The following was inspired by a recent podcast I listened to My History Can Beat Up Your Politics. I had found the podcast from a list of political podcasts and the title sounded unusually different. I found a podcast from July 24 about the 1984 democratic contest for the presidential nomination. In 1984 I was nineteen years out of high school servitude but only five years out of graduating from college. I had moved to D.C. and I had begun to involve myself in politics in a way I had felt inhibited from doing prior to my certification granting me knowledgeable enough to have an opinion. I was fortunate enough, or maybe unfortunate enough, to be invited to attend the convention, even though I was not an official delegate, I was brought with a delegation. Listening to this brought back the memories of why I had made an abrupt shift against the American political process. I more or less shunned it thereafter. And when the season came for casting a ballot for president I selected anyone who was neither democratic nor republican and I gained a belief that our votes were stolen. Not stolen by fraudulently miscounting or fixing votes, but stolen by the very concept of “we need two strong political parties.” I began to belief we needed no political parties and a lot more candidates to select from, none of which could be seen to be aligned with a political party; a no-labels, only name, approach to presenting to the voters their choices.
Listening to this podcast revived the feelings I had experienced in 1984, although the story I describe occurred some fourteen years later.
If I have not made it obvious already, I grew up with very few controls placed upon me. In other words even at pre-school ages I was left to come and go as I pleased, well beyond my own small neighborhood and I wandered about our entire 40+ thousand town and however large the state university in that town was at that time.
Now I always refuse to discuss if it was bad parenting, it was my parenting, and I developed into an independent cuss who resents it when I’m told to behave or think in any particular way. So if you say, well I was bound to fail in life because I never learned discipline, I might challenge that I was forced to learn an awful lot of self-discipline at a young life. In order to maintain one’s perspective of independence then one learns a great deal of disrespect not for discipline but for the rights of another to impose their order or their discipline upon another. And believe me that necessitates a great deal of either learning to discipline oneself or ending up in a cage. Sometimes of course if I refused to allow myself to be disciplined by another I was threatened with being put in a cage and even spent at various times a few hours in a cage. At one point I lost my sense of self,or at least my will to continue pushing the stone again and again up that mountain, I suppose. I didn’t become depressed, but I felt the world increasingly depressing. I found myself in disagreement with almost everything I was expected to be. I no longer wanted to be expected to do anything.
There was just too much control, or attempts at control. Somebody had to be the boss of someone, and perhaps merely through projection I decided to check out of it. To walk away. My intention might have been suicidal because of course that was the end goal. But I did not actually plan on killing myself, but to not ever return to society. But in my “walk-away” I took nothing with me. I fashioned to eat only what I might find wild and drink only when I encountered water or wild fruit. I think it might be on my fourth day of walking in the Sierras that I came across a mountain village. I was trying to surreptitiously walk around it and not walk through it. It was not such an easy task as I had envisioned. At one point I tried to bypass a fence but apparently ended up on someone else’s claimed property but I did not see any houses or anyone in the vicinity, but I did see a mountain stream and so I walked towards it and sat beside it. I cupped several handfuls of water into my mouth, and then pulled some wildgrass and pulled it out, dipped it into the water to rinse and digested it. I scooped a few more handfuls of water into my mouth and then lay back to take a nap.
I was awakened by the sounds of a human voice asking “Is he dead?” Then another voice, “I think he is.” Then a louder voice”Are you dead?” simultaneously with a kick in my abdomen. I opened my eyes and began to rise, but was pressed back down by what I now saw was a large man in a deputies’ uniform. “I’m fine,” I said. “Can you get up?” Kind of stupid since the only reason I had not gotten up was because he had pressed me back to the ground. “Of course.” “Okay get up, but do it slowly.” He stepped back and allowed me to rise. I discovered that I was surrounded by not one, but by four deputies, a middle aged man, and a very small woman. The woman had a rifle, or shotgun, or whatever it was, I have no idea of what kind of gun, my only distinction is between a handgun and what I call a rifle which to me is whatever is not a handgun. The woman’s rifle was pointed at me but none of the deputies had drawn weapons. The loud-voiced officer asked “What are you doing here?’’ followed by the middle aged man, “This is my property you know. Why are you trespassing on it?” “I’m sorry, I was just walking but didn’t realize I had trespassed on anyone’s land. I hadn’t seen any houses in the vicinity,” I replied very softly.
I never had a lot of modulation in my voice. I either speak softly or my voice booms so loudly people who do not know me (and frequently those who do) cower as far away as they can. One time, as a teenager, my father decided we would go to every ballpark and my grandfather,uncle, and myself packed up to join him in his adventure. (There were only 16 ballparks), We started in Boston and planned to work our way to Chicago , then drive to Los Angeles, then up to San Francisco where my mother and sister would meet us and we would fly back to Japan and my uncle and grandfather would drive back to Indiana. Well we only got to Cleveland. The Indians were playing the Yankees and my father was a devoted follower of the Yankees. My father was always a fan of any team that was dynastic. The Yankees, the Celtics, Notre Dame. He began wildly cheering on the Yankees. The stadium was sparsely populated that afternoon but four young men, probably a couple of years older than me, although I was probably larger than any of them, moved behind us and began heckling. Frankly I thought my father deserved the heckling. But then they began tossing popcorn at us, and I was annoyed, but not terribly alarmed. But my father turned around and told them to “behave”. Upon which one of them promptly turned a soda, not on my father’s head, but on my grandfather’s. I turned around exposing them to my full bulk and raised my voice and yelled at them to cease their heckling immediately. It was loud enough that I saw park security officers begin to move in our direction, but they were a considerable distance because there were no other spectators in our section of the bleachers besides our group and the four heckling teenagers. But they relaxed when the four teenagers fled to the very top row of the bleacher section we were within. I sat back down and security, apparently assuming there would be no fight, never approached. It ended our cross-country excursion however, or my part in it. After the game my father made it clear how embarrassing my behavior had been to him and I would never be taken anywhere with him again. He told me he was dropping me off in Indiana and the rest of them would complete the circuit to Detroit, Chicago and the west coast parks. But that didn’t set well with my uncle. “Goddamnit Terry, who knows what would have happened if Ken had not had the courage to scare them away. They heckled us because of your loud rooting for the other team that had attracted them. You were the cause of all of us to be heckled and if there was any embarrassment it was you who were to blame Terry, not Ken.” So the trip ended because neither wished to continue with the trip unless he apologized to me. He was unwilling to do that and I refused to apologize to him. I have generally been told I apologize way too much. But I never apologize to my father and my behavior or my ideas or are always too wrong to listen to, even before I can express them. Well of course there was no conversation between us on any subject, not even a”how are you this morning”, for the entire last year we spent in Japan. Well that excursion into a different memory was because of what was about to occur on my walk.
The deputy asked, “How did you get here?” “I believe I said I was walking.” “Where do you live? They,” pointing to the property owner and the woman I supposed was his wife, and who was still pointing the gun at me, “say they’ve never seen you in the vicinity.” “I live in Reno.” “ Do you have any identification?” “No, I didn't bring any. I just planned to walk and I wasn’t aware an ID was required to do so.” “Where's your car?” “I believe I said I was walking.” “Well you didn’t walk from Reno it's sixty-five miles away.” “Well why could I not? I’ve been walking for four days.” “I don’t care how many days you’ve been walking, no one can walk here from Reno.” “Why can no one do that? I’ve walked across the entire country on two occasions.” “Look if you don’t begin to tell me the truth, we’re taking you to the station. I know you’re up to no good and we will get to the bottom of this. And we will find out the truth, we will find your car and whatever you’ve stolen.” “Okay go ahead, I’m leaving now. But if you want to find my car it is parked in front of room x at the Rancho Sierra Motel in Reno. I turned and began walking away from them. “GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE!” That was not his first raised voice directed at me, but I had learned in my nearly six decades to discipline myself from raising my voice from its softness in the presence of the police, but I was really annoyed because it was the very reason I had begun my walk, and so turned back and looked directly into his eyes and my voice boomed to a volume twice the loudness of his own, “UNLESS YOU CITE ME THE STATUTE THAT SAYS IT IS ILLEGAL TO WALK YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE I HAVE DONE ANYTHING ELSE EXCEPT TRESPASS. THAT WOMAN CAN POINT HER GUN AT ME AND I WILL ALLOW THEM TO ESCORT ME OFF OF THEIR UNMARKED PROPERTY THAT I DID NOT REALIZE WAS THEIR PROPERTY. WHEN I RETURN TO RENO I WILL SEND THEM A CHECK FOR MY TRESPASS, FOR THE SIX HANDFULS OF WATER I DRANK FROM THEIR STREAM, AND THE BLADES OF WILDGRASS I PULLED AND ATE. BUT YOU ME, DEPUTY SIR, YOU GET YOUR ASS AWAY FROM ME!” Well my voice was strong enough the woman actually dropped her rifle and both she and the man backpedaled several feet and threw an arm in front of their face as if it would protect them from the sound that was bombarding them. And the funniest part was that all four of the deputies also increased their distance from me. But as soon as they felt they were safe enough from my voice, they all drew their pistols. I sighed, I knew my walk was over, I let them handcuff me. I sat in the small cage they transported me to, although I had told them there was no more conversation and I wanted a lawyer. I stayed in their cage until the next day sometime. I was offered no water, no food, and my handcuffs were not removed. My hands were purplish green when the lawyer finally arrived and he insisted I be immediately transferred to the hospital. I was probably in California but Reno was by far the nearest hospital. They saved my hands but I’ve never regained any wrist strength. I cannot peel a banana and require both hands to have enough wrist stength to lift a paper cup.
But while at the hospital police officers visited me, and I told them about my decision to walk for the rest of my life and survive on whatever I could find. I asked them to send money to the couple whose land I had trespassed on and to ask them what I owed for the six handfuls of water and the wildgrass I had eaten. I guess they determined I was irredeemably insane, so I was taken to the mental hospital not to another cage. They were going to handcuff me during the transportation but the doctor told them they couldn’t. So I haven’t been handcuffed again. I didn’t stay that long in the institution, but it was determined I was too depressed to go back to work so I would have to apply for permanent disability. When the paperwork was filled out and I signed the application for SSD, I was removed to a halfway house, well they called it a”mission”. I got a job the next day down the street where someone was trying to fix their sidewalk. I asked if I could help and he was skeptical because my wrists and hands were still wrapped but I showed him I could control the screed with my foot and I used my elbows for the mixing and pouring of the bagged concrete mix. It had been awhile since I had done any physical labor but I tell you, it was exhilarating, made even more fun because of my figuring out a manner to overcome my handicap. I hadn’t actually asked for any money, I had just been walking by and saw him unloading the concrete mix and tools and asked if I could help. After he had witnessed that I was capable, he drove away for the day, occasionally returning to check out how I was doing. When I completed the sidewalk he gave me two hundred dollars. I said that was way too much, but he insisted.I was really feeling good when I returned to the mission, but I found myself late and the door barred. So I walked around, not back to the mountains, just around and around downtown Reno. I returned to the mission in the morning and of course reprimanded. I was sent back to the hospital for only a couple of days, before being sent back to the mission. But they braceleted me this time and I couldn’t go any further than the public sidewalk in front of the mission house. I didn’t have much to do, so I started trying to reconnect with my family and a few old friends by attempting to write a few letters on an old electric typewriter. Still I couldn’t lift my wrists and type as I always had, so I laid the typewriter on the floor and lay beside it and found I could type with one finger a few minutes at a time, which is the way I have typed since and how I am composing this if I can keep my wrist supported and stretch my finger to the keys. The case worker told me she had handled the application but she wouldn’t be able to handle the appeal and I would need to obtain a disability lawyer and she made me an appointment. I could get unbracelated when accompanied by the caseworker. If a social security disability case is granted then one receives back pay upon the application being granted from the date the application was first initiated. A disability lawyer works for a percentage of the back pay. As it turned out there was no appeal but nevertheless the contract I signed meant they received the back pay check and paid me the difference. One of the other processes required is that even though a psychiatrist from the hospital had already written a recommendation, or whatever it is called, psychomendation?, I was nevertheless sent a notice to meet with another psychiatrist selected by social security. The caseworker duly drove me to the appointment.
He asked me if anything particular had happened that was causing me to be depressed. I say I am not depressed, but I frequently felt the world was depressing and I felt there was little hope for the world to ever become non-depressing. He asked me what I meant. I replied I felt our world favored the elite and took hope away from the working class, that it supported the persecution of some, etc. That all of this caused conflict within a nation; that nations sought conflict between other nations that furthered conflict, that we were destroying the environment and within twenty years humanity could face its doom anyway (so I was wrong—this was twenty-five years ago). He said that sounds like I was pretty depressed. I said no, I had decided to walk away from the depressing world to avoid the depression. He asked how I was planning to do that it because it sounded like I was suicidal. I said no, I had decided to leave and walk for the rest of my life and live off nature and maybe when doom came to many, I might be survivacidal.
He laid down his pen. He looked directly at me. “I am going to recommend they grant you immediate disability because you are too depressed to probably ever be able to work without long term government support. I’m afraid without social security you might imminently attempt suicide again.” I asked him, “If I were that depressed, exactly how is getting disability and not working going to prevent me from becoming suicidal? Isn’t it more likely going to be the other way around? Won’t preventing me from doing anything actually make me more despondent and more inclined to commit suicide were I so inclined?” But he didn’t answer the question and informed me he had another patient to see. Four-to-six weeks later I was told I had been granted disability. I was told to fill out an application for assisted housing. There was a waiting list of nearly a year, but the city of Reno found me a little place to live and paid for my deposit and rent until official housing could be found. They rushed me through a food stamp application and since the city was paying for my housing, put me at the top of the list for the next available vacancy. So I was released from the mission. The day after I moved into my new abode I began leasing a cab and went back “to work.”
I am still not depressed. But the world remains depressing.