Teach The Sky

A scarcely discussed aspect of mental illness – and like chronic illness as well, I get the impression – is the fatigue of having to describe and rationalize the symptoms.

So last week, I crashed bad.  BAD.  Catastrophically bad.  Couldn’t get out of bed, bad.  The kind of bad that is usually an exaggeration played for laughs in comedy shows.  But it was real.  Agonizingly, painfully real.  I tried and failed to muddle through one day, and then was basically crippled the following day.  It’s taken more than a week to recover, if I can even call this recovery.  There was no catalyst, no real inciting incident.  As near as I can tell, my Depression just rolled a natural 20 on it’s to-hit roll and I went down like a sack of grain. Continue reading “Bedridden”

Not a lot of people talk about the chokepoints in writing.  The industry as a whole focuses on two points: the creation of a manuscript and the publication of the manuscript.  And there’s good reason for this.  If you don’t have a manuscript, nothing else can get done.  And publishing is a manuscript is how your writing gets shared and/or you get paid (sadly, it’s usually or, not and, but that’s another matter).

The thing is, there’s a LONG road between those two points.  Once the manuscript is completed – and by that, I mean the first draft is truly done – you now embark on the long path of editing it. Continue reading “Chokepoints and Milestones”

The two weeks between June 19^th and July 4^th are the most Patriotic days of the year in the United States.  July 4^th is the day we celebrate the signing of the declaration of independence, our breakup letter with England back in the Colonial Days.  Nevermind that it wasn’t actually signed by everybody until August sometime.  People say its America’s birthday.  Cool, great.

June 19^th – or Juneteenth – is the observance of when federal troops were used to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.  Even though the proclamation was signed in 1862, it wasn’t actually enforced locally until three years later.  The first time federal troops rolled up into Texas and actually told slave owners ‘nah, son, you gotta let them go’, that’s what June 19^th is celebrating.  The two holidays go hand-in-hand, really.  July 4^th is when the first American freedoms were born; June 19^th is when the least of American freedoms were finally delivered.

We’ll talk about things like the Burt Lake Burnout, Manzanar War Relocation Center, and Hutto Residential Center, another time.

But the point is, July 4^th is like getting your learner’s permit when you’re 15.  Juneteenth is the unrestricted license you get at 16. Continue reading “By Dawn’s Early Light”

With all the societal unrest of late, there’s been a lot of talk about ‘rights’.  And I don’t mean ‘of late’, as in the last week.  I mean…well, hell, my whole life.  A child of the 1980s, I was born into a society that was struggling with the social contract for as long as I can remember.  Maybe that struggle began before the ink was even dried on said contract.

In the United States, are concept of rights is defined by our legal system, specifically the Constitution (the Bill of Rights is actually just the first ten amendments in the Constitution).  27 Amendments currently sit on the books, with a good hundred or so proposed every year congress is in session.  Earlier rights deal with individuals, whereas later rights are generally a bit more institutional.

The question becomes, though, does the presence of a right suggest a corresponding responsibility?  If you have the right to bear arms, do you have the corresponding responsibility to carry and use that firearm in a particular manner (IE responsibly)?  With the right to free speech, do you have a responsibility to speak the truth or speak accurately in some fashion?

Or are responsibilities wholly independent?

We codify rights, but not responsibilities.  I think that may say quite a bit right there.

And maybe solving some of our problems might come from doing just that: defining our societal responsibilities.