Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Getting better? Looking up?

I've been in talks with twice as many recruiters this year than last year. Still not much has come of it yet. My first answer would be to produce more games. The indie line of that work is difficult because it's sometimes lonely and I have to take on other small jobs to make things happen and that can slow down the process. I sometimes want to forget about games but I've invested so much into it that there really isn't any sense in stopping. Why not do both? Keep the hope alive people. One way or another I'll escape Central Texas. I don't care if I have to play bongos on a river boat to get there.

In related news. HTUR is halted for the time being. I'm shifting efforts back to Subcutaneous for a little while because there is more bang for the buck there. Also I haven't updated much on the Unreal4 project. But now that I think I've worked the kinks out of my outlines I can dig back into it.

There are also many tracks starting to pile up ... an issue that I have with making and releasing large batches of work is that the quality is inconsistent over larger periods of time. And for the first time in a while gaming has taken up some real time for the last couple weeks. A grandparent of mine died today. Worse things have taken longer. This year being what it has been.

September has just ended and so now I feel like I can begin again. Work, Just work. Then work harder. I think that's the only way to see times like these in the rear-view.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Hope Out

What planet is this? I need to find a way to sell all my things so I can get to the hobo life or something. Middle America kills. I'm shocked at my idle mind this month. Please let something happen. I do not want to experience that last book again.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Bloody Detail

It has been recommended to me to account for my last manic episode. I need something to come back to in the future where I forget where I've been. Hopefully never again.

I did a terrible job of documenting my first issues in Los Angeles. The stress of striking out on my own as well as trying to handle my taxes and student loans became a heavy mental load. Before Halloween that year I had started to experience mild psychosis my father didn't know what to do with me at the time and sent me to live in central Texas with my mother.

I was very depressed out here for almost a year. Then I got into the state mental health service MHMR and started to really turn things around as I acclimated to the humid days and the zero tolerance life. There aren't many good jokes in the heart of Texas. In time I became so comfortable that I made the mistake of weaning myself off of my daily medication. First it was a small change. As time went on I took less and less until eventually I had stopped altogether around a year later.

Come mothers day of 2014 I was acting out again. I didn't have a grasp of what was going on because my mother also suffers from the same disorder and had a short relapse only a few months before. I fancied myself a master manipulator or magician. And have since scattered my belongings in all corners of our house. At the peak of that experience my father made the call to have me on emergency detention. I was apprehended by the local police and spent ten terrible days without psychiatric treatment in the ER of the local branch of Metroplex hospital.

The days there were terrible. I could hardly trust anyone and was on 24 hour surveillance. Initially I was testing my own limits but with time ended up testing every shift nurse in that system. I remember avoiding medication at metroplex and thinking that my life would come to an end if they were to poison me to get me to sleep. I don't remember many details except the cold nights and losing a bunch of weight under delusion that I was a kung-fu master of some kind. The hospital staff was very dismissive and not trusting. I couldn't tell whether it was my ego or others around me who seemed like deflated caricatures of people who I was familiar with. Pardon the ramble but those ten days were the worst experience in a hospital that I have ever seen and now I only have the medical bills to show for it. I still try and forget some of those terrible times on the state hospital waiting list. Within a week I was moved up from the 40th position on the waiting list to the second. On the last day I was finally able to eat and brush my own teeth without supervision. I was then moved to the state hospital ASH.

Ironically I'd been wanting to visit Austin considering the time that I had spent in central Texas already. I'm a musician and I found a lot of peace in the strange people that are from around there who worked at ASH. For my first week and a half there I maintained the super-soldier mentality and displayed my martial arts almost on a daily basis. I endured many hallucinations in order to maintain control but still had to be put down between fights of the female aspects of what angrycrow was capable of and the peace of ben Nix. I was once asked if I thought there was a coincidence that my best friend from college and I were both diagnosed with mental disorders. If you combine our technical knowledge with the trying times that most adults our age suffer with I would say no. We're a stressed generation in trying times and we're fast approaching leadership roles in communities who set their minds on the great american dream. I know I'm getting out there and lofty. But I strongly believe that my experience was mostly based on defining freedom for myself. Nothing defines freedom better than being arrested and thrown into a hospital system against your will just before mothers day. Having to get permission to use the restroom. Living where the suicidal people are in the same room as the homicidal. I have been verbally abused and physically threatened by the wild animals in SSFAPS ward at ASH too many times to recall. And so I have to close this chapter. Despite my behavior without the medication and me foolishly second guessing a veteran doctor. I have more a sense of what freedom can be if I keep myself in check. This experience has given me as much creative material as it has nightmares. I only wish I could remember every bloody detail that would keep me from entering the halls of the haunted hospital ever again. Between ASH and Metroplex I was reborn as a more free man with an even greater respect for the fine line between genius and insanity. I think I'll be back for other accounts of this experience. But I'm glad I have the freedom to put it here in the first place.