HOW NOT TO DRIVE

A comprehensive guide for old people and teens and people from new jersey

Here's some scenarios that will inevitably happen to you if you are an new jerseyan, teen, or old person. Or if you're just a boring white person. Let's say there's this driver- just drivin' around. Hell, let's say it's me. 

If I am in the middo lane and have my blinker on for the left lane, and you are behind me: wait your turn. Don't try to swoop over with your shitty Prius just because you have the opening first. I'm waiting, and I'm faster. Your Prius is guaranteed gonna go slow and I'll tell you why: because you're scared of life. Get your shitty, lime green, plastic shit mobile with the "my windows aren't dirty, they're my dog's nose prints" bumper sticker the fuck back and be scared behind me. How the fuck is a dog's nose print NOT DIRTY? Whatever, I can't with that bumper sticker, or with you.

All you wheel-whackers with your chest 1 centimeter from the steering wheel also stay behind me and remain scared. You better be doing something nasty with your hand jammed way under there because I could respect that, but if you're just sitting that close to the wheel because you're a scared white person with a stick up your ass, I have no patience for you.

There are many reasons to drive under the speed limit, and being from new jersey is not one of them. Hold one of your dashboard stuffed Hello Kitty animals if you're scared and press on. 

Which brings me to DUH DUH DIH DUH DUH NEWSFLASH OREGON DUH DUH DUH 

THE LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING!! ONLY!! That's it. It's not for driving. It's not a "slow as fuck" lane. It's not a phone lane or a jack off lane or a look at pics of kitties on Facebook lane. It's a passing lane. Pass a person and get out of the fucking lane.

Since I just passed you because you're slow as mentally retarded molasses did you notice my car's sweet lil sexy ass? It's so cute, black, sleek 'n' sexy. I know it's tempting, but stay the fuck away from it. I know you want to be close to my hot black ass but if your plastic, burnt sienna rapist cube touches my car, it's going to ruin your day because I will EASILY kick holes in your cheap plastic American car-cube.

Also, GET OFF YOUR CELL PHONE! No one wants to read your Facebook update status "drivin!" Tee hee! No one cares about you. Stop TWEETING on the way to Taco Bell "4th meal, bra" Is the road so boring and unsocial that you can't concentrate on real life for the 5 minutes it takes you get to the McPaddy's and have a shot of Jack Daniels? Pick your cargo-short ball out of your ass and pay attention to the road. You can tweet "pullin the cargo-shorts ball outta my ass, YOLO" after you order your Jagerbomb. 

P.S. Why are white people so stupid that they drink Jack Daniels and Jagermeister, two over-priced, not good liquors? Is it that they actually think hot girls with Mardi gras beads in their orange cleavage and a guy with a pirate outfit will party with them if they drink it! Even though they only awkwardly stalk women with huge foreheads, no chins, and saggy gross droopers in a tit sling on Facebook and have not hung out with a hot girl or pirate ever? And Tevin's SWEET leprechaun outfit consisting of a tiny green vest and huge puffy Jamiroquai hat on St. Fatty's day doesn't count as a LIQUOR PARTY MASCOT

If I make a turn into your lane, it's because a) I have judged your speed and assume it will remain constant b) I know I can accelerate fast enough so you don't have to slow down c) I assume you're a rational person. So stop speeding up to like 70 mph to make me think you were inconvenienced by me turning onto a street. Everyone can hear your engine getting 150% louder and can SEE that you're speeding up because you're a passive aggressive ALPHA DAWG who wants to show your dick has been in somethin' before. I know what it's been in ( see above Facebook stalked girl description) and I'm not impressed. Nor am I impressed by your nasty Geo Priapism or your sick plastic hubcaps and dice testes on the rearview mirror. 

I'm onto you.

A) I know you're listening to Kid Rock in there. 

B) I know you woke up to your uncle jacking off on your naked ass you have issues and secretly fear you might technically be gay because of it

C) I know you shave your chest hair and yes, you still look fat. And your dick is still tiny. And wormy. And wiggly. 

D) I know you roofied and date raped that goth tween while her kid was screaming in the other room. I know that you put KORN on to get you in the mood.

I'm onto you. 

Oh god, I know I am forgetting so many shitty driver scenarios but I am getting annoyed just thinking about these wastes of skin even though I am in a mental facility listening to a blank-expression person rant about his baboon army and how it's going to destroy my Belgian boyscouts at the third toll of the bell for 1 1/2 hours. It takes a lot to annoy me if you're mentally ill, and virtually NOTHING  at all to cause me to hate you if you're sane.

DHTG

11/11/54-3/14/13

I remember his birthday because I'd have to recite it to every doctor I talked to about him, and enter it into the ' system' when documenting something out of the ordinary that he did; missing his meds, having a panic attack. I repeated it daily to the front desk when I visited him in the hospital when he had pneumonia, yellow and lifeless looking with a tube shoved down his throat. He'd try to claw it out each time he'd see me. He couldn't bear not to talk. His writing was all but illegible and when he was lucid enough to ask for a pen he'd just scrawl dates and names of cities, meaningless to me, but so important to him. Things that must be said. 

Dave talked a lot. Pedanted and perserverated on the same five or six topics every time you'd see him. 

TAYLOR! You're an Aquarius. And I'm a Scorpio. Aquarius and Scorpio, they get along don't they? 

Yes they do, Dave, big time. 

Taylor! You're Scottish!

Yes Davey, and you're a Frenchman! 

Riiiiight, from Bordeaux, France. And you're from St. Louis, Missouri. Hey Taylor! Say hi to Chris for me. Hi Taylór. Ha. Hi Taylór! You and Chris gonna get married or are you just cohabitating? Say my last name in French again Taylor!

And I'd yell it with probably more of a Jamaican accent than French, but he loved it all the same. Sometimes he'd call just to ask me to say his name. 

Dave was pretty much the only person I'd pick up the phone for, besides my mom because that means someone died. I'd answer for Dave because I knew we'd get right down to business. 

How're yer kidneys, Davey?

Holding fast at 14%, Taylor!

You eating good?

Ha. Oh. I ate some Big Boy's yesterday.

Ok, stick a vegetable in there anywhere?

Ha, oh, ha. I dunno Taylor. 

Well stick one in the ol' pie hole wouldja?

Ok Taylór! Hey I'll letcha go. Love you Taylór. Say my name one more time!

Geeejèr!

I like it when you say that! BYE!

The bye was always the high point. The crescendo, crashing down at the end. YES FINALLY, it's over.

I know his anxiety made him call me just as it made him scrawl on thousands of yellow legal pads. Long, dripping, and I assume French -looking letters, senseless parts of sentences, numbers, towns. I know it was also the boredom, to pass the time. He very rarely left the block. Big Boy and the BP station and the office. He'd ride his ol' rickety Huffy like a true Frenchman with a fancy hat and a scarf fashioned into an ascot around his neck. Maybe a pair of gnarled suspenders tangled dangerously around his jugular so deep he could barely talk. When I unwrapped them once I found two pairs entwined leaving deep red marks in his neck, but not seemingly holding anything up.

Thanks Taylor, hey thanks!

Maybe he got out in his mind. He watched every tennis match on TV, perseverating on them for weeks beforehand, listing names and numbers, the scores, Frederick Nadal, some other foreign sounding names. I was told when he died he had a sort of shrine on his table, a picture of France, a book about France, and a bible set up to stare at. He called France often. And Ohio, and a town in Michigan just far away enough to be long distance. I used to have to analyze his phone bills to see why they were so expensive.

Each call lasted 1 minute, 56 seconds, 42 seconds. Dozens of them a day. One after the other sometimes.  One was to a nurse who provided care to him in some form and with whom it is rumored he had a love affair. He showed me a photo countless times. Here's Deborah with her husband, her children. Once he had photos sent to him by some estranged aunt, maybe. I helped him hang them by his kitchen. This is my father. This is my mother, she killed herself. This is my sister, she killed herself. This is me right before I went to the institution. I'm 22 years old, 1976. This is my girlfriend, she killed herself... He'd point them out like an autistic child, by rote. He could be blind and still know their order. The photo of David is of a handsome young man. He looks much younger than 22. He smiles, but you can see it in his eyes. The worry, the doubt. 

He'd be on the couch like any other morning- but frozen, twitching slightly, unable to move or respond. His eyes fixed as if on a movie screen showing the same horrible scene over and over. His mother. His guilt. His sister. His girlfriend mid-plunge from a parking garage. He's European. He's Hitler. Lost in a silent terror. He'd get his Ativan and slowly come to. The first time I saw it I thought he'd never come back. Oh yeah, that's what he does, I was told. But I couldn't leave him alone. His roommates would be smoking on the couch next to him, having pushed his legs over, watching some shitty sci-fi show. His felted, worn-out, burn-hole robe would be open, exposing his incontinence briefs, his clozapine belly. His roommates were used to it. I'd shove them away, cover him up, bring him some water, do a stupid dance and sing I LOVE YOU DAVEY JE MAPPELE TAYLÓR! until he'd squeak out an almost imperceptible tay...lor...ha.

But it was clear he was reliving the same scene, and what it was, he never said. 

God, I'm making him sound infantile, slow, lost. But he was just like you and me- though consumed by anxiety, agorophobia, useless repetitive thoughts. What could it be that caught him in this place, like a hamster in a wheel? The things he felt he did wrong in the past? His father systematically committing his mother, his sister, then him, to a mental institution when he thought they all were sane all along? 

From a young age David had been diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and an affective disorder; mania, depression, or both- bipolar disorder. David was bipolar as well as schizophrenic, as his records declare, and not surprising given the circumstances. He had been prescribed lithium from this early age. I'm told lithium made David a different man. He was like a father to the other men in his large group home- so together and with-it and able to help the other young men around him with mental illnesses. He knew what they were going through. He'd been through hell. 

Lithium can be a miracle cure, and often is for those with Schizoaffective disorder. The same lithium that's in a battery, and keeps the poles balanced, I guess, works on the human brain. Lithium also destroys your kidneys, which it must be filtered through, pretty quickly. And though it helped David immensely, it was thought best to try other things when his kidneys began to rapidly fail. I'm sure it must have been devastating to him to lose the grip on his mind to save his physical health, which could barely hold him together.

When I met him he was prescribed the latest miracle cure, clozapine, which didn't suit him nearly as well and has its own horrific share of side effects and detrimental health byproducts.

He still had graphomania- the need to write constantly without apparent meaning. He still had the crippling anxiety. And his kidney function had stabilized at 14%. 12% meant dialysis. He wasn't exactly a good candidate for a transplant. We went to classes to learn how to better slow his kidney degeneration, Don't Smoke!, but I spent more time nudging a snoring David awake than I did learning about nephrology. 

Of course I'm writing this sitting outside of a darkened church at night chugging beer and smoking a cigarette. I didn't know how to appropriately honor David. He did occasionally have a beer, or more likely, 5 o'clock vodka that his roommate would peer pressure him into drinking. He struggled with smoking, but would quit sometimes, and feel great about it, only to start up again because his room mate made it look "appealing".

I can only imagine.

I'd be hungover as fuck chiding the two- yeah, but you shouldn't!  I'm not on psychotropics, boys! 

God! 

I went to the beautiful Clackamas river today alone, and I tried to think of David- how he'd play tennis with my friends, who also worked with him. He'd wear a sweater, suspenders, and shorts- his tiny chicken legs cramped at strange angles, drinking water out of a rusty tennis ball can. I tried to think of the way his hands moved when he spoke, the almost indescribable way people with schizophrenia's hands look- hands that haven't done a day of work in their life. Atrophied, bent, yet graceful. Purposeful in their acknowledgement  of a statement, poised to accentuate a flourish of language. I thought of how much he loved me and the other staff that worked with him, unconditionally. Even the menopausal bitchy illiterates you will discover from previous posts. He was patient. He was kind. He was perfect, and brightened every day that I saw him, or talked to him, or knew he was around.

I thought of what he would be doing with me out here on this precariously perched mossy rock in the cold, desolate woods.

He couldn't come here. He'd be nervous, wanting a smoke. Worried about getting his meds, worried about Checkers, his black-soot-filled-nose cat, getting fed. God knows what that cat ate. He was found dead under the bathroom sink, given an honorable burial in a white trash bag thrown into the apartment complex dumpster. Months later David would stand out front, his robe dangerously open while children scurried about, pulling each other in a one wheeled wagon (not exaggerating!). He'd yell, Checkers! Puss'n'Boots! Davey's Boy! David's Puss in Boots! I'd ask him, and he could tell me he knew he was dead.

What would there be for David on this river?  He who so seldom left his block he had credit at the BP station? My thoughts then drifted to what I'd do this weekend, why my friend was mad at me, when do I work next?  I stopped thinking of Dave. I stopped appreciating the river, caught up in my own anxieties. I didn't smoke one then for Davey. I didn't think of the rolling fields in France. What is there? What do we have?

Scenes from a mental hospital

Sorry I haven't posted anything interesting in a while. I'm of 
course talking to my two admitted readers: Jessy and Logan.
And whoever  else may be, thanks for reading this trash.

Remember how straight that worm was last night? -my friend just now

I think my life might be boring