Casey, my friend, shut up.

Not too good right now. Casey won't shut the fuck up. He has been gouging my eardrums out for a full half-hour now over a game of chess, which, I actually, find as remarkably boring as his horrid wrecking ball of the English language. His language is pedestrian and sophomoric, as if he were brought up amongst a cage of wild chimpanzees and his nose runs, never ceasing, and the sniffles ring in my ears like monotonous tortures...and the constant blowing into a handkerchief-utterly disgusting. Yet, Casey is really the only company I keep here at the group residence. We have sessions of "playtime" for an hour...anything beyond that and I would poke a pencil through both my eardrums and wail in agony. Or, I would simply, physically, shut his mouth for him and extricate his sinuses with a butter knife. So, yes, an hour is plenty good, because, you see, I HAVE to be somewhat social and WORK on my social skills. HA! With these lunatics! What is this establishment thinking? That Casey is the only being I consort with is bizarre, but he seems to be the only semi-coherent lunatic in this residence as far as my perception allows. I am, luckily, quite functional and stable as long as they've had me on this new regimen. I can articulate. My body is never quite under my control...nor are my facial muscles, bur I get by. I have developed a great insight regarding my illness. But, I have to say straight out: I am bat-shit crazy when the meds don't work and, yes, I will eventually deteriorate cognitively, and lose all remainder of sanity: My illness has a poor prognosis. Now, Casey here is a real bundle of bricks! He sure can run his mouth like those choo-choo trains my distant father used to maintain back in Newton, KS. Quite some ways away from the tiny township, good old Pleasant township, in which I was raised by my invalid and bickerish mother.

 Anyway, about Casey. Casey is the kind of fellow that talks a lot of empty bubbles that just float around shamelessly and aimlessly. His language permeates the air with a dank cloud of swamp-smelling stagnancy. His breath reeks of a septic mold that encapsulates the sense of smell and inspires a disgusted fury. At times, he takes well over twenty so minutes to make his point and the horror of it is that he never really succeeds at making that point, rather, he makes obtuse angles and broken squares and jargon unbeknown to anyone, not even to  himself. I don't bother much with trying to correct his lack of command over the English, or shall I    say, American language, for obvious reasons. HE NEVER SHUTS THE FUCK UP LONG ENOUGH FOR ME TO GET A WORD IN. Sure Casey, it's all butterflies and pond lilies and flying horses. They place the state of things, or status quo, on the back burner: they make anything relevant to the present cease to exist.

I recall during one chess game his insistence on repeating over and over his resentment towards the rats that had infested his former home and how they were sent to his house for the sole purpose of tormenting him. He said it was bad enough being an ugly bachelor that frequents "titty" bars and lurks amongst the dregs in porn cinemas. He said he would come home from the job that "drained his life away" only to find the piece of steak he had defrosted and was looking forward to dragged across the kitchen floor and mangled by ravenous rats. Casey believed that they did this to him to torment him. He did not understand the source of the problem: he rarely sealed properly or put away his food items. Call it lack of common sense, memory, whatever. His idiocy combined with the drudgery of his feeble preoccupations brought out the worst in me. I often berated and ridiculed him. This did not phase him. I wonder if maybe he even liked it. Sicko. I can also recall, with great misfortune, the tale of how his dog, a mixed breed of something or other, shat upon the living room rug as soon as he left for work. Everyday. Not one day did he not come home to a pile of shit on the carpet of his living room. He even went as far as to punish the dog by refusing to feed him for days. I asked him how that would have solved the problem and he replied "Well, I couldn't make him stand in the corner for two hours, so I decided he would only learn by starving. No food, no feces on my carpet." Completely logical, The dog died of neglect weeks later. Casey is a big asshole. Literally. He is off his rocker. I haven't fallen off mine recently. Good, good.

              Casey talks incessantly of plastic animals and rubber devices sold two for one at the dollar store. To put it plain: his talk is cheap and monotonous. And the ballgames, oh the ballgames! Enough about ballgames! I care not for games-they bore me to tears (if I had any at the right moment). Going food shopping under the surveillance of one of our group home musketeers is such an adventure for him. To me it just looks like food coated in fluorescent lighting and sounds like the worst horror of a radio station being played in between blaring announcements that have no appeal to me. I don't even see it as a break in the monotony of group home life. I would much rather read or write in solitude at my desk. My desk. It is covered with several books with pages marked, chocolate remnants, chap-sticks, nail clippers (about six pairs), and many notebooks I have littered with my writing both coherent and, on bad days, non-coherent. Who cares about bananas sold at a price that Casey claims is exorbitant? Fuck that! Not me! And golf....oh Lordy. A ball goes into the ground and everyone cheers....so the fuck what? People actually make money off of getting a ball into the right hole. Absurd! And Casey REALLY cares about such silly tripe and the blah blah latest news on Tiger Woods expose. I guess Casey is what you can call a common blue collar type. The only thing that makes him interesting is his psychosis when it takes over his ability to talk or move. I know, that sounds awful, but life often brings awful to the table and too damn bad.

I also had an ear-full about the making of candles. Casey insisted that the bees work very hard to provide wax for the distribution of candles, scented and unscented. He said it was unfair that we should keep them as slaves for the pleasure of modern housewives and deadbeat druggies that do not prefer light bulbs for some reason or other. I really thought he was starting to go into psychosis as he spoke of the bees and the wax and all that nonsense, but he remained completely chatty Kathy coherent in a surreal sort of way. I had an unpleasant thought, maybe somewhat insightful. Do I sound like this freak when I am not well? Hell, I sound worse than that when I am unwell so who am I to talk....one might say. But, as a medicated schizophrenic free, for the time being, of any symptoms, I am very down to Earth and straight. Anyhow, Casey kept blabbing about how we should allow the bees to inhabit their own territory and stop caging them for our own purposes. "What happens to the queen bee when all her minions are gone?" He asked me. Dead straight in the face. No hint of sarcasm or jolly joking. He went on to explain to me that the queen must become mad and then die a horrible, abandoned spinster. I asked him what did spinster have to do with it, but he brushed me off and dove into another delusion about how the queen bees must be saved. "Oh yeah" I said "Like God save the queen dude." I said this, of course, very sarcastically, but he did not pick up on it. He said simply "Yes," "like God save the queen. But, don't say dude because the queen would not like that sort of diction used when referring to her "Heinousness"."  I am reporting this story in my own language. If I were to relive the language of Casey, I may die. Well, maybe it is better I give you an example of his language. For instance, when talking about the queen bee he actually said "The mother bee is probably sad that her worker friends leave her. It is not nice that the people (whoever they may be) steal her workers away and make them work full time for the humans." There, that is enough. When "social" hour is up I flee to my room and make daily logs of did I experience any symptoms? Was I coherent today? Have I noticed an improvement since the change in meds? I also go over my day in chronological order as a way to improve my grip on reality and events as and when they truly happened. I do what I can to stay sane. I have yet to decipher the last book of the Hexastix. I know, I know, it has been a long time, but it is not my fault if I suddenly become haywire and scattered, and I have thoughts that are like grains of sand, many, but each a separate particle unattached to their brothers and sisters when dry. Many thoughts unhinged and beliefs incredible. I am tired. Casey. Trying to remain patient and calm when we dabble over chess is so, so tiring. I would actually like to grab him by the throat and scream "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND PLAY CHESS!!" But, no,no, that does not happen: I would be strapped down to the loony bed if I acted on my impulses. Nap time. -Henry O'Malley