The Global Outrage of an Educated Man: Vol. 193: Catharsis

Spread the Outrage. Spread the Truth.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, relatives and neighbors, hear the bells of truth ringing in your ears as the Holiday season is fast approaching. Let the echoes of their past reverberations be felt on the distant horizon of possibilities and storytelling's often times ludicrous imagination. For I have awakened from a dream and have a truth to tell and it will no longer lay resting in silent ambivalence.

It was first noticeable when I was a much younger child and the need to escape was at times, too much to bear, that it's hold would suddenly come upon me and cause me to threaten running away and instead go and sit on the curb at the corner of the yard on 105th Ave and Washington. It was there you could find me, tennis shoe sneakered feet on the gravel pavement, black nylon backpack resting at my side and tears streaming down my face. What or who it was that set me off, I do not remember, only the unmistakable urge to vanish from my surroundings.

As I grew older and the changes around me were no longer just physical but spiritual and parental as well, the need to escape would take the shape of talking to myself or others who were able to hear me when I would be planted in right field during a youth baseball game. The chattering monkey unable to keep quiet always resting upon my shoulders, my eyes and ears absorbing the next pitch and possible need to take action in the game. When the games stopped the self medicating took over and for many years they held me in their purchased arms while I navigated the streams of consciousness in classroom after classroom waiting for the bells to ring.

Looking back, it is noticeable to me now that I, like so many others, have a minor case of mental illness. As a result, I do not any longer back away from the undesired truth but bare witness to it sitting with me wherever I go. I have come to appreciate that idols and icons have all been touched since the beginning of time and it is nothing more than a blessing and a curse to endure until we reach the ether of humanity's eternal universe.

Ernest Hemingway would have been appalled that a male aspiring writer such as myself would bare witness to these mental dry heaves of psychosis and wish to lay bare for the public to dissect, but such is life in the pharmaceutical 21st Century. But please, friends, relatives, neighbors and future co-workers, rest assured that it isn't anything major, or for anyone to be truly worried about. There is no need to tip toe around the next time we meet; but I do know this, I am far from normal and that will be for the rest of my waking life, okay. It is a necessary struggle I will continue to have for the rest of my life, but I am content in knowing that in a world as crazy as this one has become, if I wasn't a little bit touched in the head, then something truly, truly would be wrong. And for the rest of those that have known me for so long, this all comes as very little surprise, I suppose.

Happy Holidays!!!!