WOW! : EXPERIENCE THIRTY- ONE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

What ASTONISHES you? 

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

PRAYER : EXPERIENCE NINETEEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

What is your experience with PRAYER ?

Have you been granted what you needed?  Have you received the answers you sought?

Do you pray for other people?  What do you pray for?

Or perhaps you have never prayed or given up on prayer?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

MARAUDING MENTALLY ILL

Back in the day.

Before diagnostic psychobabble became part of talk. Before you became wary of saying you were feeling "blue." When the blues were best treated by listening to the blues.

Before consciousness included realization that your best friend suffered their thinking.

A delight with morning dew and sunlight spun in the rose bush between thorns and bud.

Me - the fly who realized and wiggled loose.

That day when his friend who knew him since high school dismissed your concerns about his pain by saying, "But - don't you know?! He's just really really really neurotic!" 

That day you just got a clue. 

She had a decade on you. 

Sentimental with childhood, no one told you.

Where exactly is that point where really really really neurotic and mentally ill meet? When the day you realized you lost a friend along the way?

When saying someone was "crazy" was said with a smile, a laugh, even a hold-your-belly because it was meant as a compliment. When "crazy" was "genius" and innovation. When you respected unique individuals. No one was on trial for "culture appropriation" either. So what if they wanted to do something with their hair?! It was their hair. Crazy, man!

But, now you know more. Too much. Some would say better. Now you can use words like narcissistic personality disorder, self-harming, or clinically depressed with knowing and sadly, abandon. 

He lived all those labels and more. As the years went by he got really really really really really neurotic.

He tore himself up on a nightly basis. He spent hours looking in mirrors. He went into a zone while stretching his legs before a run. Where are you? Come back! Come back!

He was always running late and drove like a hellion, even the blind curves through the canyon. Scared the hell out of you a few times. 

Had to chase young girls. Really young girls. Really really young girls... Sunset Strip. Told them he was a music producer. Leaned into his dream of being a Rock Star. He passed on first and second look. Told too young girls who could believe their eyes... Went home alone to dismantle.

Did not see his aging.

Women as props.

Women as compensation.

//

Being around these people makes you sick too, so you make your escape. That's what you do. You're afraid their mental illness is a contamination. Cooties. Associating with that person means something about you - you mean girl.

How did you acquire all the clutter of mentally ill friends? Do you hoard mentally ill friends? Remember when you thought you were loyal and faithful rather than an enabler? 

//

Went to visit his parents. His mother you always liked. Tears springing from her eyes as she said, "I hope it's not mental illness." 

"I think it is," you said, quietly but sure.

Obsessive-Compulsive. Self hater. Something at the core.

C 2021 Christine Trzyna

Note: The last couple days living through history; The siege of the United States Capitol to disrupt the political process of confirming Joseph Biden as the next President, the fervent discussion of President Donald Trump's mental health, and the effect of the Covid-19 plague and economic disrepair, has me thinking about mental illness. In discussion with a friend, we agreed that we don't think of depression as mental illness. It is most often common and appropriate. There is a great deal of pain to process and a Dark Night of the Soul can be Spirituality Enlightening. We don't think a mere six weeks of feeling blue should lead to medication. We do think self harm and suicidal thoughts should require a psychiatric consultation. In this series of free writing I'm exploring mental illness and friendship.

GARDEN VARIETY PARANOIA ? LAPL LIBRARY RECORD? ACCIDENTALLY RUNNING INTO PORN?

GARDEN VARIETY PARANOIA ?  LAPL LIBRARY RECORD NOT PRIVATE?
ACCIDENTALLY RUNNING INTO PORN?

 

By Christine Trzyna  C 2013

One of my more garden-variety-paranoid associates, who used to be a security guard at a world famous museum and owns a gun collection that was handed down in his family, is, among other things, afraid of how law enforcement (maybe the FBI?) can get your LIBRARY RECORD. The way this goes is that you're suspected of doing something wrong and so they get your library account number and then a list of all the books you ever took out from say, LAPL. From this they determine a psychological profile of you.

The truth is that I do suspect that LAPL, and other libraries, are collecting this information but I don't know for sure. I feel more sure that they know exactly what you're doing on the computer with your two free hours, but then I still believe you'd have to be doing something illegal for any law enforcement to actually ask for the record. 

Example, several years ago a person was arrested in the Studio City branch for using e-mail to send prostitutes to assignments. It was in the newspaper that the police had been monitoring (reading) his e-mails for years, since he'd been doing so from the Sherman Oaks branch.

I tried to calm my garden-variety-paranoid associate. 

"I read all around subjects. I sometimes take out a book for the hell of it and I may or may not read the whole thing. There are books and films I've ordered, picked up, and then returned without reading or watching much of.  NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU READ A BOOK OR WATCHED A FILM SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU TOOK IT HOME. NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU AGREE WITH AN AUTHOR'S POINT OF VIEW or that you were influenced by what you were exposed to!  You can just as well get pissed off at an author as you can suck up information. Who can prove that what you read or watch says anything about you besides that you were curious or had a whim?"

Actually, to me, it's circumstantial evidence that you actually looked at or read a web-site.  Unless you're Robert Blake and the FBI just looked at your hard drive and found out you were looking for murder supplies.

Through the years I have honestly and accidentally hit into porn when I wasn't looking for it. In my lifetime I have actually looked for it almost never.  I'm not for it. It goes against my spiritual beliefs and what I want for this world.

One such case was maybe a decade ago when I was looking for information on Sarasvati, the Goddess of the Arts in Hinduism.  (You might think of her as a patron saint of writers, musicians, dancers...) 

At the time I had an EarthLink account and used their search engine. One of the main links on the first page was called "Sarasvati's Temple." So I clicked and got onto an inter-racial dating site. I believe it was owned by a woman of some Asian background and her purpose was to give dating advice to men, mostly Asian men, and to assure them that there were inaccurate stereotypes that were effecting their self esteem  So if you paged all the way down to say, page 20, you got to the International Penis Size Survey. This page had a 'how to measure' that had an actual penis on it. I wasn't offended. One of my platonic men friends thought it was so funny that he asked me to print the whole thing out for him to show his friends.

However, soon after that my EarthLink account was plagued with porn spam, even communications that suggested I could get my hands on child pornography. It was disgusting.  I was advised that pornographers were targeting me. I got over 700 such offers in the 3 weeks that I was out of town on vacation. One person suggested that the offer for child porn was actually an undercover operation.

Then there was the time I was checking on where hits were coming from to this Blog.  I happened to be at a Latter Day Saints genealogy library taking a quick break from research and believe me when I say that in the one second that it took to see a flash of the porn and shut it down, the Church people were notified that someone was looking at porn. It was embarrassing as the manager came out and looked at what a row of young missionary men ("Elders") who had just come in were looking at on the computers.

More recently I discovered a graphic lesbian porn site linking to this blog. It took me about half a second to get back to a civilized view of the world. Sometimes people actually think that they are going to get at you in some way, say because you hate porn, by trying to infiltrate your work. 

Is this where I yawn?


C 2013 - 2022 - 2025  Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved