Installment story.

He lived in a cave with a rabbit, a squirrel, and a calico cat.  Most of the time he smelled bad, but the animals didn’t seem to mind.  There was a certain respect, an appreciation for each other.  The squirrel and the calico cat played mind games, but mostly when they were on the veranda of the cozy cave.  The human being put cat food out for the animals.  He filched it from houses in the valley.  Cat food was hard to come by when his hiking boots left footprints in the snow.  Footprints were a dead giveaway to folks of means who held a sense of right and wrong, trespassing and larceny.     

Late at night, the human told the animals stories, fables really.  There was always a moral. He wasn’t sure if he was influencing their development with the morality of the stories, but he was sure they enjoyed the stories.  The short fables seemed to loll them asleep or elicit an occasional twitch of an ear.

Other creatures shared the cave with the four of them. The mice were wary of the cat and skittered only near the edges of the cave.  The insects, most of whom had a very minuscule sense of self-preservation provided extra morsels for the squirrel and the rabbit. Spiders were welcome because they controlled the population of insects.  Bats were good daytime company as long as they did not poop on the man.  He built his small cooking fires on the veranda, as to not bother the bats. 

The man, Sherman, had suffered various degrees of emotional and physical abuse from early childhood. He was not the type of person to blame his loneliness and lifestyle on his past, but he wondered about the impact of his father’s beatings. Did they have a negative impact on his psyche?Perhaps, he sometimes mused, his father had some small impact on him.  His father was a good man unless he was drinking too much Jack Daniels. 

He was raised in a Lutheran Church, one of the more fundamentalist sects, with a parochial school and German looking teachers. Being good was of paramount importance.  Singing hymns was big, really big.  Knowing more than a handful of bible verses was a respected quality in 5^th, 6^th and 7^th graders, especially the 7^th graders.  The good 7^th graders could recite as many as a hundred verses. The very short verse, “Jesus wept,” was frowned upon if used too often.  That was his favorite verse of all.  He wondered if Jesus wept in heaven when Sherman became an atheist.   He suspected that some of his classmates had turned out to be atheists too, but he had no way of knowing.  If he ever left the cave and moved back to town, he might try to find one or two of his old classmates. He remembered the blond girl with the cute dimples.  The teacher liked the dimples too and often commented on them to the class.  The children in the class often wondered why the teacher liked the dimples more than he liked some of the other children. He might recognize her in a grocery store if she still had dimples. He could ask her if she was an atheist too.

Sherman really didn’t like being an atheist because this very strong belief held no promise, not peace of mind, not true friendship, and especially no hope for the afterlife. He wished he had more. 

“Little squirrel,” he asked, “have you watched the hatch of insects on the creek?”  The squirrel nodded.

“Have you watched them rise high into the air and fall back into the creek only to be eaten by the fish?”  The squirrel did not acknowledge him.

“That is a small look at mankind on a sunny afternoon. There is no difference between the insects and the vast history of mankind stretching into the far recesses of time. Mankind only entertains himself better between birth and death, if that can be said, and suffers more and longer than the insects.”  The squirrel’s eyes blinked.

Sherman thought he was onto something profound.  Perhaps a new religion was being awakened in him. He thought of his ex-wife.  He thought of his children.  He thought of the possibility of grandchildren.  He unfurled his sleeping bag and dropped it on the bed of straw.  He would awake in the morning after sweet dreams interrupted by several trips to the edge of the cave to pee in the middle of the night.  Trips to the edge seemed to be part of being an old man.  The bats would be out hunting on such a clear night as this one.  The moon was waxing gibbous and looked cold.

Installment number two

How did Sherman come to live the life he was living?  At one time he had a good job working in a paper mill, and before that he was a solid hand in a plywood factory.  He made good wages.  He took his family to church.  He was a good blue-collar worker. Then one day something in him snapped. He was never the same again.

He struggled with his perceptions of light and dark, good and evil, happy and distressed, good worker and a marginal worker.  His world was thrown into chaos.  Lines began to fade.  He was no longer grounded in a dualistic view of the world.  He grew more introspective, day by day.He saw a psychologist and then a psychiatrist.  The psychologist administered a version of the Myers- Briggs personality profile.  He was found to be an INFP on one test and an ENFP on another test.  He was swinging to and fro’ on the introverted to the extroverted scale.  This scale was solid for “I” intuitive, “F” feeling, and “P” perception.  The swing between introversion and extroversion was maddening. Sherman understood, intuitively of course, that the extroversion was prominent on the days he exhibited mania.  On the days that he experienced depression he swung into introversion. Carl Jung thought the INFP’s were the most likely souls to be lost of the 16 personality types.  They were the least likely to perform solidly in life’s demands.

The psychologist administered tests and listened intently to Sherman.  The psychiatrist administered questionnaires and drugs. The drugs were powerful psychotropics and while they carried the promise of a normal life they also carried the surety of unwanted side effects. While taking Depakote he ate voraciously and gained 50 pounds, on another drug he simply wept for hours at a time.

There were no physical abnormalities to test for.  There was no way to peer into his brain with a CAT scan, a PET scan, a biopsy, or make surgical incisions seeking some physical anomaly thereby arriving at a conclusion for a solid diagnosis and more efficacious drugs.  These procedures were available for the discovery of diseases such as cancer.  Perhaps someday the medical profession will have the ability to diagnose and treat him with a simple blood test.

When Sherman didn’t take the powerful drugs, his family criticized him for his aberrant behavior.  Who was the father and husband?  Who might he be when he awoke each day? Would he be the irritable Alfred, the fun-loving Larry, or the depressed David?  The family recognized some of his characters and personalities.  Now and then they experienced the introduction of an entirely new individual that did not fit the usual personalities.

During a manic episode while hiking in the woods with his middle son they encountered several men.  Sherman started a conversation with a deep redneck southern drawl that was a phony as a three dollar bill.  Sherman's native accent was mid-western with a touch of Down East. The two deer hunters demeanors quickly fell from affable to something aproaching fear.  They had guns.  Why were they afraid of Sherman? They had mentioned earlier in the conversation that they were employed as prison guards.  The two hunters were all too familiar with mental illness, considering the fact that Americans house their mentally ill in prisons instead of institutions.

3rd installment:

Sherman attended a group meeting on mental illness, once, in his home town.  They met in a third-floor room of a Presbyterian Church.  He walked down the hall toward the room with some misgivings about attending. One of his well-meaning friends, whom Sherman thought was a little-bit-off, had suggested he check out the group.  As he walked into the room his heart skipped a beat. There were thirty people arranged sitting in chairs facing into a large circle of emptiness, some of whom he immediately recognized.  The empty space in the middle of the large circle made him uncomfortable.  The empty space reminded him of the life that was slowly slipping away from him.  He couldn’t explain such strange thoughts.  Who else would think of a large space in relation to one’s own mind. He had watched Hollywood movie scenes of AA meetings.  He expected the meeting to open with introductions.  “Hello, I am Gloria and I am nuts.”  But this did not happen.  A nice woman whom he did not recognize opened the meeting with a warm greeting and a short talk about the organization they called NAMI.  The acronym stood for National Alliance on Mental Illness.

He watched everyone very closely.  Sherman did not speak.  The behaviors ranged from totally solid, good citizens, good family people to the opposite extreme.  One frightening looking middle aged man dressed in combat clothing loudly interrupted in a belligerent manner, shouting, “I am being interrupted.” 

In fact, the interruptions were non-existent because he had not been talking.  As the strange man sat in the comfortable easy chair, he began very stylized movements resembling Karate or Tak Won Do, or very fast Tai Chi.   The movements were absurd, threating, surreal, and outrageous.  Sherman was nervous.  He was uncomfortable around normal society and the man in combat clothing frightened Sherman. 

Sherman was not frightened about the wild man hurting him.  Sherman was frightened he might hurt the wild man if the wild man got into Sherman’s face.  Sherman had been an athlete in high school and was comfortable with his ability to defend himself, although this was very foolish think given the fact that he graduated 30 years earlier.

One day, soon after the mental health meeting, Sherman started collecting camping gear from his basement.  There were pots, pans, cooking stove, sleeping bags and inflatable mats.  He put them in the back of his Toyota truck and drove up the familiar mountain road.  He had stumbled upon the cave once while deer hunting.  He made several trips with goods and provisions.  Finally, on a bright fall day, he left his truck in his driveway and started walking.  The trip on foot took the entire day, well into the night guided by a full moon.  Sherman was at peace with himself.  He left his bipolar medications in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser.

The largest adjustment to make over the next several years was the loss of social contact.  His hypomanic disposition had made him popular with some of the town’s people.  He often thought of his family, the guys at the coffee shop and even casual contacts with store clerks.