So, here as a work by Fraud In France Lite, we have a old John Prine cover, Angel From Montgomery:
http://www.sheer.us/stuff/2017/AngelFromMontgomery.mp3
Keys, synths, vocals, percussion, and guitar: Sheer
Drums: Bruce DeGrado
Bass: Art Day
Additional Lyrics: Sheer, Mike Mesford
So, I’m still working Angel through the process. Still haven’t managed to get vox tracked for it.
I may have found another psych med that does something useful. As we know, I find mania useful as a growing exercise, however, what I really want is something I would call a ‘contained mania’. i.e. something where I have all the mind expanding thoughts and personal growth, but don’t discover afterwords I’ve sent a email I would do anything to have unsent.
Okay, well, I think I’ve found it. On a 5 day full throttle test – and unfortunately, I will have to repeat the test because I had the (word omitted) flu and it’s possible that’s why – I remained entirely contained. I won’t list the drug here, but a second set of trials is in order. A better life.. absent much external insanity and lack of containment.. may be near.
Of course, first I need to procure a larger dose. No problem, I’m meeting with a GP on Wed. I’ll tell her my tale, and hopefully she’ll see it my way.
So, my first post of 2017 will be a bit of neoclassical – this actually started as a completely improvisational attempt to express my sadness, pain, fear, and other negative emotions surrounding a situation in my life. Whatever else you can or can’t say about it, I think some of my emotions when I played it come out nicely in the recording. Happier stuff in the pipeline, folks, including a cover of Angel From Montgomery that cooks pretty well, but for today, this is what we’ve got.
So, it’s basically hopeless to think I could remember who would be responsible besides me in any case. Human memory isn’t written to the way computer memory is, and it’s not.. reliable in the same kinds of ways. So I might remember violence and hate and anger, but it’s impossible to know whether that’s real or not – especially since I’m looking at it from the other side of a closed-head injury. Look, the car I was in didn’t have a airbag. I don’t know how much damage was done to my mind, but I know it was enough that I couldn’t stick out my tongue straight and I was mildly aphasic for weeks afterwords. So talking about remembering who to be angry at is really, really silly. Because I *don’t* know what of my memories are real.
As far as $person[0], I remember you asking me who I wanted on my island. Apparently at this late date we can really safely say the answer is you. I remember you wanted to be CEO of pepsi, and you were a fan of Perot, and left post-it notes all over the house encouraging your parents to vote. I remember we went to many dances together, and we danced, and it was fun and wonderful. I remember you had a duck named comet who helped with the mayor of occaquan’s campaign. I remember six little ducklings growing up in my bathtub. These memories feel real. But unless I can convince you to compare notes with me about which of my memories are real and which aren’t, I’m never going to know.
What if I’ve got it inverted.. what if you are in love with me? And don’t know it? It certainly was a long time before I knew I was in love with you…
So, I don’t really know who did what. There’s no way to know. For all I know, I did all this to myself. If you all want it to be my fault, that’s fine with me. I just want it to stop hurting, and want shrinks to stop fixing me-for-other-people at the cost of hurting me-for-me, which is real popular.
$person, it’s not like you’d suddenly start talking to me if I was 100% complient. So I’m not even going to try. I’m going to try, instead, to scale my psych meds to give me the best system performance, and to give me manias timed for when I can take vacation time from my day job, and to make sure I lock out access from the internet and go far away from cars and the like. Basically, make them safe for the rest of the world.
In other words, fuck y’all, I’m living for me. You all want me to live for you instead, you’re going to have to convince me there’s a reason to want to.
So, you should probably read these in reverse chronological order, meaning you should read them from oldest to newest. See that category marked $person, over there on the right? Yah, click that. 😉
That said, I have a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing to you. For example, when I said something about what are you going to do about having a child, what I meant is, how are you going to handle it if one of your children has a mental illness (which does, believe me, happen) if you can’t handle one of your friends having one.
And the bit about me not even owning a gun.. what I meant to say was “I would never ever use force on you”. I don’t know how that got so tripped up coming out of my fingers.
Remember, I’m afraid of you being afraid of me, and that’s a nasty, nasty, nasty feedback loop. And I can’t just not care about you – I can’t remove you from my history, or from people I care about, or make how I feel about you have unhappened.
I’m in love with you. That’s a fact. It doesn’t have to be a major detriment on your life. I’ve got people in my life who are in love with me who I’m not in love with. It doesn’t keep us from being friends. However, me being in love with you does, often, make me say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time when you’re concerned.
Please remember that the part of me that needs to understand what happened is *still a young teen*. Never aged. Time stopped for him. Think of him as a process sitting at a breakpoint.
You remember what that was like? Now throw in DID, mania, and the whole box of cookies I’m trying to keep juggled, including adulting, a day job, a music career, and helping my friends not go under.. I actually think I’m doing quite well, but I’m sure Clint will inform me about how well I’m not doing. But sometimes the amazing thing about the dancing bear is not how well it dances but that it dances at all.
So, when the protective order runs out, I’m going to do my best to *not* run over there and try to convince you to talk to me again. Instead, I’m going to ask ALL my friends for help, and use the gentlest, most careful way I can think of, because at this point, I’m convinced, yes, you’re scared out of your mind too. I don’t know if this is because I’m not seeing the real $person but rather reflected light from you inside the warped and twisted reality engine that is my mind outside my CE, and on the edge you’re just fine, or if this is really how you feel. But I’m gonna keep playing it like it’s real until it’s either utterly clear it’s not or something changes.
FWIW, I won’t call you, but you are free to call me. I want you to call me. And I won’t talk about anything a coworker at a place of business wouldn’t talk about, at least until we’ve negotiated a lowering of DEFCON level and figured out what if anything can be salvaged of our friendship. If that helps any. At the very least, it would mean a lot to me if we could get to strangers at DEFCON 5 and me knowing what you saw happen at the party where what I saw happen was a system crash and a suicide by drowning of *me* and a running away from my parents but still being captured and hurt and hurt and hurt.
You all will notice there are a number of users that post on this blog. Each one represents a alter, or a DID personality. There are likely to be more, not less, because I think I’m committed to giving all my secrets away. People at the edge, if you can see me, very real, loving, worth keeping personality down here where the light is shining. Me. Keep me. I’m worth keeping. Really.
As many of you may or may not have guessed, I’m able to completely close off this aspect of myself and just be Sheer. That’s fairly easy, although Sheer is not always the most comfortable or happiest guy around – he does have his moments. There are definitely some good times in my life. It’s not without joy. It just doesn’t have nearly as much of it as it probably should have, and I feel very closed in and constrained and afraid a lot of the time.
So, here we are again. Me writing you. Except not as email, because your request that I not do so was starting to come with handcuffs. So I’ll do it here.
Look, despite some of the insane emails that I’ve sent you in years past, I don’t expect you’ll be my lover. I am, however, hoping you can find time to be my friend, at least enough time to help me put together my memories of what happened at your party enough that they make some kind of sense.
I’m *begging* you for help. My mind is badly damaged. I don’t even know if it is a closed head injury from a rear end impact in a car with no airbags at 60 mph (I was stopped, he wasn’t) or if it’s psychological damage from some sort of abuse (memories suggest there was a lot of that, but memories are unreliable), or if it was the experience of being cut off from my support network by Kayti (my experience with Kayti HURT a lot), or it’s just that it wasn’t rated for the number of cycles per second I’ve asked of it repeatedly. (I’ve pushed the limits. A lot.)
In the real, in the now, it works very well most of the time. See my linkedin recommendations. I’m really good at what I do, and I do a lot of things. In mania, I have a lot less control, but since you’ve asked that I not contact you, that’s the only time that I even think about it. Except as a backgrounded task, I’m thinking about it all the time, and it’s hurting all the time. We could really both save ourselves a lot of trouble by just having a conversation while I’m not manic. PLEASE consider this. I know there’s sort of a “Sheer is a horrible monster / Sheer is a rapist / We Hate Sheer” club out there. But I haven’t in fact raped anybody, unless you know something I don’t, and I never would have kicked my sister in the stomach – the threat was just the only way to stop her from *constantly* physically attacking me. Or so my memory (admittedly a fragmented view) tells the tale. And I do in fact try my hardest to be the very best person I can be, every day. As far as your “Don’t talk to me”, it is *really* hard keeping track of reality during periods of mania when you have DID. I invite you to try and do better than me, except that I don’t, because no one should have to go through the experience of *needing* DID, and I think I must.
But I’m begging you. Consider that you might not have the whole story, especially about things you’ve been told by my sister. Consider that if you heard my side of it you might feel differently. And consider that I have no reasonable way of assembling my memories of the night I first went dead inside at all without you.
Please, if I ever meant anything at all to you, please help.
Also.. Our friendship was for a time the best thing in my life. Maybe I remember it as better than it was. But I kind of doubt it. I’d really like it back. Enough to jump through basically any hoop.