Being Insane

Augustine Milk is a good friend of mine from college who happens to be…well, insane. In his bio, he explains

I am Schizoeffective, which is like being Schizophrenic ? delusional, paranoid, subject to The Voices ? but with the added bonus of making me vulnerable to the symptoms of any number of other mental illnesses: Manic-Depressive Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, etc.

We worked on literary magazines together and went on Taco Cabana runs late nights (and I am still grateful for his recommendation of the Lords of Acid music group a few years ago). Augustine has been diagnosed as schizophrenic since 1994, and tells stories about the different voices he regularly hears as well as his drug addictions while living in California. Now he lives in a home for the mentally ill in Minnesota. He is intellectually alert and just as witty, although sluggish at times and has bad days and good days. Among the most astonishing thing he told me recently is that his disease makes him unable to watch TV or videos (although he still is able to read books and of course write).

Basically this blog is an outlet for his poetry, and quite frankly, blogging software is not really appropriate for this kind of content. So far the blog has been an outlet for poems like Special Date:

Easy twenties, easy hundreds
Easy thousands each week
Fairy gold flows like water
Spent on liquor and tweak

But it?s not about money
Though that?s part of the life
It?s the wailing of sirens
It?s the glint of a knife

It?s not knowing, not planning
Living for the next thing
Moving pleasures, any impulse
Onto nothingless cling