devil worshiper too. It was pretty funny in retrospect. I went around throwing devil horns and evil grins at the idiots spreading the rumors. I was probably the biggest excitement they had in their narrow-minded lives.
Fun's fun, but the reality is that I always felt bad for these guys who really weren't doing anything wrong. I had a particular affinity for Malcolm Young, because he was painfully shy (like I am by nature), because he tended to be depressive (gee, I wouldn't know anything about that, I'm just your dyed-in-the-wool ray of fucking sunshine), and because I could see that he was actually a lot more sensitive than he let on.
I have to confess that I was a bit jealous of the powerful bond of friendship that Malcolm had with Angus. Not everyone is lucky enough to have the other half of their soul born in the same lifetime. Forget having the other half of your soul be your guardian angel. Having them be your best bud is the way to roll!
In truth, most soul mate relationships I've observed have been platonic rather than romantic. Too much is made of the romantic soul mate bond.
In fairness, I think that (romantic) love stinks, so take my previous statement however you wish. Take it with a couple of grains of sea salt. I use sea salt in my cooking. I recommend it.
All this is leading up to something. Bear with me.
I honestly think that there is a degree of elitism in the insistence on rigidly adhering to certain concepts. People who do not have access to higher education don't get to learn the niceties of iambic pentameter (I didn't even know what the hell that was until I was in my 50's) or what the hell ever.
I didn't know the difference between a Haiku and a Senryu until I was in my 50's. I just liked the 5-7-5 pattern that I learned in the third grade or thereabouts and I enjoyed using it to express my dumb and worthless thoughts.
There's a lot of shit that I still don't know. It doesn't mean that I don't have the right to express my shit.
Similarly, there are a lot of musicians who are self-taught, who didn't have access to higher musical education, and, frankly, a lot of the time I like their work better than the works of those who have been properly trained. For instance, Chris Isaak (who, by the way, is an incredibly cool person) can't read music. He couldn't tell you what a pentatonic scale looks like, but if you were to play one for him, he would play it right back at you, embellish on it, and turn it into a really amazing song.
The slaves who sang the heart-rending spirituals on which the blues (a.k.a. the backbone of modern music) is based certainly did not have access to higher education about music or poetry. They sang to comfort themselves and their fellow slaves. They sang to convey messages. They did not express themselves in a "proper" fashion, but they damn well expressed themselves. They told their truth. They told their stories. And they had every right in the Universe to do both, propriety be damned!
As well, the idea that using profanity shows a lack of intelligence is elitist fuckery, and I don't have a whole lot to say to anyone who adheres to that foolish line of thinking.
I think I would have thrown myself from a precipice long ago if it weren't for the rule-breakers and "mongrels" of this world. I couldn't bear the idea of being shut in a room with a bunch of hoi-polloi. Pair me with the proletariat any day.
I do like to share my work, and for a while, it seems to go well enough. But I invariably learn the lesson that my truth is not pretty or polished enough and I am not sweet and sunny enough, and I end up saying "fuck it" and oozing back down the back alley from whence I crawled forth in the first place.
I will never be acceptable. For the most part, I think that's a good thing. But it does get kind of lonely, so now and then I go against my own rule about not engaging and I engage. This is generally a mistake.
Live and learn. Again and again and again.
Now I have to unruffle my feathers so I can prepare the latest Carnal Invasion manuscript for publication via my seedy little company, Naughty Netherworld Press, purveyors of high-quality Kindle smut. These are supposed to be gleeful romps featuring a group of randy, shapeshifting aliens having a go with elementals, humans, vampires, werewolves and such, not a heaping helping of angry argleblargh by a pissed-off editor. I need to switch gears toot sweet.
~Cie~
Cracks me up every time. I did see an interview later where Malcolm revealed that the director for this set of videos behaved like a drill sergeant and they couldn't wait to get away from him. Angus spent the entire interview doubled over with laughter. Reporters had a tendency to interview the brothers separately because when they were together they tended to start smirking and chortling about some joke that only they were in on, and one couldn't get much useful information out of them.
The theme for Silver Threading's Writer's Quote Wednesday Writing Challenge is Comedy. What does the above picture have to do with comedy? It doesn't, it has to do with me, The Real Cie, the butt of the Universe's cruel jokes. We'll get to that.
I created the above picture to be included in a mass email for the birthday of Jared Padalecki, the actor who plays Sam Winchester on Supernatural. Jared lives with depression, and he created the Always Keep Fighting charity to raise awareness. There's something about Jared. More on people with "something about them" later in the post.
Yes, the tattoo is the permanent kind.
Am I doing this right? I don't know. Will they like me? Probably not. A few people do, but most people don't understand where I'm coming from at all. Nor do they get my sense of humor.
In this post, I refer to myself in both first and third person. Referring to me as I am now, I always use first person. Referring to my past self or the fictionalized version of myself, I will use either first or third person. I tend not to edit posts of this nature too much, because I want to preserve the emotional rawness.
I've never fit in. I was badly bullied. I had a serious mental illness (I have three diagnoses, actually: Bipolar disorder type 2, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Obsessive-compulsive disorder) that was improperly diagnosed until I was nearly 40. There was always something different about me. People saw that and wanted to destroy it. I wasn't pretty, I was socially awkward. I tried to make people like me, but they didn't. I started self-injuring when I was in my early teens. I made my first suicide attempt at age 13 by swallowing a bottle of aspirin.
Because I was raised Catholic, I believed that committing suicide was a sin that would get you sent to hell. Because sending a person who was already suffering to hell makes a lot of sense, right? Not here to argue theology, but that idea is a crock of shit, as is the idea that people who commit suicide are "selfish" or "stupid." Suicide may be "a permanent end to a temporary problem," or it may in fact be not a permanent end to a lifelong problem. Pithy sayings don't work on serious issues.
"This is really fucking depressing, Real Cie," you're saying. "When are you going to get to the comedy part?"
The prompt mentions Robin Williams.
Mork is one of the friends I turned to when real life was too painful.
I was a writer from the time I was very young. I was precocious and learned to read at a first grade level when I was four years old. I'm not saying this to brag about how smart I was, because I don't really think I'm that smart overall. I was in the top percentile for the English category when I took my SAT's. I have some sort of gift in the English comprehension and writing areas, but I've never learned to use it in a way that appeals to most people. I'd like to thank my bipolar disorder for that.
I always had a real sense for the absurd as well. I could find bits of humor in the oddest places. Other people didn't get it. I used it to survive.
Young Me used her literary and metaphysical gifts to escape to an alternate world. Unlike the world I was living in, this world was filled with fun and friends.
I didn't know it then, but I was an empath who could pick up on other people's emotions. I wish I could have known Robin Williams in life. I think that Real Cie and Robin would have been friends, just like Cie in my stories and Mork were friends. That's what I like to think.
This became Mork and Cie's favorite band after one of Cie's few friends' older brothers played their music and Cie said "wow, who's that?"
Keep in mind that in the 1970's, there was no public Internet. Young Cie had to go into record shops and look for imported magazines to find out more about her new favorite band. She liked doing research anyway, and liked pretending to be a detective.
If you see evil rather than humor when looking at the above picture, you need to adjust your perspective. I'm still gobsmacked that anyone could have thought of these men as "evil."
Cie liked AC/DC not only for the music, but because, like her, they were outcasts and freaks who used their sense of humor both to cope and to entertain others. They didn't like people who bullied other people. There was also "something about them."
I didn't know it yet, but "something about them" means "walking wounded."
Even at ten years old, when I was watching Star Trek reruns I really resonated with the Empath character, Gem. I didn't know it yet, but it was because, like her, I take on other people's pain. I don't get physical manifestations, and, unfortunately, I can't do psychic healing on a physical level.
This plane is purgatory, and this world is in a lot of pain. I used and still use my sense of the Ridiculous to cope, and most people don't get it. I've suffered a lot of derision because of it.
I still do it because the Pissed Off Crusader for Justice in me doesn't want me to destroy who I am to please other people. I've tried it several times. I almost didn't survive. I won't do it again.
I think that many people who express themselves through comedy use comedy as a coping mechanism. Like me, they have been bullied, or they suffer with a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder. Seeing the ridiculous helps us survive. Often we try to make the world a better place. Sadly, it doesn't really seem to work.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. If we make the world a somewhat better place for a few people, it's worth it.
I've got more to say, much more. But the foam mat on my bed has slipped sideways and it's really irritating me, so I need to fix it.
Did I mention that I have OCD?
I have to joke about my mental illnesses, because otherwise I'd go crazy!
I'll be here all week. Also, for the rest of my life.
