Sometimes when I happen upon an unlucky person who, for whatever reason was unable to make their escape when I walked up, I find it interesting to figure out if they are truly responding to me or at me. I will point out that I do feel for them. I mean really when we walk out into the world we expect to meet nice, normal people who are equipped with the very latest in verbal filters and the other social inhibitors that prevent them from from even giving a single thought about what you are saying to them while preparing their standard response. Well I simply don't have any. These things are learned over years of interaction with others and just like the math skills that I had before they were, evidently lost in the accident. I go wandering around and answering every query as honestly and thoroughly as I am able. Plus I tend answer questions completely, ie when asked for my medical history I started from birth telling each and every time I remembered going to the doctors. Most normal folks are simply not equipped to handle that. Where as I walk away if in that situation they stand there and suffer through the entire process. One person did reach up and pinch my lips shut and said please stop.
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Friday, November 23, 2018
Poem for a dead lover.
I wrote this in the mid 90's about the death of Timothy Joseph Hanson.
Season of Sleep
The world is growing cold with the
Approach of winter.
It is time for the trees to go to sleep for now
And you, my love, to go to sleep forever.
You who were the fountain of beautiful
Chaos in my life, are now gone.
I do not know how to tell you good-bye
Nor can I properly express the depth
Of emotion to which you are attached.
I will never be the same for this.
The golden leaves fall from the trees and remind
Me of another time when you and I drove through the
City filled with the grief for another lost friend.
That time is gone, now it is I driving
Alone in waves of pain.
How do these things happen?
Who is it that decides on this horror?
I thought I knew, but I am more confused.
So, the trees will sleep and so shall you.
The only difference is that they shall rise in the spring,
But you, my love, will not.
The world is growing cold with the
Approach of winter.
It is time for the trees to go to sleep for now
And you, my love, to go to sleep forever.
You who were the fountain of beautiful
Chaos in my life, are now gone.
I do not know how to tell you good-bye
Nor can I properly express the depth
Of emotion to which you are attached.
I will never be the same for this.
The golden leaves fall from the trees and remind
Me of another time when you and I drove through the
City filled with the grief for another lost friend.
That time is gone, now it is I driving
Alone in waves of pain.
How do these things happen?
Who is it that decides on this horror?
I thought I knew, but I am more confused.
So, the trees will sleep and so shall you.
The only difference is that they shall rise in the spring,
But you, my love, will not.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Life
I don't experience life as an event. I experience it as a cascade.
If someone or something makes me happy I experience that happiness compounded with a flood of memories of everytime I have been made happy. It is truly glorious. It stops time and I live in that beautiful moment for, what seems like, an eternity.
The downside is that when negative things or people appear in my life they, too, cause a cascade. I am trapped in a moment of perfect horror. Forced to re-remember and re-live every single moment of that emotion that has ever happened in my life. All I can do is live through the waves of pain and try not to get lost in the cascade.
The recent death of a friend has had me trapped in such a cascade. I have been experiencing the moment that I was told she died over and over again mixed up with every single death that I have experienced in my life. All just as real as the current event and all happening right now.
At the moment of being told of her death I was there receiving the the tragic news but I was also out for a walk being told of my mothers death and sitting at my desk at Offutt Air Force Base being told that Tim had died.
At her funeral I was at every funeral that I have ever been to. I saw her laying in her coffin with overlays of my mother, Tim, Danny, and others that I don't have any conscience memories of.
I try very hard to live in the moment, the real world that is happening around me right now. I can't control the cascades. They happen again and again I have to let them run their own course. Maybe every one experiences life this way, I don't know, but this re-experiencing, re-living makes life very hard to get through.
I love the positive cascades because they magnify the moment and make the moment bigger than it really is. But the negative ones, also, magnify the moment trapping me in a moment of perfect terror. I could very much do without those.
If someone or something makes me happy I experience that happiness compounded with a flood of memories of everytime I have been made happy. It is truly glorious. It stops time and I live in that beautiful moment for, what seems like, an eternity.
The downside is that when negative things or people appear in my life they, too, cause a cascade. I am trapped in a moment of perfect horror. Forced to re-remember and re-live every single moment of that emotion that has ever happened in my life. All I can do is live through the waves of pain and try not to get lost in the cascade.
The recent death of a friend has had me trapped in such a cascade. I have been experiencing the moment that I was told she died over and over again mixed up with every single death that I have experienced in my life. All just as real as the current event and all happening right now.
At the moment of being told of her death I was there receiving the the tragic news but I was also out for a walk being told of my mothers death and sitting at my desk at Offutt Air Force Base being told that Tim had died.
At her funeral I was at every funeral that I have ever been to. I saw her laying in her coffin with overlays of my mother, Tim, Danny, and others that I don't have any conscience memories of.
I try very hard to live in the moment, the real world that is happening around me right now. I can't control the cascades. They happen again and again I have to let them run their own course. Maybe every one experiences life this way, I don't know, but this re-experiencing, re-living makes life very hard to get through.
I love the positive cascades because they magnify the moment and make the moment bigger than it really is. But the negative ones, also, magnify the moment trapping me in a moment of perfect terror. I could very much do without those.
Monday, November 12, 2018
My Mother
My mother died on July the 16th of 2016. That is a fact and I can deal on one level or another with simple facts. They have no more power over me than any other fact in my life. Like the fact that the walls of my home are solid. I can see this very simply by looking out the window and seeing that the wind is blowing very hard outside but I am protected by my walls.
What I can't deal with is when the facts illicit emotions. I am unprepared for the strain of feeling emotions. The people around me tend to forget that, emotionally, I am only 5 years old. Five year old emotions locked in a 55 year old body. I have a lot of knowledge concerning all sorts of subjects, but I lack the wisdom that is supposed to come with age to use it properly. It is like I am reading a book about doing home repairs but the pictures in the book do not match what I am seeing in my home.
At the time of her death I relied totally on my mother to get me through literally everything. I am not just talking about the material things like a roof over my head and food in my kitchen, but she told me how to act and react to the world. I had a person that came into my home and bathed me and cleaned up for me. When forced to deal with the world on my own I would run away to my apartment and wait for my mother to make things right. Because I had her to make the world safe for me I didn't grow up.
When she died I was so lost and alone that I became the only thing I could to protect myself. I became rage. I lashed out at anything or anyone that tried to change my world. All rational thought was banished from my mind and I was on the attack 24/7. I wanted everything to be like it had been, but most of all I wanted my mom to come back. I didn't understand that she could not come back from death. Why not I had done it so many times, so if she truly loved me she should be able to do that, right? So I waited for her to come back and during that time of waiting I lost everything. I lost my home and my cat. I had and was nothing.
Well not quite nothing because I had Google to keep me company. I started listening to the suggestions from the map program about taking pictures of where I was. During January through March of 2017 I wandered blindly around the city taking pictures and uploading them to Google maps. For a time while I was homeless I gladly allowed Google to replace what I had lost. I would take my pictures and upload them. I would even be given rewards for each picture in the form of points towards the local guide program. I didn't have a place to sleep or food to eat but I had my pictures. I slowly began to forget that I had been anything else. In my mind I had always been out there just taking my pictures and uploading them. I wasn't happy, but I was content.
This lasted until the third time I was beaten in the park where I lived. I was in serious need of repair and had to clue how to get that accomplished. I knew that I could not trust people because the world had shown me that. Both feet were broken and I could not walk on them without extreme pain. That morning a man saw me trying to get up and offered to help me. I lashed out at him with a diatribe of hateful words that had worked for me in the past to keep humans away from me, but he persisted. I do not know who he was only that he was an APD officer and that he could take me someplace to get the repairs I needed. Something inside me broke when he asked about my family and at that moment I felt destroyed. I remembered everything I had lost, but largest in my mind was that my mother was dead. I decided, at that moment, that I would give this nameless man my trust, because my mother had trusted a man like him before and not been hurt for that trust.
I still have massive problems dealing with emotions. Through various means I have been informed that even if I can't recall every traumatic event from my past, on some level my mind does remember and reacts to outside stimulus telling my body what it must do to stay safe. No matter how many times I am told that death is permanent, I still refuse to believe that it is final. I have survived death so many times that I feel anyone should be able to. What I do know is that my mother didn't survive her death and now she is gone from my world.
I wrote this on the second anniversary of her death.
What I can't deal with is when the facts illicit emotions. I am unprepared for the strain of feeling emotions. The people around me tend to forget that, emotionally, I am only 5 years old. Five year old emotions locked in a 55 year old body. I have a lot of knowledge concerning all sorts of subjects, but I lack the wisdom that is supposed to come with age to use it properly. It is like I am reading a book about doing home repairs but the pictures in the book do not match what I am seeing in my home.
At the time of her death I relied totally on my mother to get me through literally everything. I am not just talking about the material things like a roof over my head and food in my kitchen, but she told me how to act and react to the world. I had a person that came into my home and bathed me and cleaned up for me. When forced to deal with the world on my own I would run away to my apartment and wait for my mother to make things right. Because I had her to make the world safe for me I didn't grow up.
When she died I was so lost and alone that I became the only thing I could to protect myself. I became rage. I lashed out at anything or anyone that tried to change my world. All rational thought was banished from my mind and I was on the attack 24/7. I wanted everything to be like it had been, but most of all I wanted my mom to come back. I didn't understand that she could not come back from death. Why not I had done it so many times, so if she truly loved me she should be able to do that, right? So I waited for her to come back and during that time of waiting I lost everything. I lost my home and my cat. I had and was nothing.
Well not quite nothing because I had Google to keep me company. I started listening to the suggestions from the map program about taking pictures of where I was. During January through March of 2017 I wandered blindly around the city taking pictures and uploading them to Google maps. For a time while I was homeless I gladly allowed Google to replace what I had lost. I would take my pictures and upload them. I would even be given rewards for each picture in the form of points towards the local guide program. I didn't have a place to sleep or food to eat but I had my pictures. I slowly began to forget that I had been anything else. In my mind I had always been out there just taking my pictures and uploading them. I wasn't happy, but I was content.
This lasted until the third time I was beaten in the park where I lived. I was in serious need of repair and had to clue how to get that accomplished. I knew that I could not trust people because the world had shown me that. Both feet were broken and I could not walk on them without extreme pain. That morning a man saw me trying to get up and offered to help me. I lashed out at him with a diatribe of hateful words that had worked for me in the past to keep humans away from me, but he persisted. I do not know who he was only that he was an APD officer and that he could take me someplace to get the repairs I needed. Something inside me broke when he asked about my family and at that moment I felt destroyed. I remembered everything I had lost, but largest in my mind was that my mother was dead. I decided, at that moment, that I would give this nameless man my trust, because my mother had trusted a man like him before and not been hurt for that trust.
I still have massive problems dealing with emotions. Through various means I have been informed that even if I can't recall every traumatic event from my past, on some level my mind does remember and reacts to outside stimulus telling my body what it must do to stay safe. No matter how many times I am told that death is permanent, I still refuse to believe that it is final. I have survived death so many times that I feel anyone should be able to. What I do know is that my mother didn't survive her death and now she is gone from my world.
I wrote this on the second anniversary of her death.
Mother's Day
July the 16th is
when I celebrate Mother's Day. That is the day my mother died. I was not
allowed to be part of her life during the last six months of her life. She was
my mother and my advocate. She helped me to navigate through the world because
I was lost. I didn't even remember that she was my mother all the time. I just
knew that this nice lady would come over and take me places. She always
believed in me and made the world safe for me. The level of cruelty involved in
the decision that I should not be allowed to see her is astronomical. She was
literally all I had.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Death of a Friend
All my friends are beautiful. When I decide that someone is a friend their whole aspect changes in my eyes. I don't know when I first noticed this but I know that if you are a friend of mine I easily look past all your shortcomings and see what I want to see. This could be a function of the TBI, an easy simplification of the complex world for my minds assimilation. It could, also, be how it is for everyone, we see the people and things we like bathed in the light of beauty. I have never discussed this with anyone, because as I have said I don't understand people so I tend to avoid them. Those few who have, through one means or another, entered my life are changed in my eyes.
On the 28th of October my life lost one of it's glowing lights. Tiffany Martin was killed by being run down with a car. She was only 27 and was one of the very few people that I had offered sanctuary in my home if she ever needed it. To say that she was beautiful if an understatement. She, literally, walked in beauty. She was always a breath of sunlight and peace when she entered my home.
She sought sanctuary in my home only three times and I gave it freely. I never asked why she felt the need, I simply gave her what she wanted.
She loved the picture books that I have collected of great architectural masterpieces from around the world and pretty pebbles that I had gathered. We would sit in long silences enjoying each others company. She liked sugar in her coffee and enjoyed the high caffeine brews that I favor. She, also, enjoyed looking at the pictures that I had taken of various buildings and flowering plants around Albuquerque. I have great trouble relating to others, but for her I made an extra effort and it was very much worth the effort.
To say that I am saddened by this death is not doing justice to the feelings involved. I can not properly express the level of feeling I attached to this one life. If all my friends are lights in my life, then she, surly, was one of the greatest lights. Her lovely smile is sorely missed in my life. I am much reduced by this loss.
In loving memory of my friend Tiffany.
On the 28th of October my life lost one of it's glowing lights. Tiffany Martin was killed by being run down with a car. She was only 27 and was one of the very few people that I had offered sanctuary in my home if she ever needed it. To say that she was beautiful if an understatement. She, literally, walked in beauty. She was always a breath of sunlight and peace when she entered my home.
She sought sanctuary in my home only three times and I gave it freely. I never asked why she felt the need, I simply gave her what she wanted.
She loved the picture books that I have collected of great architectural masterpieces from around the world and pretty pebbles that I had gathered. We would sit in long silences enjoying each others company. She liked sugar in her coffee and enjoyed the high caffeine brews that I favor. She, also, enjoyed looking at the pictures that I had taken of various buildings and flowering plants around Albuquerque. I have great trouble relating to others, but for her I made an extra effort and it was very much worth the effort.
To say that I am saddened by this death is not doing justice to the feelings involved. I can not properly express the level of feeling I attached to this one life. If all my friends are lights in my life, then she, surly, was one of the greatest lights. Her lovely smile is sorely missed in my life. I am much reduced by this loss.
In loving memory of my friend Tiffany.
Friday, September 7, 2018
Poetry
I feel that most people start writing because of some need to get the things inside out. I began to write based on a tragedy that changed me in more ways than I could handle. I started in 1991 to write poems to express the lose of a loved one. I was a staff sergeant in the US Air Force and gay so I kept most folks at arms length for my own protection. Tim was the most annoying person I had ever met and he would not take no as an answer. I don't have any clear memories of that time as it was prior to my TBI, but I can see the pain I was in from old writings I had from that time. He was a civilian and didn't understand why I refused what he offered. I finally allowed him into my life and it was the happiest decision I had ever made. This was written after he killed himself.
On this day,
Oct 10 1991, Timothy Joseph Hanson took his on life by parking his car on the
train tracks near his mothers home in Sioux City, Iowa. The phone call upset me
so much that in fine Roman tradition I killed the messenger by slamming the
phone partway into the cinder block wall. I, also, smoked my very first
cigarette that day with the civilian AFETS. It was the most horrible day
imaginable. Within a month I was headed to Woomera,SA where I would meet some
very wonderful people. The feeling of lose never goes away. The feeling that I
should have been able to prevent it does not fade. More importantly the anger
at this person who said they loved me but chose to leave me never goes away. It
grows.
Season of Sleep
The
world is growing cold with the
Approach
of winter.
It
is time for the trees to go to sleep for now
And
you, my love, to go to sleep forever.
You
who were the fountain of beautiful
Chaos
in my life, are now gone.
I do
not know how to tell you good-bye
Nor
can I properly express the depth
Of
emotion to which you are attached.
I
will never be the same for this.
The
golden leaves fall from the trees and remind
Me
of another time when you and I drove through the
City
filled with the grief for another lost friend.
That
time is gone, now it is I driving
Alone
in waves of pain.
How
do these things happen?
Who
is it that decides on this horror?
I
thought I knew, but I am more confused.
So,
the trees will sleep and so shall you.
The
only difference is that they shall rise in the spring,
But
you, my love, will not.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
My first
I am just a normal guy who has died a few times and gotten better. I served in the United States Air Force until 1998 when, after 17 years, they decided to kick me for something that I had told them at the beginning: I'm gay. It was a knee jerk reaction by DOD to the president writing Don't Ask/Don't Tell. That document ended more careers then the so called "which hunts" ever did. I don't understand politics and in my opinion that is a good thing.
The most life changing event I have so far experienced was my death in 2013. I was thrown from the second floor of my apartment and landed head first on the brick floor below. I have life today because of two reasons. One is the brilliance of the medical team at the University of New Mexico Hospital lead by Dr. Tabe. The other was my complete lack of medical knowledge. I did not know that my injuries should have killed me so I refused to stay dead. I had an extensive rebuild of my chest and head. I have very few real memories of anything prior to June the 21st, 2013. The doctors originally wanted to do the operations over an entire year but I forced them to complete me in just under a month, I wanted to get back to school! That was a bust because my mind had been rearranged. Things I was good at before I could no longer do. Math has been taken away from me. I used to volunteer as a cooking instructor through the Department of Justice's Weed and Seed program and I have lost the ability to explain what I am doing. I can still cook, excellently, but I can't explain what I am doing. I think of it as muscle memory, my body remembers and just does.
When I left the hospital I remember the nurse telling me to go with this very nice lady because she was my mother. She became my number one advocate and defender. When she died in 2016 I went crazy. I hated everyone and everything that I perceived as taking her away from me. I ended up homeless and lost until a very nice Albuquerque Police Department man found me. I had been beaten several times so he took me in for repairs. He, also, told me about the Good Shepherd. I did not know that there were places I could go to get food and to sleep.
This is only part of a much larger story. I have left things out for the purpose of brevity but I will expand later on.
I have a hard time relating to humans. Its like when they were rebuilding me that left some parts out. If you have never met a person who has suffered a severe traumatic brain injury then you may not know that one of the common side effects is extreme irritability. That is what the doctors call it but it does not begin to explain what happens. Imagine someone bumping in to you and your first thought is to launch nuclear weapons at them and you may begin to understand what it means to befriend a TBI survivor. So I have few friends to say the least.
Thank you for your time.
The most life changing event I have so far experienced was my death in 2013. I was thrown from the second floor of my apartment and landed head first on the brick floor below. I have life today because of two reasons. One is the brilliance of the medical team at the University of New Mexico Hospital lead by Dr. Tabe. The other was my complete lack of medical knowledge. I did not know that my injuries should have killed me so I refused to stay dead. I had an extensive rebuild of my chest and head. I have very few real memories of anything prior to June the 21st, 2013. The doctors originally wanted to do the operations over an entire year but I forced them to complete me in just under a month, I wanted to get back to school! That was a bust because my mind had been rearranged. Things I was good at before I could no longer do. Math has been taken away from me. I used to volunteer as a cooking instructor through the Department of Justice's Weed and Seed program and I have lost the ability to explain what I am doing. I can still cook, excellently, but I can't explain what I am doing. I think of it as muscle memory, my body remembers and just does.
When I left the hospital I remember the nurse telling me to go with this very nice lady because she was my mother. She became my number one advocate and defender. When she died in 2016 I went crazy. I hated everyone and everything that I perceived as taking her away from me. I ended up homeless and lost until a very nice Albuquerque Police Department man found me. I had been beaten several times so he took me in for repairs. He, also, told me about the Good Shepherd. I did not know that there were places I could go to get food and to sleep.
This is only part of a much larger story. I have left things out for the purpose of brevity but I will expand later on.
I have a hard time relating to humans. Its like when they were rebuilding me that left some parts out. If you have never met a person who has suffered a severe traumatic brain injury then you may not know that one of the common side effects is extreme irritability. That is what the doctors call it but it does not begin to explain what happens. Imagine someone bumping in to you and your first thought is to launch nuclear weapons at them and you may begin to understand what it means to befriend a TBI survivor. So I have few friends to say the least.
Thank you for your time.
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