alright so i just picked up from where i left off last night, typing up the fall 06 journal. i stumbled upon some good notes in the midst of it so the part where i'm talking about icarus college organizing got typed fancier than it was written originally and i think i'm going to end up using some of it for the grant proposal that i'm procrastinating about writing right now. so here ya go, more words shoveled on the fire like coal to keep you warm. or at least give you a sense of what a fucking self-absorbed weirdo i am!

Y Control
Shifting colliding time space zones. the key to the puzzles are all over the tiny apartment and they lead right back into each other. the apartment is gone now, off the map. you walk by it on Macdougal Street all the time but you’re in a different dimension now. keep walking.

Building a map for myself in the unconscious realm. clues and symbols to look out for, markers in the  mirrored hallways. all those characters running around in there. the consentual reality but what does that mean? who’s paying for it to stay like this? shapeshifting magicians or the people that hire their services? how far back does it go? there has to be some truth to there being black magic in embedded in the power structure  - old power spots and ancient secrets covered up but still used. television is numbing away our telepathy – now the internet is allowing us half-cyborg telepathy but it dulls the senses, scrambles our ability to talk to trees and streams. the social control is the aim of the power structure, or course, maintaining control as always. don’t look up, stare straight ahead.
i was just reading M the lucid dream book and she fell asleep. i am so grateful for her these days, she allows me to go here to these crazy places in my head and not be afraid of not coming back or sleeping with the light off. last night, by the light of the full moon, i smoked a little bit of pot for the first time in two weeks. there were 50 or 60 people at the farm, a big party contra dance thing in the barn, all kinds of food and kids and dogs, very sweet. for some reason i just felt this strong desire to break my pot fast – part of it was definitely the pressure of being around all the people – needing a filter for all that energy or something. i’m so of two minds about it, maybe more than anything else ever in my whole life. but so anyway i was walking through the moonlight, down the path to the woods, and i had this flash of connection and i saw the mental health peer ed structure and plans for NYU and the bones of the next grant proposal laid out in front of my eyes, these are the notes i took:

Popular Education about Mental Health and Wellness
Weekly readings and discussion groups. We’ve seen that the format of a ‘support group’ doesn’t work so well on campuses because there’s too much stigma around the idea of what a ‘support group’ means. A ‘discussion group about mental health issues’ has a whole different feeling, especially to students who are used to the format of reading and discussing texts. People can talk about their personal issues without feeling as vulnerable and scared. If we want this to work we need to create materials that guide people in how to effectively lead discussions. They don’t have to be so complicated, just inspiring enough with a good set of communication tools and exercises.  We can use the old standards like: how do we define Normality and Productivity – a brainstorm on the board with associations to those words and ideas. What is Mental Illness? What is Mental Health? Where do we get these ideas from?
We can also have discussion guides on talking about Suicide, Psych Drugs, Depression, Anxiety. The people leading the discussions don’t even necessarily have to have personal experience if there’s a good text to draw from. How can we best draw out the talents and experiences of the people in the groups? How can we facilitate really good communication in a group? How do we make people feel comfortable? (How do we build community networks with roots in the underground that infiltrate the mainstream? Social Anxiety Disorder. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. fuck i want to burn down the old way with all the fuel they’re giving us to work with.)
Peer Support
Despite the fact that there is so much need -- that there’s a whole new generation of young people who have a much more complicated relationship to psych drugs and the mental health industry, that often sensitive people’s first psychotic breaks happen in the first years of college, that the statistics for depression, anxeity are so high-- there is NO specifically mental health peer support on college campuses at all.
There are ‘screenings’  for mental illness. There are traditional underfunded counseling centers. But no peer based mental health support. Much of this has to do with legal liability and a legacy of cultural shame. it has to do with the biomedical model, the power of big pharma to dictate the agenda.  (reference ‘suicide cotagen’ thing.) history of western closemindedness to ‘alternative therapies’. 
The Icarus Project is a grassroots support network formed in 2002 by and for people labeled with bipolar disorder and other “mental illnesses” who understand our experiences outside the mainstream medical model. Some of us take psych drugs, some of us don’t – all of us are consciously engaged in trying to reframe societies conception of mental illness and shift attention away from the disease model for a more holisitc view of mental health and wellness.
we are all about creating listening spaces.
we want to fill the space that has been left vacant to talk about mental health alternatives, community alternatives.
NYU
we are very inspired by the LGBT peer ed group Outspoken and drawing connections between the struggle for queer liberation and the emerging movement for mad pride. 
we have a rough curicculium, an army of badass presenters, a small group of students with experience, and our plan is to develop a Safe Zone like training over the next semester
meanwhile make friends with incoming RA’s, professors, other ally’s in the administration. ask to be a part of welcome week and related activities in the fall of 2007 which means: do presentations for incoming students, prepare materials to distro all over campus. Continue to foster our relationship to liz swados and the reality show
here’s the thing we have to be straight up about:
- we want official recognition
- we want financial resources and space or $$ for space
- we want to be and look autonomous enough that we’re not connected to the counseling center
 
So there i am, walking under the moonlight, and it’s like my brain has just opened all these floodgates that have been closed down for a couple weeks, all this stuff pouring out of me, synthisizing all that information running around my head into thoughts about affecting the material realm. and I felt SO POWERFUL somehow, all alone at the edge of the woods, so powerful that i just spontaniously started singing this Avengers song that I haven’t thought about in a long time that dwells in the manic parts of my brain:

I’m riding on a thin white line
Standing in the doorway of cloud nine
And you see me in the window of a choffured limoscene
You see my on the TV, radio, and the magazine
Don’t ask me how I feel – if I’m coming home
You said “Don’t go – don’t go – don’t go to Babylon”
Well hey Joe I’m already there

You can hear me for a million miles
I’m surrrounded by a thousand dials
And what I want to see
is a million more of me
Black plastic disks going round and round and round and round
Don’t ask me why I’ve changed – I never did
You said “Don’t go – don’t go – don’t go to Babylon”
Well hey Joe I’m already there

So strange. Tonight, writing the lyrics down it seems a lot more straight forward and about cocaine and fame. Her voices touches the dark side of the divine, multiple levels of coexisting realities. something about it grips me tight, it’s a character from a story in my head, a character i play sometimes when i’m all alone with the moon as my audience. I seem to get lost in the book in my head these days, and I feel this (maybe delusional, maybe kind of real) intense power to shift reality around me, mine and other people’s as well.

Just for the record: Paz, Lisa, Ben, Leila, and Dave come up from the Lower East Side to hang out at the farm today and it was one of the sweetest days in recent memory. You smoked again with Lisa. Watch it, buddy. Remember meditating at Paz’s yoga class last week – seeing the door open. You can get there without the weed and you can’t get there sustainably if you’re smoking the weed. Just a reminder. There’s too much to hold together right now.
//By the way: you’re worried about M. Her ashama was really bad last night and you didn’t know what to do. You feel helpless. You don’t know how to take care of her and you so badly want to be able to do it. Fuck You’re so clearly scared of her dying slowly, hooked up to machines. It’s a horrible thought but it’s a real one. You’ve watched it happen to the person you loved most and it’s hardwired in. It’s part of what always keeps you away from everyone. Sleep.
staircases and 890 and crowded city streets. it’s time to start creating maps of these places because i’m already clearly visiting them. part of me is conscious about what i’m doing, part of me is not. i’d like to get them in a room together to play some chess or something.

//I’m sitting in the sunshine – in the patch of the orchard where Ashley and Ryan were living this summer, the stones Ryan laid out for her like a shrine to their love, now covered over by grass and herbs and dead apple branches. on my hands and knees pulling them away, uncovering the ruins only 2 seasons old.//it’s just good to sit and play in the earth. plan and play. The edge of the orchard and the field and the path and the woods and the creek below, the highway road in the other direction. it’s Monday, early November. there are milkweed seeds flying around you, the sun feels good on your bare chest, cricket steady hum, intermittent traffic on 9G. I’ll come back to this spot in the Winter and keep building whatever’s growing in my mind and spirit. Quiet connection to this land. Mudstains on my parts look like hyroglyphics. The air is sweet.



This is November 13th, 2006
Go ahead and stare...
Brad’s memorial.  If I ever forget that I’m part of a vibrant, solid, full of love community I’m going to think about last Saturday, standing in La Plaza on 9th and C, a circle of people shouting out stories from Brad’s life. people from all over the world. So many faces I hadn’t seen for years that hadn’t seen each other for years, so many reunions of our extended clan. Frank Morales said at the memorial - god’s not up in the sky somewhere – the spirit is in the people and the struggle.
We Are Everywhere.
Sunday night late. After the Oaxaca teach-in at St. Mark’s Church took the train to Wassaic with Kaya and our bicycles – emerging out of the train after riding through the pouring rain on 3rd avenue, red green, orange lights reflected in the puddles, steam rising from manholes, yellow cabs whizzing by and then the enormity of grand central, us soaked in rain and city. So we’re off the train in Wassaic and suddenly it’s dark and quiet and 1am and the air is thick and wet and wild – then driving back to Gtown in the old red diesel jetta mostly in silence, exhausted. Then staying up till 3 in bed reading War in the Neighborhood by Seth Tobocman, feeling connected deep to our peeps.