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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Re-occurring Dream of My Youth Haunts Me
My first means of having money other than my allowance from my parents was delivering the M0ntreal Gazette door to door as a teenager. Having been expelled from school for smoking a cigarette in the wrong place, my parents took away some of my teenage privileges, such as my Gazette route and not allowed out of the house. I remember it well because I had a ticket that night to Led Zepplin, the last time they played in the Montreal Forum in the 1970's. Later on during that time period of my youth I started delivering the Sunday Express for money. I had to repeat my last year of high school due to not passing secondary five French in Quebec, so the summer before my repeat year of secondary five, I worked in Montreal loading and unloading trucks for money with an agency. Some time after that summer experience, I started dreaming in ghostly images of a truck that I was trying to load with ghost like boxes, with me being a ghost my self. When I tried to put the boxes in the truck they would bounce back out and I could not load the truck to earn my pay. I had this particular dream as a recurring one for quite some time .
After graduating from the Canadian Coast Guard College and serving in the fleet for a bit, I left and went to the off shore oil industry on Canada's east coast. I ended up with a nerves break down after serving under a German Chief engineer that found problem with four Canadian engineers just before me, I was the fifth Canadian engineer to serve under him in a month. After applying the Canadian Shipping Act and refusing to sail with him, I found a way to sign off the ship and still have a job. My nerves were shot and I ended up on the first oil rig that started drilling on Hibernia oil well off the Newfoundland coast, after the Canadian oil rig Ocean Ranger sank on the well head in a bad north Atlantic storm. Then stranger than fiction occurrences happen while being on the oil rig while drilling on Hibernia well head. I was losing sight of my own mind from what was seemly like the on slot of paranomal activity. I resigned from my position and returned to land. One thing lead to another and I ended up in psychiatry and pumped full off anti- psychotic medication and given the diagnoses as a person with schizophrenia. I returned to Montreal under the guiding hand of my parents while being heavily medicated. I rebuilt my life in Montreal as a electromechanic transferring my skills from Marine Engineering. The late 1980's were pretty well recession years for the economy and I did my best keeping employed developing my skills on the job while taking courses at night. In 1998 the factory that I was working in had an industrial explosion were I ended up fighting fires and looking for bodies until the fire department took over. It was a good company but I left it, due to another job offer that I took and got screwed. I ended up unemployed and searching for work again. I was in and out of different jobs again while starting to dating my present spouse, then problems occurred between us as I enlighten people on the existence of the National Building Code and what you can and can not do when renovation a building. I was hospitalized over this several times and more or less lost my trades while psychiatrist ruled my life with court orders. I am now on disability pension which puts me at minium income half way through my life. It seems that I could never fill that financial truck of life and spent a lot of time near poverty levels trying to earn a living and make a future for my self. I am still haunted by this old dream of not being able to load that finacial truck because I do not earn a real living, I more or less survive on my spouses income and dragging her down with my chains of schizophrenic poverty. What can I write, it hurts dragging some one you love down into financial poverty, I know I have the next twenty years to earn a living, but I say to my self why leave the security of the disability pension, you loose good working habits when not employed. Start again for what, to argue proper engineering practice to people all over again and loose a job over it. I have a record of employment that says I was dismissed for being over qualified as an electromechanic, I have since lost those skills due to psychiarty and me supposedly carrying the diagnoses of schizophrenia. I remember one time when trying to earn a living and having an argument with an agent from Emploi Quebec weather I was fit to work or not while on unemployment issurance. It was like it was written that a schizophrenic was unfit for work. May be I will make it as an Outsider artist and fuck the world of holding down a real job.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Using The Computer To Flex The Muscle Of The Mind
In the last two and a half weeks I have ignored my blog, due to learning new skills on the computer while putting together the HTML required for my own free website, to display my creative endeavors. With a lot of trail and error, using my engineering logic with a text book, I learned some basic HTML while putting the whole website together. The work I did can be viewed at: http://www.angelfire/folk/docgmcreations . The site displays some initiated art that I am looking for funding to complete, through funding I can get to Canada's capital to get the photographs of the required images so that I can reproduce them incorporated into my art. Part of wearing a uniform never left me, it is in my art which is being developed into small series that I have in mind.
I always took to new challenges well being the individual that I am, I often reflected on this part of me that helped me succeed as I did, while being a consumer of the mental health system. I can not complain much, I got my childhood dream coming true with my ghost stories found in my schizophrenic issues. Another reason I feel that I was able too succeed was having had a college education in the government training that I went through after high school. Having had set goals in education , graduating, then applying those skills and making good money doing it. I was able to set my own personal goals high during my early manhood while accepting being a mental health consumer. I was always eager to work and go to school. Even back in 1985 in an after-care program, I attended university courses at night taking writing and theology courses. It helped to keep the mind working in a positive direction as I grew to learn what my schizophrenic issues were all about. Time was my best friend for I always used it well, trying to build up the success I once had after college. Having a wonderful home life with my girlfriend adds to my own personal happiness, I am no longer a lone dealing with my schizophrenic issues like my apparitions/hallucinations, I can talk to her freely about it with out being judged. I always hated the fact that it was my mind being judged and my sainess. By character I am a bit of a bumbling eccentric with spiritual and mystical values that made me too eccentric at times, as I was learning to cope with my second sight for apparitions/hallucinations. I was left on my own to figure them out, even although I was always being treated for schizophrenia, medical staff never spoke to me about them, on how to deal with them. The subject matter was just all delusion and no meaning. In a way I am grateful I had little influence concerning my apparitions/hallucinations, this way I was able to evolving looking at them in a more positive light, that there could be something more to it. I always had to consider that I have the type of schizophrenia that induces visual apparitions/hallucinations which is rare. It is more common to have auditory type apparitions/hallucinations, that can lead to more detamental anxiety for the person, hence higher medications levels, making it harder to function. When I was on higher medication levels as a young adult my parents were there to help me out and assist me with housing in their home. I maintained a good diet with my mother's cooking and the attitude was instilled in me not to lay down and be defeated. There were always bumps in my road map of life. Being hospitalized, strapped to beds, locked in isolation, they did not know what to do with me but give medication, when I went over board with my eccentric ways that are schizophrenic tendencies. I even considered these issues as a challenge and applied my education to reason them out in a mystical way, as to feel comfortable with my self and the added subject matter of my schizophrenic issues. For any one young and starting out with the diagnoses, I would tell them that they have to make them selves of strong character, flex the muscle of the mind in problem solving activities, so you can apply this thinking process to your schizophrenic issues, thus one can function on as little medication as possible while living with these complicated issues.