About a month or so ago I was walking along K Road when I encountered, coming along in the other direction, a somewhat disreputable looking middle-aged gent with a pigeon perched on his right shoulder. The pigeon was neither dead, nor attached – in fact, it kept fluttering its wings to keep its balance. I said, as you do, "Is that your pet pigeon?" The gent said that he had found it injured and had nursed back to health at his home. "Then I accidentally gave it some crack and now it won't go away!"
I try to look at the world from other people's perspectives and so I have tried to imagine what it was like to be that pigeon. While in the company of this human, it had enjoyed some kind of euphoria. Presumably it could only attribute its extraordinary feelings of happiness to the human who was around when they happened. Perhaps it was sticking with him in the hopes that he would once again provide similar such feelings of ecstatic joy. Or perhaps it was sticking with him out of gratitude. Either hypothesis is conceivable. When you think about it, the idea of a crack-addicted pigeon is less odd than the idea that someone could "accidentally" give a pigeon crack cocaine.
Recently I have started to feel that there is little point keeping this blog. I have been distracted over the last couple of months by a long essay I needed to write to finish my degree, and it may well be that I will wind this blog up sometime soon. However I am still committed to trying to tell the truth and so, in this post, I will slightly amend something I have said in another post and will reiterate a strong suspicion that I have voiced before. In the post "Comedy and Political Correctness" I said that I heard Jess perform the senryu which I quoted in that post in 2014. I'm pretty sure I actually heard her perform it in 2015. For years I have been a little bit of an online stalker when it comes to the girl I call Jess. Reasonably regularly she publishes poetry under her real name on the internet, but I have only seen her a handful of times since 2013. I did see her perform in 2014. I knew she was due to give a performance and trailed up to the venue. Before the poetry readings had begun, I had a couple of moments conversation with her. She didn't seem altogether well. She shared with me, with the utter honesty she has, "I have a girlfriend." I asked her the obvious question. "Have you come out?" She said, "Sort of. I think I go both ways." The girlfriend she mentioned was in fact only eighteen at the time. The girlfriend appeared on the scene and they kissed – I had to go out back of the pub and throw up. That night I met for the first time a man a little younger than me – a heterosexual Borderline who had escaped the Mental Health System through the simple expedient of no longer showing up to appointments. My interest in Jess made him unsure of my sexuality and so he asked me, "Do you have a girlfriend?", an effective, indirect way of determining whether a man is gay or not. I said, understanding the intent behind his question, and with a certain self-hatred, "No, but I want one." He had found out at the same time as I did about Jess's girlfriend and said to me something like, "Why are you chasing that girl? She's a Lesbian!" I was already upset and this made it worse. A little later in the evening, unable to help myself, I asked him, "Would you give a man a blowjob?" This is of course an alternative but equally effective way of determining a male's sexuality. He found the question hard to bear of course, but he had brought it on himself.
The evening was profoundly distressing because I couldn't tell this chap, or the friend I was with, that Jess hadn't been a lesbian when I was hanging out with her in 2011, that her treatment by the Mental Health System had made deranged her, had driven to sexual confusion, in the period since 2011. As I have said before, the girl had spent eight whole months in hospital in 2012.
Readers of my blog may remember that when I was hearing voices over the New Zealand summer of 2009 and 2010, for a period in early 2010 I would talk, in my head, with Barack Obama. The real Obama was in Auckland last week. I was walking down Khyber Pass to visit my mother when a police motorcyclist pulled into at the intersection and bade the oncoming traffic hold still. A police car followed, then a motorcade, then another police car. Now, New Zealand politicians don't get motorcades or police escorts, so I feel fairly confident that behind one of those tinted windows was Obama himself, travelling to Government House near Mt Eden to meet with Jacinda Ardern. I had been within a dozen feet of the former President, someone I had imagined I was communicating with telepathically eight years previously.
This post is a little all over the place but I want finally to bring up something I have alluded to in earlier posts. Simply for the sake of completeness. In early 2014, just after being put under the Mental Heath Act, I wrote a long essay, around twenty-five pages long, describing my entire life, one copy of which I gave to my lawyer and another which I brought into the Taylor Centre, asking for it to be given to my psychiatrist Jen Murphy. I just assumed they would read it but I can remember alluding to it later in the year when talking with my Key Worker Josh Brazil and him having no idea what I was talking about. The reason my sessions with the retarded psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 failed so spectacularly was perhaps that he, too, hadn't read this particular essay. I think now that the psychiatrist Tony Fernando, the arsehole who had 'treated' me from 2007 until the beginning of 2012, had removed this essay from Murphy's cubbyhole before it had reached her, that it never found its way to either Jen Murphy or Simon Judkins. I remember one time later that year or the next bringing in a blog post to be given to her– Fernando emerged from his office briefly, without looking at me or talking to me, evidently simply to make sure it was me in the reception, and then returned immediately, head-down, to his office. I believe, incredible as it is to say, that he was intercepting my communications with Jen Murphy. I have said before that Fernando is a sociopath but, even if he isn't a total sociopath, the man is undoubtedly a quack and a fraud, a man who shouldn't be practicing medicine let alone psychiatry. The world would be a better place if he slit his wrists. You might wonder why it has taken me four years to voice this suspicion, that Fernando had been intercepting my communications – but it has been hard for me to accept that the Mental Health System could be so corrupt, so mendacious, so morally bankrupt. It beggars belief. I simply couldn't believe it. But I now know it to be true.
Like I say, I don't know if I will continue to write future posts. My writing skills seem to have deteriorated. However, even if this post is badly written, it still contains things that needed to be said.
Wednesday, 28 March 2018
Tuesday, 13 March 2018
Screenplays and Their Reception
I wonder if anyone regularly reads my blog? Some time ago I published a badly written post about a screenplay I wrote in 2012. Tonight I want to talk a little more about some of the film scripts I've written, none made and in fact none ever quite finished. Of course, in doing so, I'm also talking about my life, some aspects of which are slightly unusual. In the post "Bruce Sells Out" I discussed the first feature length screenplay I ever wrote, back in 2001 ("Bruce Sells Out" being its title), how it was optioned by a New Zealand production company but never made, and how I thought the writers of "Bruce Almighty" had somehow stolen my idea. I don't intend to talk about that film again, tonight, but, as I said, rather about some other screenplays I've written. Bear with me (I always say that). This post will get more interesting as it goes along.
After 2001, for a long time I wasn't creative at all. I started but didn't complete two short stories in around 2005, stories I didn't come back to and finish until 2013. At some point during those years I also tried writing pilot episodes for a sci-fi TV series. In 2007, of course, I became 'unwell', something I've talked about so often I shouldn't need to rehash it again. In 2009 I was again 'unwell' but, during that year, decided to write another film. It would have been a horror, if I'd ever finished it. It concerned a character like a young Kurt Cobain, pursued by demons, who falls in with a whole bunch of drug addicted swingers who get killed off one by one by the monsters. I didn't get very far with this film and, as the concept suggests, it emerged from a state of existence dominated by thoughts of vampires, ghouls, zombies, and brain damage. Towards the end of the year, after I was off the Rispiridone, still unwell but in a better emotional frame of mind, I had another idea. I had a vision of two fourteen year old boys driving around through lonely, deserted, suburban streets at night, a picture of a teenage wasteland, a film I envisaged combining the social commentary of a Ken Loach movie with the feel of T.S. Eliot's famous poem. Towards the end of the year, while thinking about this film, I heard a voice. It was Jon. He said, "A film about two fourteen year olds who steal a car." I had my idea. Two fourteen year old kids, poor, friends only with each other, who steal a car, go for a joy-ride, are enlisted by an older brother to deliver drugs, and spend the night encountering various representatives of Auckland's motley demi-monde, a roundtrip through the dark secret underbelly of the city that would end with them returning the car, now with its windscreen staved in, to its original parking spot, where it would be found the next morning by its bewildered owner.
I started the script in December 2009. During this period, I was talking with Jon and Jess continuously in my head, a period that I have described in other posts such as "Me and Jon Stewart Part 2" and "Bruce Sells Out". December is summer in New Zealand. I remember staying at a bach ('bach' is a Kiwi word for a holiday home) up at Taupo Bay. From the moment I woke until the moment I went to sleep I was continually talking with my two imaginary friends, joking with them and laughing at their jokes. It was, bizarrely, a happy time. I started writing the film there at the bach by the beach. It was only when I was writing that the voices would quieten down, offering only words of encouragement and not intruding. At one point up there I wrote a scene, a scene that occurs early in the film, in which one of the two boys, Mark, says to the other boy, Daniel, that their English teacher is a faggot. At the time I wrote this, neither of my two imaginary friends objected but, later that day, when I was at the table with family, Jon jumped back into my head. He said something like, "You can't use that word!" He was involved in the creative process, had thought about my employment of this slur, and, knowing how offensive people found the term, had decided to warn me against it, knowing that if I did use it, it would get me into trouble.
I continued writing the film into 2010 but had given up by the middle of the year. I couldn't get it quite right. By that time I had recovered from the psychosis I had experienced all of 2009 and no longer heard either Jon or Jess. In 2011, I hung out a few times with the real Jess and wrote a blog for a while that no longer exists called 'Persiflage'. Then in early 2012 I resolved to finish the film about the boys and decided that the best way to actually muster up the impetus to complete it would be to undertake a creative writing degree, and so enrolled at AUT. I had almost completed a draft of the screenplay after a couple of months study. The film I wrote had many fantastic moments I think. Daniel and Mark meet a bunch of rich spoiled twenty-year olds, drinking and drugging and loafing around the pool of their Parnell mansion while the parents are away, one of whom says, "You know the real reason the planet's heating up? It's because the Earth's orbit is decaying and we're all plunging into the sun." But I couldn't quite get the third act to work. The last part of the film involved the boys at a party in a hippie commune and twenty-five minutes of a ridiculously eclectic cast of characters never met before standing around just talking to each other. The problem was that, by 2012, my idea for the film was completely different to the idea I'd had in 2009.
This is not to say that the story was without merit. My godmother, a well known author here in New Zealand, often says to me, "I'd wish you'd finish the story about the two boys!"
I could tell that my supervisor, a novelist with no understanding of film scripts, and perhaps not that serious about helping his students, was completely uninterested in my film. Feeling discouraged, and sensing that the film I'd developed didn't quite work, I decided, on an impulse, to write something else, something different. I wrote a scene depicting Jess in the consultation room with her psychiatrist. It had occurred to me, you see, that the general public knew next to nothing about schizophrenia, that I'd had experiences (in 2007 and 2009) that gave me unique insight into this 'condition' and that I could, maybe, change the world by telling people what it is actually like to be a patient of the Mental Health System. I didn't tell Jess that I was writing a film about her and she didn't find out until the next year, after I'd more or less finished it.
When I started writing this film, I thought it would be a comedy. A couple of weeks into the process, I was driving when a scene occurred to me. I imagined Jess dreaming – in her dream she is standing on a hilltop in a barren ochre landscape while a crowd of people mill below. She says, in voiceover, "The other night I had a dream. I dreamt I was on a plain, looking down on hundreds of people. And a terrible wind was blowing. And I was screaming. I was screaming, 'I'm here! Can't you hear me? Can't you see me?'" When this scene occurred to me, it struck me as so powerful that I had to pull over and vomit. I had my Plot Point 2. I knew then what the film would be – it would start a comedy about a likeable, eccentric, funny young woman, and then descend into something much darker. Although the rest of the plot would only come to me gradually, I had the idea.
The film (with the rotten title "The Hounds of Heaven" and atrocious spelling throughout) is on the internet so I won't provide a plot summary. I will describe two moments in it however. Jess, at the nadir of the psychotic episode that occurs between the mid-point of the film and Plot Point 2, is watching The Daily Show, in February 2011, and hears Jon telling her that she is responsible for the Christchurch earthquake that has just taken place. This scene probably seems extraordinarily insensitive. However, first, it is very close to being a true story. I was with the real Jess when the earthquake happened; she received a call from her mother saying it had happened; having just been with me, she went to WINZ and while there thought she overheard someone saying she had caused the quake. It upset her terribly I think for a long time. Second, the whole last act is set in Christchurch. My intention was to present a true depiction of the city in the months after the quake, to show Jess (both the character and the real girl) that she wasn't actually responsible for it. During the writing, I spent a week in Christchurch with family friends to research what it was like in the immediate aftermath. I wasn't intending to be insensitive. I was truly trying to represent two different tragedies.
I wish to describe and explain another moment, for reasons that will become apparent later. There is a whole long sequence in the film in which Jess is in the company of a bunch of stoners who are discussing conspiracy theories. One of the stoners suggests that Neanderthals and humans had coexisted "for, like, millions of years" and so probably interbred. Another stoner says, "Wouldn't that mean there are Neanderthals walking around the streets?" The first stoner says, "All I'm saying is, imagine you're a Neanderthal and you come out of your cave with your club and you see, you know, a pretty girl, are you going to let it stop you just because she's, you know, a different species?" (To which the other stoner replies, "True. Good point.") This was a joke. I learnt at school that different species don't interbreed, that this is in fact the way one distinguishes one species from another, so the idea of Neanderthals and humans interbreeding seemed funny, seemed absurd; moreover, the idea that men and women are of different species also seemed inherently funny. Years later, however, I read in the newspaper that recent research suggested that humans and Neanderthals did interbreed – and that people with significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA are more likely to suffer depression. When I read this, I wondered if the world had gone mad instead of me.
An important aspect of my experience of the Creative Writing course that year was that, although I was writing a film about schizophrenia, none of the other students had the foggiest clue that I had ever suffered psychosis myself. When I told my supervisor that Jess decides that she is responsible for the February Christchurch earthquake, he said, "They do that, don't they?" He had worked in an asylum and told me once that, in his view, schizophrenia was caused by spinal injuries. One of the other students, incredibly, was actually a retired psychiatrist, and she also didn't seem to suspect in the slightest. When she read the scene in the film in which Jess starts telepathically overhearing the thoughts of those around her in a supermarket (I had shared this scene with the whole class), she questioned its plausibility, telling me that schizophrenics don't tend to hear voices in the way I'd described. I felt like saying, "I actually know more about this than you do." At this time though I was keeping the fact that I'd been 'ill' on a need-to-know basis, and saw no reason to admit her to the source of my insight. Despite the egregious spelling mistakes in the film, I was in fact totally well all of 2012 and had been well since early 2010. The reason I was able to describe madness so well was because, when I was actually very ill indeed, in 2007 and 2009, I used to tell myself, "Remember what this is like, you'll be able to use this in your writing later." And of course the film was also inspired by my observations of a real person. As readers of my blog will know, I have a good memory. If people think that I was mad because I chose to represent madness, that only shows how stupid people can be. Just because someone has been mad in the past doesn't mean that he'll be mad forever – and it is ridiculous to think that the sane who have been crazy cannot remember what their craziness was like.
At the end of the year I submitted the screenplay for assessment. In February of 2013, I became 'ill' again. And this is where it gets weird. The reason I became ill was because I decided that somehow people in the media had obtained or at least heard about my film script – there seemed to be veiled references to it in the newspaper and on the TV all the time throughout 2013. And the people who'd read it didn't like it. This feeling that my film had got out was distressing. For three reasons. First, I had no idea how journalists could have read the screenplay – it was supposedly under embargo. And it wasn't a finished draft. Second, I had no clear idea what these readers thought of it or of me. Third, because no one directly told me that they had read my screenplay, I couldn't be sure whether my feeling that people had read it was true or whether I was experiencing delusions of reference. Psychotics often imagine that they are famous, and it was possible that I was delusional. Some weeks after the episode started I received notes from the film director tasked with assessing it: he advised me "not to show it to anyone else in the film industry." I thought I had said something about schizophrenia so controversial it had to be hushed up. Perhaps the clearest clue I received that people had indeed read it occurred I think about halfway through the year. The columnist Paul Thomas wrote an article offering advice to young people in which he said something like, "Girls aren't a different species. Not even the pretty ones," and also said, without saying who he was addressing, "You're not half so objectionable as I thought."
In late February or early March, I re-entered the Mental Health Service proper, as I have described before in this blog. I felt driven to do so. The 'delusions of reference' together with a reappearance of voice-hearing impelled me. Although I had become a patient in early 2007, I had never told the people treating me why I had become ill in the first place– I felt I needed to set the record straight, finally explain why I had first fallen ill. I also felt that I had made a terrible mistake writing the film about Jess and that I needed to set her record straight as well. It didn't work for either of us. And of course ever since the beginning of 2014 I have been under the Mental Health Act. But I have talked about that enough in this blog. Although I will once again reiterate my bottomless contempt and hatred for the psychiatric profession.
It may be interesting to end this post by saying that I still experience 'delusions of reference'. I have no idea how many people read this blog but sometimes receive signs that others must have read it. One example of such a 'delusion of reference' which I want to mention concerns one of the short stories that I began in 2005 and finished in 2013, called "Live in the Present". It was about a young woman who lacks object permanence. I submitted it to The New Yorker that year. For a long time now, Stephen Colbert has been banging on about object permanence and recently so did John Oliver, a concept I don't think the ordinary public once knew about and certainly wasn't talked about in the popular media. I know it must be a coincidence but my life is so full of coincidences that eventually it makes one wonder where imagination ends and reality begins.
After 2001, for a long time I wasn't creative at all. I started but didn't complete two short stories in around 2005, stories I didn't come back to and finish until 2013. At some point during those years I also tried writing pilot episodes for a sci-fi TV series. In 2007, of course, I became 'unwell', something I've talked about so often I shouldn't need to rehash it again. In 2009 I was again 'unwell' but, during that year, decided to write another film. It would have been a horror, if I'd ever finished it. It concerned a character like a young Kurt Cobain, pursued by demons, who falls in with a whole bunch of drug addicted swingers who get killed off one by one by the monsters. I didn't get very far with this film and, as the concept suggests, it emerged from a state of existence dominated by thoughts of vampires, ghouls, zombies, and brain damage. Towards the end of the year, after I was off the Rispiridone, still unwell but in a better emotional frame of mind, I had another idea. I had a vision of two fourteen year old boys driving around through lonely, deserted, suburban streets at night, a picture of a teenage wasteland, a film I envisaged combining the social commentary of a Ken Loach movie with the feel of T.S. Eliot's famous poem. Towards the end of the year, while thinking about this film, I heard a voice. It was Jon. He said, "A film about two fourteen year olds who steal a car." I had my idea. Two fourteen year old kids, poor, friends only with each other, who steal a car, go for a joy-ride, are enlisted by an older brother to deliver drugs, and spend the night encountering various representatives of Auckland's motley demi-monde, a roundtrip through the dark secret underbelly of the city that would end with them returning the car, now with its windscreen staved in, to its original parking spot, where it would be found the next morning by its bewildered owner.
I started the script in December 2009. During this period, I was talking with Jon and Jess continuously in my head, a period that I have described in other posts such as "Me and Jon Stewart Part 2" and "Bruce Sells Out". December is summer in New Zealand. I remember staying at a bach ('bach' is a Kiwi word for a holiday home) up at Taupo Bay. From the moment I woke until the moment I went to sleep I was continually talking with my two imaginary friends, joking with them and laughing at their jokes. It was, bizarrely, a happy time. I started writing the film there at the bach by the beach. It was only when I was writing that the voices would quieten down, offering only words of encouragement and not intruding. At one point up there I wrote a scene, a scene that occurs early in the film, in which one of the two boys, Mark, says to the other boy, Daniel, that their English teacher is a faggot. At the time I wrote this, neither of my two imaginary friends objected but, later that day, when I was at the table with family, Jon jumped back into my head. He said something like, "You can't use that word!" He was involved in the creative process, had thought about my employment of this slur, and, knowing how offensive people found the term, had decided to warn me against it, knowing that if I did use it, it would get me into trouble.
I continued writing the film into 2010 but had given up by the middle of the year. I couldn't get it quite right. By that time I had recovered from the psychosis I had experienced all of 2009 and no longer heard either Jon or Jess. In 2011, I hung out a few times with the real Jess and wrote a blog for a while that no longer exists called 'Persiflage'. Then in early 2012 I resolved to finish the film about the boys and decided that the best way to actually muster up the impetus to complete it would be to undertake a creative writing degree, and so enrolled at AUT. I had almost completed a draft of the screenplay after a couple of months study. The film I wrote had many fantastic moments I think. Daniel and Mark meet a bunch of rich spoiled twenty-year olds, drinking and drugging and loafing around the pool of their Parnell mansion while the parents are away, one of whom says, "You know the real reason the planet's heating up? It's because the Earth's orbit is decaying and we're all plunging into the sun." But I couldn't quite get the third act to work. The last part of the film involved the boys at a party in a hippie commune and twenty-five minutes of a ridiculously eclectic cast of characters never met before standing around just talking to each other. The problem was that, by 2012, my idea for the film was completely different to the idea I'd had in 2009.
This is not to say that the story was without merit. My godmother, a well known author here in New Zealand, often says to me, "I'd wish you'd finish the story about the two boys!"
I could tell that my supervisor, a novelist with no understanding of film scripts, and perhaps not that serious about helping his students, was completely uninterested in my film. Feeling discouraged, and sensing that the film I'd developed didn't quite work, I decided, on an impulse, to write something else, something different. I wrote a scene depicting Jess in the consultation room with her psychiatrist. It had occurred to me, you see, that the general public knew next to nothing about schizophrenia, that I'd had experiences (in 2007 and 2009) that gave me unique insight into this 'condition' and that I could, maybe, change the world by telling people what it is actually like to be a patient of the Mental Health System. I didn't tell Jess that I was writing a film about her and she didn't find out until the next year, after I'd more or less finished it.
When I started writing this film, I thought it would be a comedy. A couple of weeks into the process, I was driving when a scene occurred to me. I imagined Jess dreaming – in her dream she is standing on a hilltop in a barren ochre landscape while a crowd of people mill below. She says, in voiceover, "The other night I had a dream. I dreamt I was on a plain, looking down on hundreds of people. And a terrible wind was blowing. And I was screaming. I was screaming, 'I'm here! Can't you hear me? Can't you see me?'" When this scene occurred to me, it struck me as so powerful that I had to pull over and vomit. I had my Plot Point 2. I knew then what the film would be – it would start a comedy about a likeable, eccentric, funny young woman, and then descend into something much darker. Although the rest of the plot would only come to me gradually, I had the idea.
The film (with the rotten title "The Hounds of Heaven" and atrocious spelling throughout) is on the internet so I won't provide a plot summary. I will describe two moments in it however. Jess, at the nadir of the psychotic episode that occurs between the mid-point of the film and Plot Point 2, is watching The Daily Show, in February 2011, and hears Jon telling her that she is responsible for the Christchurch earthquake that has just taken place. This scene probably seems extraordinarily insensitive. However, first, it is very close to being a true story. I was with the real Jess when the earthquake happened; she received a call from her mother saying it had happened; having just been with me, she went to WINZ and while there thought she overheard someone saying she had caused the quake. It upset her terribly I think for a long time. Second, the whole last act is set in Christchurch. My intention was to present a true depiction of the city in the months after the quake, to show Jess (both the character and the real girl) that she wasn't actually responsible for it. During the writing, I spent a week in Christchurch with family friends to research what it was like in the immediate aftermath. I wasn't intending to be insensitive. I was truly trying to represent two different tragedies.
I wish to describe and explain another moment, for reasons that will become apparent later. There is a whole long sequence in the film in which Jess is in the company of a bunch of stoners who are discussing conspiracy theories. One of the stoners suggests that Neanderthals and humans had coexisted "for, like, millions of years" and so probably interbred. Another stoner says, "Wouldn't that mean there are Neanderthals walking around the streets?" The first stoner says, "All I'm saying is, imagine you're a Neanderthal and you come out of your cave with your club and you see, you know, a pretty girl, are you going to let it stop you just because she's, you know, a different species?" (To which the other stoner replies, "True. Good point.") This was a joke. I learnt at school that different species don't interbreed, that this is in fact the way one distinguishes one species from another, so the idea of Neanderthals and humans interbreeding seemed funny, seemed absurd; moreover, the idea that men and women are of different species also seemed inherently funny. Years later, however, I read in the newspaper that recent research suggested that humans and Neanderthals did interbreed – and that people with significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA are more likely to suffer depression. When I read this, I wondered if the world had gone mad instead of me.
An important aspect of my experience of the Creative Writing course that year was that, although I was writing a film about schizophrenia, none of the other students had the foggiest clue that I had ever suffered psychosis myself. When I told my supervisor that Jess decides that she is responsible for the February Christchurch earthquake, he said, "They do that, don't they?" He had worked in an asylum and told me once that, in his view, schizophrenia was caused by spinal injuries. One of the other students, incredibly, was actually a retired psychiatrist, and she also didn't seem to suspect in the slightest. When she read the scene in the film in which Jess starts telepathically overhearing the thoughts of those around her in a supermarket (I had shared this scene with the whole class), she questioned its plausibility, telling me that schizophrenics don't tend to hear voices in the way I'd described. I felt like saying, "I actually know more about this than you do." At this time though I was keeping the fact that I'd been 'ill' on a need-to-know basis, and saw no reason to admit her to the source of my insight. Despite the egregious spelling mistakes in the film, I was in fact totally well all of 2012 and had been well since early 2010. The reason I was able to describe madness so well was because, when I was actually very ill indeed, in 2007 and 2009, I used to tell myself, "Remember what this is like, you'll be able to use this in your writing later." And of course the film was also inspired by my observations of a real person. As readers of my blog will know, I have a good memory. If people think that I was mad because I chose to represent madness, that only shows how stupid people can be. Just because someone has been mad in the past doesn't mean that he'll be mad forever – and it is ridiculous to think that the sane who have been crazy cannot remember what their craziness was like.
At the end of the year I submitted the screenplay for assessment. In February of 2013, I became 'ill' again. And this is where it gets weird. The reason I became ill was because I decided that somehow people in the media had obtained or at least heard about my film script – there seemed to be veiled references to it in the newspaper and on the TV all the time throughout 2013. And the people who'd read it didn't like it. This feeling that my film had got out was distressing. For three reasons. First, I had no idea how journalists could have read the screenplay – it was supposedly under embargo. And it wasn't a finished draft. Second, I had no clear idea what these readers thought of it or of me. Third, because no one directly told me that they had read my screenplay, I couldn't be sure whether my feeling that people had read it was true or whether I was experiencing delusions of reference. Psychotics often imagine that they are famous, and it was possible that I was delusional. Some weeks after the episode started I received notes from the film director tasked with assessing it: he advised me "not to show it to anyone else in the film industry." I thought I had said something about schizophrenia so controversial it had to be hushed up. Perhaps the clearest clue I received that people had indeed read it occurred I think about halfway through the year. The columnist Paul Thomas wrote an article offering advice to young people in which he said something like, "Girls aren't a different species. Not even the pretty ones," and also said, without saying who he was addressing, "You're not half so objectionable as I thought."
In late February or early March, I re-entered the Mental Health Service proper, as I have described before in this blog. I felt driven to do so. The 'delusions of reference' together with a reappearance of voice-hearing impelled me. Although I had become a patient in early 2007, I had never told the people treating me why I had become ill in the first place– I felt I needed to set the record straight, finally explain why I had first fallen ill. I also felt that I had made a terrible mistake writing the film about Jess and that I needed to set her record straight as well. It didn't work for either of us. And of course ever since the beginning of 2014 I have been under the Mental Health Act. But I have talked about that enough in this blog. Although I will once again reiterate my bottomless contempt and hatred for the psychiatric profession.
It may be interesting to end this post by saying that I still experience 'delusions of reference'. I have no idea how many people read this blog but sometimes receive signs that others must have read it. One example of such a 'delusion of reference' which I want to mention concerns one of the short stories that I began in 2005 and finished in 2013, called "Live in the Present". It was about a young woman who lacks object permanence. I submitted it to The New Yorker that year. For a long time now, Stephen Colbert has been banging on about object permanence and recently so did John Oliver, a concept I don't think the ordinary public once knew about and certainly wasn't talked about in the popular media. I know it must be a coincidence but my life is so full of coincidences that eventually it makes one wonder where imagination ends and reality begins.
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