V/V:I REALLY AM AN OPTIMIST ON MY GOOD DAYS, REALLY

Psychotic is a word that makes me cringe. Why? Probably because I too have grown up around the stigmatization of mental illness and the words associated with it, as well as all the stereotypes of people with mental illness. Do you think it’s a group of pathetic people that don’t know how to integrate themselves into a world that’s full of confident, happy, sociable people? If you know anything, you know there is no such world as that. We are all insecure, emotional, and isolated individuals, who are really good at covering up the truth. But people don’t laugh at just anybody. They laugh at what they don’t understand. They create words that hurt. They create thoughts that hurt. They create an image that hurts. They even create an impossibility of integration that hurts. Well, guess what? I fall into what I call a subculture of crazy, lunatic, mentally insane individuals. If you want proof, I could maybe stamp “insane” on my forehead so that I don’t have to live in shame or guilt for my condition.

(MLRF, 2002)

VI/VI: MUSICALITY’S RHYTHMIC BANTER

You spoke to me in the music I had fixed into my ears and mind and visual-mental landscape. All your songs played like water, just like the oceans I dreamt about. And the streams that only I had the ability to dip my feet into, was water that played like tears. Music was all I thought I had and it was truly killing me softly. What I thought was background music to the soundscape of our lives really was the story of our lives. The songs were singing my past, present, and future.