Mad Farmer Sascha

NOTHING LIKE PAIN

“When you’re looking at pain-- you’re looking at truth
Nothing like pain to make us all the same…” The Gits

Excerpt from an email I wrote to this 18 year old just out of the psych ward, diagnosed bipolar like me, who wrote after reading a piece I had in the San Francisco Bay Guardian last week (You can check out the piece if you have web access at: http://www.sfbg.com/lit/sept02/bipolar.html):
:

Madness and Manic Depression - Carving out a Life

“My mind is like a switchboard - with crossed and tangled lines.
I don’t know what’s going on - it’s the operators job not mine.”
                -Poly Styrene   X-Ray Spex  1977

HER WINGS FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

    This is so fucked up. I've been shaking and crying -- slipping between waves of numb shock and deep sadness. I can't believe Sera jumped off a fucking bridge. I can't believe she left all of us so soon.

DREAMS ARE FREE

Sometimes I wake from my dreams with the fragments dancing around my head like a loonytoon halo, my mind dangling somewhere on the tightrope border between awake and asleep - just enough time to grasp a few sliver images and scribble them into sentences like code and know I can return later to find the beginning seeds of a story or some jumbled surreal parable about the inner workings of my life.