mother things just got weird

mother, things just got weird



I wrote the prose below last year, after one of the hospitalizations forced upon me last year, by a doctor who put me on speed or something that kept me awake once for a week at a time.. I was going back and forth then between accepting God's Will... the miracles that came later would convince me.


17/02/07
11:27 PM
Yea, had some crazy ass dreams
for a week or so, while I was awake. This is the truest story I know how to tell.


There were a few days of blurry faces looming around my hospital bed. I was restrained for some reason not yet clear... and I was sure that I knew every human I saw before, somewhere.... convinced deeper than my sex and hunger that I would remember, be suddenly jolted into knowing past lives, cosmic adventures.... the undreamed. I was at Ressurrection hospital first, in Evanston, and you can check on that if you want because it sounds too made up for fiction, though just about right for the mystics of the everyday.

I thought perhaps the staff were paid actors on some reality show and I was getting the big sting; the whole country was in on the joke, except me, because I was the watched one, some terrible angel who you humans were cautiously awakening.... again.


This was going crazy and then coming back... most of the way. Inside my chest and gut, there is something stirring that I wouldn't notice before and I feel like I have changed deep and true and all romantic and wild.

The radio station suddenly didn't like me, or something.... who knows? They say they just want music now. They have no idea how funny peace and I were hitting when we riffed. It will be a damn shame if no one gives us money to film some of our skits.

I more than likely blew the opportunity somehow... maybe when I started going after people before I reached the conclusion that I had to forgive everyone, as they have forgiven me (yeah, right.... got to inspire them to do that). Fearless radio turned out to be spineless radio, maybe.,.. unless I am wrong, which I am a lot, and hope I am. Those are some damn talented folk. Still, They have lost me. Each according to his own. Radio is hardly the major thrust of my career.

A total thanks to those who have already pledged their time to the scrappy beginnings and are prepared to show up at cook county dressed warm with their dogs to try and show our support with the bruised and battered and dying. I'll let you know when it is safe to come out fighting peacably.... like I would know?



I was transferred from resurrection hosp. after waking up and nodding out on waves of white fluid pumped into my iv.... as I was leaving, someone pulled out a brand new catholic bible with a green felt cover. I kind of sneered it off, thinking at that poiint that i was to be the new Picard, a pilot of what would amount to the earth as ship; a creature undreamed come from afar, and now manifesting in human form again to make some cosmic sales pitch for humans to get all peaceable so they could join the intergalactic space orgy that is the apocolypse in this game (or is after you earn as much through study and hard work or some such bleeep).


AT St. anthony's, since i got all mad dog in the end with the cops, they slapped my vomiting ass in the cracker jack box. ... Yea, for some reason when M called an ambulance, I decided I wasn't going with them, or something... so a small herd of cops took me down hard. Who can blame them? A couple of my ribs.



Laying in a barren room puking and puking and the pain a wolverine gnawing on my spine, I started thinking I was already dead, or about to die. I had already lost like ten pounds. They took a couple days figuring out what to do with me, as I yelled and ranted to get relief from the pain trains* slamming into my fusion -- the huge block of bones disentegrating from plain old boring gravity. The psych ward workers were more used to coke heads and really, really crazzy people who were more or less like infants, and suicide cases and cutterS and pukers AND homeless people who found the place their best alternative in a cold chicao winter... I was sure that I was all of them and none. . . I remembered the radio had branded me Pain and it made sense to be there admidst the tragedies of mental break down.


After being an asshole, and being a man of my word, I had to give them something cool for helping me out. I don't think these people make nearly enough money, so it came to me to give them a painting, cabrini green, which used to hang in cook county and never quite made the transition to stroger. Something right about my work hanging in a psych ward. I wrote up a contract so the employees own all rights to prints and stuff, not the church or the hospital...

Other than the hospitals and homes, my paintings are all at MERCY home. Love them gals and guys and they can always use another hand -- it's abused kids and stuff man.


I got some stories All tragic and true and funny, and met a couple damn fine poets and a whole hell of a lot of buds... I was almost the only white guy there and that made it all kind of jovial and cool... I learned while driving cab that blacks get along better most of the time than whites... I would get sick of white people and work the black neighborhoods, personally, because they were chatty and knowledgeable most of the time. When I was eighteen, I sobered up for my first time in a dallas white ghetto filled with people of color who treated me with respect and love. Period. The economy was good there in 1980 and I never heard about no crime.

I especially liked this woman, J., a psychologist or something who told me I needed more soul, and ain't that the truth. Indeed, I let her put some braids in my hair, for the hell of it. M. thinks I am too old for such fashion splashes and wants them out.. they fall out in two days norm.

J. is the one who told me they were not black ghettos, but white ghettos filled with people of color (who can be white now, too, because there is no real white or black anyways... as she also explained with her fire and grace). Never would have thought of that without her musing.







Here's the HEADS UP...

The bit with the comic books was me thinking I could raise some money for charity, and the bit with the peace bears was a joke based on national lampoon's cover about a dog being shot if you didn't buy a copy. I thought it was funny to threaten to kill a peace bear unless people quit killing each other or something. M. missed the point and now all the little peace bears are hidden in the closet. They are still peeking out, I guess... but you know little peace bears, they are wary as all hell.

So, here is the boring health story:


I was in a coma state for 30 hours, during which my mortality was in question. I guess in the end I got violent, like some pain ravaged dog... M. called the ambulance and I got it in my head not to go with them, so they called in like five beefy cops who took me down hard. I was already half in the coma, lucky for them or me or all of us.

All writings by John Scott Ridgway are protected by the law... but I encourage you to spread my poems by whatever means necessary. One day you will understand.


This is the truest story I know how to tell. Freshly released from the hospital and writing frantically to fix and edit the new stuff on the blog, after having taken a week or more going manic, then 30 hours off for a coma, and then another week to begin to figure out why the shit got too crazy for me, and why I came to believe in the old cliche that I was some christ like thing, or angel, or leader or a teacher or some such pipedreams.


My visions of my powers have settled down now to merely inspired by the great men of old and now, so I have been released to tell the tale....

They don't let you out of that ward when you talk to angels. I am looking forward to a little reunion when the shows start on Common Ground. All these folks get in free and a coffe on me (if I have enough money that day).




Here is the newest, what I wrote in the hospital will go up when I get the blog fixed up.

My body was reacting against a drug I had been taking for ten years, suddenly throwing me into a series of literally maddening seizures.



This dream came while I was awake, or apparantly so to those around who expect some excentricities, but clearly noted that the hatter was mad...... . I was in wonderland kansas and barton fink and johnny got his gun and this thing went on forever.


THIS IS TRUE MEMOIR WRITING,


Swear it on my sweet amazon mother's smile, and this is going to be told WITHOUT ANY EMBELLISHMENT.... WARNING, A BIT OF MY SOUL IS ON DISPLAY AND THAT AIN'T ALWAYS CLOSE TO PRETTY.


Perhaps I should gonzo a bit of humor up between the bouts of the pathetic, who knows? Not me, I'm just a boof. And all I got is honesty, like gene wilder modestly once said.

I was vomiting for almost three weeks, some kind of flu, standing at the sink eating crackers and trying to keep the pain pills down long enough to douse the fire burning under those THick, red, angry scars.


Despite deep and steady back Pain that would have normally stopped me from writing, the words seemed to just flow through me unbidden. All I had to do was make myself sit here. When the typing became praying is beyond th is boof.


i felt like i was catching hold of electric currents, in places deep in my unconscious.... and organically growing into a being i am just now imagining.

A leader of some kind of crusade, however sickening the word sounds.... a man struck by some holy, awful, gorgeous experience that I will be spinning out now that I am back at the helm... a week or so mostly off writing has my fingers damn itchy.....



WIth the health, right now I am eating vegetarian, off cigarreettes, taking a bare minumum of pills and exercising... but when my brain went awry, I was just puking up everything and going half crazy from withrdrawel after ten years on the stuff, and having seizures....



I became possessed by dream after dream. It could not have happened at a worse time. A series of seizures...
I became convinced I was a conglomeration of different fictional characters like in Dune, or Stranger in a strange land... in other words, a christ like figure....

Well, that and other things. I think my jesus was a salesman who was telling earth that he could show them how to make the planet a space ship and join in som e intergalactive orgy....

I felt I was Paul Atreides being tested, that one false move and I would be considered too dangerous to emerge.

I started listing the names of a bunch of comic books at one point, which seemed to alarm everyone. I really need to either polish my first drafts more or keep them secret.MOTHER, THINGS JUST GOT WEIRD
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by jsr