(November 2002)

So to amuse myself on the long Northwest drives up and down the coast in the last couple weeks, I’ve been writing a science fiction book in my head about time travel and alternate realities. Except it’s actually not fiction at all and is really just a metaphor for living with an extreme case of manic-depression and having a really interesting life. In traditional Hopi language, there’s no past, present, or future in the grammar structure – different objects and people have different “states of becoming.” This has always fascinated me. It’s a completely other way of conceiving the concept of TIME. Working 40 hours and going back to the same house every night it’s hard to get a grasp on that one (which is probably a good thing if you want to survive in this painfully linear world,) but start traveling in the crazy way I’ve been traveling lately and it becomes pretty obvious that we all don’t move at the same speeds.
It’s easy to get a sense of this if you don’t sleep for awhile, or sleep in a different place every night, or hang around lots of different groups of people all the time -- everything has a tendency to speed up. You just start taking in more information, juggling lots of different things in your head at the same time, existing on some other plane of reality as the other folks around you. I’m one of the extreme cases where if I slip out of gear and don’t get enough sleep a couple nights in a row, I just start moving really fast and I have to find a quiet place and knock myself out with some heavy drugs just to get myself moving at the same consensus speed as the rest of the people around me. It’s no fun being the only person moving at your speed. Especially if you have a tendency to crash and burn.
 But amidst my short cycle sleep-dep fiascoes on the road, I have this habit of noticing that time bends a lot and everything seems to repeat itself in these ironic and interesting ways. A lot of times I feel like I’m living a life that curves like a spiral -- where I end up in the same places with the same people at different times or I end up in familiar places with different people who look like and are doing the same things as the people I used to know or I end up with familiar people but in new places who are older now like me and I can’t help but notice how we just keep getting more and more badass as the years go on. Like going in a circle, except the circle is spiraling towards the sky. Or something like that.
Not only do I notice the reality repeat thing, but I can’t help but acknowledging how our realities can shift so easily – especially if you’re like me and have volatile brain chemistry. In the imaginary science fiction book in my head, I want to employ this slick literary device where I describe a bunch of scenes from the perspective of someone who’s delusionally psychotic (and thinks that he and all his friends are superheroes for instance) -- then describe the same scenes from the perspective of someone who’s suicidially depressed (and thinks that he and all his friends are a bunch of dead beats and losers) – and then finally the same scenes from the perspective of someone who’s all grounded and into being human like the rest of the world, (but still sees glimmers of the magic he knew as a “madman” and blends it all together into some kind of interesting story.)
Because I feel like a fucking superhero sometimes. And I feel l fucking deadbeat a lot of times too. And I know I’m just human. And yet, I feel very much like I’m actively shaping the world around me. In a couple years, when I pass through some of these Northwest towns I’ve been through in the last couple weeks, I won’t be surprised to see some kind of mark that I passed through before. And more than just the double circle “never give up” tags that I’ve been writing on the walls. It’s incredibly gratifying to have people tell me that they got inspired to start growing food in the abandoned lot near their house after I came through and taught an urban permaculture workshop in their town four years before. Or that some zine I wrote in a fit of loneliness and alienation got someone through a time in their life when they felt really alone in the world. Or that I inspired someone to go off and ride a bunch of freight trains and have big adventures.
Which is so fucking great. It’s one of the things that makes me feel so lucky to be a part of a real thriving sub-culture existing outside the mainstream, or depending on how you look at it – a whole network of interconnected subcultures existing outside the mainstream. Ironically, I think that one of the things that makes us so powerful is how relatively small we are compared to the dominant culture. I imagine for most Americans who get their cultural identity from the Hollywood movies and the nightly television it’s very hard to feel like it’s possible to make a difference in the world. The people they look to for guidance and inspiration are stars, literally like “stars”: -- like so high up and out of touch they might as well be up in the fucking sky. Totally out of reach. So I love feeling like the people who influence my life are within reach. In the last couple weeks I’ve crossed paths with more than a dozen of my true heroes and heroines. Real people doing really amazing things. And I love the feeling that we’re all just mutually inspiring each other from our little corners of the country. That we all send off our little ripples through the fabric of our friends. And shit changes.

Alright, enough of me waxing poetic on the community tip. So I haven’t sent one of these mass emails out for a couple weeks cause thankfully I’ve been off living life and spending hardly any time in front of this little screen, but I wanted to just catch everyone who’s interested up with a couple things:

The “Walking the Edge of Insanity West Coast Mental Health Workshop Tour 2002” or whatever fancy name you want to call it turned out to be really inspiring and successful from this one kids’ perspective. At the Eugene, Portland, and Olympia workshops there were about 40 people each. And the workshop dynamics really got progressively better at each event. There were only about 20 folks at the Seattle workshop but the event was announced and organized the day before it happened!
I have high hopes that some really good work is going to come out of these events. There were a lot of really interesting ideas brought up in the realms of building radical support groups, creating safe spaces for people to gather, creating local forums through printed zines and email listserves, doing education within our community around the stigma and the nature of treating mental illness – educating people about conventional as well as radical therapies. There are some folks in Portland who are doing an hour long radio show about mental health in the activist community which should be done by the end of the year. For folks who have radio shows around the country, I’d be more than happy to put you in touch with them so that you could get a copy of the show to broadcast. I’ve counted now five collective zine projects about mental health, both national and local, that should be making their way out into the world before too long. However I can help distribute them, you just say the word. I watched the beginnings of a local support group form before my eyes at the workshop in Olympia, I almost started crying it was so beautiful. That Olympia workshop blew me away in a lot of ways.
Most of the people who are getting an email from me for the first time are folks who wrote their contact info in my journal after one of the workshops. I would be really happy to hear from people who participated in any of the events about their thoughts on how things went in general, how they could have been structured better in the future, and where and where they think things are or should be headed next. .

    In the last week I’ve switched tracks and I’ve been going back and visiting a number of the farmers that I had the honor of crossing paths with two years ago as I was doing interviews for the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library project. For those more recently making my acquaintance, back in 2000 a couple of us set up this incredible seed library project in Berkeley and I managed to get a grant to interview farmers on the West coast who saved their own seed. There’s a whole fascinating subculture of alternative seed growers who grew out of the back to the land movement and who’s work was a direct response to the petro-chemical corporations buying up most of the local US seed companies back in the early ‘70’s (and dropping the majority of the heirloom and open-pollinated varieties in favor of chemically bred strains and hybrids.)  Some of these people were just the most brilliant and inspiring people I’d ever met, and it was totally heartbreaking to find myself locked up in the jail/psych ward/ half way house nightmare at the beginning of 2001 and lose touch with all of them and be so far away from my dreams. So I’ve been making my way down the coast, catching up and gathering amazing seed and wisdom for my springtime farming adventures back East. And just kind of reveling in it, really.

I’ve come to think of the mental health work I’ve been doing a lot like planting seeds. Gathering ideas, refining them, selecting out the stuff I like, propagating them and trying to leave them in fertile soil. I’ve felt very much like a pollinator over the last couple weeks, traveling up the coast and relaying messages between groups of people, spreading the word about different projects, trying to slowly and subtly change our outdated ideas about how things work and reinnoculate the language we use with beauty and community power. Cause we are a bunch of superheroes.

And I know mass emails are so fucking impersonal and lame, I’m sorry. I doubt I’ll be sending too many more of these out the way I’m doing it now. When I get the time I’m going to refine the lists on my trusty little laptop so that everyone in my life isn’t getting everything about everything that’s going on with me all the time

But if you made it this far then you get to hear the announcement that I’m really excited about:
The Icarus Project Website is up! And it sure is purty.
www.theicarusproject.net
I’m so proud. But my cohort Ashley Mcnamara and my old housemate Mark Burdett get the credit for this one. It’s still in the early states and not interactive yet, but it’s a solid base that’s going to create a really kickass project. A bunch of the links aren’t set up yet so be patient, but if you check it out you’ll get an idea of where we’re going with it. I don’t think the email link works yet but you can write to the_icarusproject@yahoo.com for more info.

BAY AREA FOLKS:
I’ll be back  in Oakland on Wednesday December 4th. You can reach me at the cave: 510-595-1803. The next day I’ll be speaking at a book release event for this interesting psychology professor at Berkeley I’ve been corresponding with in recent weeks:
 
Book Reading and Signing, Panel Discussion, and Reception

On Thursday, December, 5, Stephen P. Hinshaw will read from his new book:
"The Years of Silence are Past: My Father's Life with Bipolar Disorder"
(Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Professor Hinshaw will be joined by Professor Jodi Halpern, UC Berkeley
School of Public Health, and Sascha DuBrul, writer and advocate with
personal experience of bipolar disorder, for a panel discussion about mental
disorder, its stigmatization, and its impact on individuals and families.
Book signing and reception (with food) are included.

Thursday, December 5
6:00-8:30 pm
Radisson Berkeley Marina Hotel, Angel/Belvedere Room
Sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being
The event is free and open to the public. If you would like to attend, RSVP:
ecpayne@uclink.berkeley.edu

Also (I’m glowing with pride as I type this): here’s the info for the two support groups that have been formed since we did the first Walking the Edge mental health workshop at the DIY skillshare back at the end of September. I would love to hear how things are going from anyone who’s been participating.

1) Discussion/Support Group for Political Activists -- Survival Strategies for Activists
 Free, drop-in group meeting every Sunday afternoon from 4PM to 6PM in Berkeley at the Long Haul Infoshop, at 3124 Shattuck Ave, 2 blocks from Ashby BART  Starting Sunday November 24-drop in and check it out,
or call Kathy Labriola at (510)-464-4652 or email at anarchofeminist@yahoo.com.

2) Support group for people who identify as part of the punk/queer/activist/artist/trans/youth and/or other subculture who are dealing with mental health issues (depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia, OCD,
PTSD, etc). This group will be starting the first week of January and will be facilitated by Lynnette Rogers, it will probably be on Thursday nights but the time and place are not pinned down yet, so email or call Kathy for the final details which will be available in the next week or so.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS INFO TO YOUR PEEPS IN THE EAST BAY AND SF

Okay, that’s it. I’m going to be in New York from the 6th to the 13th trying to get health insurance and check in with the farm, then back in California for the rest of the year, then making the trip across the country through the South, and back to New York in mid-February to plant my eggplant and pepper seeds. Then I’m going to wake up with the sun every morning and work the land and I’m not gonna move for a long fucking time. There’s only so much of this science fiction shit I can take.  Big hug to everyone      sascha