Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

me? How many other times did I look down the hallways of the state hospitals at the idea that I could be there with no recourse forever? How many times? I honestly don't know.
Yes, I'm a free man, alright. I live under a roof where I'm paying what's required under family supervision, and I'm getting more benefits in the bargain than I can imagine. That's how free I am. I haven't been so well provided for since I left my mother's house.
I want to be grateful, thankful, and respectful to my God and my family, to the idea that I've finally, really gotten liberated; I've really, finally succeeded; I'm cooperating with the one scheme that works.
All my life I've believed I didn't have anything going for me, that I was the worst sort of person, that I did not deserve to be good to myself and take care of myself, that I was worthless. I wasted my entire youth believing that. I didn't believe in any of my talents or abilities. I didn't believe I had anything worth anything to myself or to society. I was worse than a failure. I was self-destructive. That was the consequence of all the abuses I suffered when I was growing up, in that state of not understanding how to take care of myself.
I was a chronic runaway, starting early in childhood, and never learned how to take care of myself as people learn growing up. It's one of the reasons I'm writing this book, so I can look honestly at the things that happened to me and around me, and know those things for what they were.
I can write. I can compose music. I can find my way around some place new, like this entire new city I live in now. I can read better than a lot of people I've met, here and there in life, in my going out and coming in, and I can crochet like a professional. Besides that, I'm a gentleman, believe it or not. There are ladies who enjoy my company, and I know how to enjoy theirs without stepping on their toes. I'm not worthless by a long shot. My life is not a total disaster. I'm actually kind of a nice guy, if I do say so myself. I've believed the opposite for so long, I'll just say so for good measure. I need to be good to myself for a change. Sure I've got a psychiatric diagnosis. That cat has been out of the bag a long time now. But I don't hurt people, and do my best to be nice to people.
I think that's a pretty good bottom line.

When a person dies they are not completely gone. They go away physically, but they do not go away in every way. A human being is energy, and the only thing energy can do is change form. It cannot be destroyed.
What Jesus did on the cross was make it available for human beings to remain themselves as individuals, after their bodies die. The unforgivable sin is God's destruction of the essence of the individual after the individual destroys their own body by their own hand. The individual can no longer be part of God, like the Evil One is no longer a part of God. This is completely irreversible. It's the reality of this destruction that makes suicide such a tragedy. It's a death within death, and I've learned that that's what I want to avoid.
I have been able to understand this on a deeper level for a long time, so that when my schizophrenia gets me thinking about destroying myself, I have something to keep me going, something to keep me living when I'm thinking self-destruction.
When Mom and Aunt Vi were both of them finally dead and gone, crossed over, their spirits, their energy, got behind my own spirit, my own energy, and we all quit smoking cigarettes together. They never smoked. I always did, even when I had tried and tried to quit, ever since I was young. I never had the power to keep it going, until now. Now, I have succeeded with the help of the greatest love of two mothers: mother and mother's sister.
I needed that kind of spiritual power to get the job done, and almost immediately, after Aunt Vi passed on, I was able to let go of the smoking and become smoke-free, a nonsmoker.
It's spiritual power for spiritual warfare.

Artist
Chapter 17

Disoriented, ill, the young artist awoke on a bare mattress on a bare floor, with no sheet nor blanket to cover him, in a small, cold, olive-drab, cinder-block room. There was no knob on the door inside his cell. He'd risen to his feet easily enough with the strength of his youth, to explore his confined surroundings. He was vaguely dizzy. He could not see anything through the peep-hole in the door. He understood it was there to look in at him from the other side. The door was closed and locked against him. The cell was about six-by-nine, and had no furnishings but the sturdy, plastic-covered mattress on the floor.
He wore olive-drab, with some hospital's name faded into the old shirt and pants he was wearing, but he could not read the inscriptions upside down very well. His eyes were blurred somewhat, for some reason. The clothing was worn out from too many washings, from other people wearing the clothes before he'd had them on. They were hospital standard issue clothing.
He was alone in the cell, though there were sounds from the other side of the door. Someone spoke to two of his friends from the university, which was the last place he could remember being. The sounds came from the other side of the door. How could the people there know his friends' nicknames from university? He thought he'd never said anything about his friends where he was, although he had no idea where he was. But they did speak to his friends. He could hear them, he felt certain of it.
“Mop? R? Are you out there?” He called to them through the door. “They've got me locked down in here, Mop! R! Get them to let me out of here, please, Mop? Please, R? Where are you? Mop? R? Hey! You there! Hey!” He realized he was screaming, and stopped. He was crying.

The young artist went to the far wall of the cell, stepping on the mattress as he went.
There was a window where he could stare out into a cemented courtyard, like a small sized, empty parking lot, where the cops had brought him around from admissions. He looked through a window on the far side of the cell from the door with the peephole. He could look outside where there was another building and a yard. These things encompassing his immediate environment. He could see he was on the ground floor. The other building was two stories high, made of old, distressed red bricks, like the ones outside his heavily-screened, locked window-casing in his cell, that looked as though the brick'd been laid a century or more earlier, as though the building had held countless people captive over a parade of lifetimes before him. The entire place looked as though it was accustomed to tormented people living there for a long time. The windows of the building across the courtyard yielded nothing more to his understanding, than that vague impression, to his frightened curiosity.
He did not understand.
What was this place? It was like no other place he'd ever been to in his young adult life. It was like no place he'd ever even heard of in his thoroughly abused youth. He was scared, and did not know what to do. Occasionally, someone would come to the door of his cell, but they would leave it locked, mostly, unless they'd come to give him another injection. They would come to the other side of the door, and ask him questions through the door. He asked who they were, and they said they were the doctor. He didn't know what to say, so he answered everything best he could. It never occurred to him while he was in that cell that they could have been other patients on the ward making sport of him.
He was very confused.
The young artist could remember fighting a gang of men several times since he'd been there, as they'd wrestled him down to the durable, plastic-covered mattress in the room, and he'd been screaming with terror, getting his pants yanked off him, getting artfully pushed down on the mattress, and artfully jabbed with a needle in his butt, people re-dressing him skillfully with other, dryer pants, pleading with those several people who were in the room with him, holding him down as he struggled against them in his fear and alarm.
“Please leave me alone. Please let me out of here. Please? Please, don't rape me! Please, don't Rape Me!” He was tired after they'd left him laying down there, on the indestructible plastic-covered mattress; surrendering, he fell into a deep sleep; or should we say, he passed out, almost immediately after getting the shot in his butt.
Then, he dreamed.

***

The artist talked to his instrument with his hands, like a living computer talking to its monitor through its keyboard. He was playing his music to his audience; like a sane person talking with his open, forthright heart, speaking through his instrument to his listeners, all happening with a natural quality of a significant intelligence and a significant talent, coupled with plenty of rehearsal under his belt, and plenty of love to share with all who surrounded him in the sumptuous auditorium. That's what it was to hear the mature artist: his love for his music, his love for his instrument, his love for his audience, all were there at his fingertips. He played some of the music he'd written over the many years since the olive-drab.
He'd known nothing of computers when he was young. In those days, only the government had computers, and he knew almost nothing about that when he was young. But his dream was in reference to a much later time in his life, when computers had become what they are now, though he did not understand in his stricken youth.
The artist sat alone on the stage in the spotlights. His instrument, Nature's Cradle, speaking his heart into the spotlights and into the audience, on the stage in some unknown future, in his vivid dream. His instrument spoke of his love, with his heart in his lap, a six-stringed, nylon-stringed, wooden voice embodied the love he spoke, with its solo sound, his love for his audience, his love for his Maker, his love for his girl.
The audience was mostly obscured by the darkness of the auditorium, of the dream. Hushed. Intent. Wondering.
He played masterfully.

Suddenly, the artist felt himself falling the whole way around the world in every direction at once, like the paint that covers the globe commercial on the TV. He could feel his spirit covering the globe, understanding universal secrets he immediately forgot