i don’t care what the calendar or the solar cycle or the local druid says, summer is now officially and spiritually over because it’s September and the weather was overcast and rainy all day for the first time in months. it’s been raining for almost twenty-four hours now and although i initially felt as gloomy as the sky looks now, i’m starting to feel refreshed. the rain is cleansing, purifying, chasing away the extreme heat and putting out the fires, washing away the chemicals that have built up on the roads and turning them into mysterious and possibly toxic foam floating wherever the water collects.

when it rains, it pours: i just received word that my brother has been committed to a “behavioral health unit” (this is what they call the psych ward now) for up to 90 days. sixty years ago a guy wrote a little novel about birds or something that makes it very difficult to involuntarily commit insane people in certain enlightened states like california. unfortunately my brother’s latest excursion inadvertently took him in the wrong direction, into an unenlightened state where they can keep you for a little longer than a week at a time if they determine you are still insane. i was informed that it’s nearly impossible to get the full 90, but even though he sounded more coherent over the phone than pretty much every time he’s been released from other places after just a week, they decided to keep him. i tried to warn him on the phone beforehand that his plan to inform the judge that it’s all been a case of mistaken identity and that he’s actually a trillionaire secret agent diplomat with 53 passports who changed his name to X (like twitter!) is the exact sort of thing that will not serve to secure his release, but as always he didn’t listen.

i think years of seeing ironic schizoposters on the internet has made a lot of people forget that legitimate psychosis even exists. generally, ironic schizos online are just garden-variety eccentrics, who have enough of a foothold in sanity/reality to make content that’s just barely still accessible and amusing to normal(-ish) people. to some extent the audience is aware of this dynamic, and ironic schizo content is implicitly (and correctly) understood as a joke or an act. there are of course plenty of legitimate schizophrenics posting on the internet, but just like the crazy guy shouting on the street corner, nobody listens to them and they don’t gain an audience because they’re incoherent and thus uninteresting. even the Internet’s Own schizo, terry davis (rip), is still a niche figure at best. but since everyone is so used to seeing only ironic schizo content, when they’re confronted with legitimate schizophrenics they have difficulty believing they’re not just playing around. when i describe the content of my brother’s psychotic delusions to some people they respond in disbelief “why does he think that, that doesn’t make any sense”, or “but he doesn’t actually believe any of that, right?” as if they do not understand that the nature of delusions is that they are baseless and irrational and yet believed completely.

but i suppose to some extent i can see where they are coming from, confronting psychotic delusions can be disconcerting and disorienting at first. it is like dealing with an alien or somebody from a foreign culture or dimension who speaks your language and initially in conversation it seems like you still have some common ground and understand them but then they say one incorrect thing and suddenly the illusion is broken and you realize that there’s something fundamentally off, something viscerally wrong, like encountering a lovecraftian entity antithetical, nay hostile to logic and rationality and evidence and reality. you try to bring them “back” using reason and logic but those normally razer-sharp weapons of persuasion are, to your horror, totally neutralized, annihilated in a black hole of all-consuming antireality. sometimes the abyss stares back: if people are capable of so stubbornly clinging to such irrational illogical beliefs, what’s to say you’re not doing the same without even realizing? where do strong beliefs even come from, if not from reason and logic? what is the point of reason and logic? what even is reality? maybe all along you’re the crazy one... but then after a few weeks you get used to it and nod along saying “mhmm yeah that’s great” whenever he comes up to tell you some delusional thing about his thesis on time travel, the same way you might deal with an annoying kid.

now say what you will about mental institutions and involuntary commitment but i feel like this could be a good thing, both for him and for me. it’s possible that whatever he has may be treatable if he gets on a proper regimen of antipsychotics and gets off of cigs and weed and pills. my poor dear mother and i have tried to do this ourselves at home but it’s simply too much for us to handle. he will either flush the antipsychotics down the toilet because they’re “poisoned” or take an entire handful at a time which is also not good. even when he takes them properly, any adverse effects from anything he does are immediately blamed on them and used as an excuse to discontinue use immediately, like when he had difficulty urinating as a side-effect of taking 10 xanax in one day (funnily enough, a few weeks later i saw an episode of house m.d. where house had the exact same issue). then there’s the cigs and the weed and the pills, which he somehow manages to get his hands on despite our best efforts and the fact that he doesn’t drive or leave the house. less than a decade ago cannabis was illegal but now you can get brain-melting 150% thc vape pods delivered to your door like pizza (remember to tip!), blank white envelopes show up in the mail containing mexican valium, etc. etc. hopefully this latest commitment will be kind of like going to rehab, in addition to FINALLY being long enough for antipsychotics to potentially take effect. as i said, every other time he’s only been kept for up to a week, when apparently every antipsychotic takes like a month of disciplined dosing to actually start working. good luck getting a schizophrenic to stick to anything in a regular organized fashion for a month on their own, which is more-or-less what they do after releasing him after a week, prescriptions in hand. it really seems like there’s a cosmic conspiracy making it nearly impossible to treat schizophrenia by having every symptom exist in direct opposition to treatment: psychosis makes them believe pills are poison, 90% of schizophrenics smoke and the efficacy of most antipsychotics is seriously diminished by tobacco use, and so on.

i said this 90-day commitment would be good for me as well, and that’s because i can finally enjoy some damn PEACE and QUIET around the house. believe it or not it is pretty frustrating living with what is essentially an embodiment of Chaos. regardless of whether or not you agree with their theory that there is no such thing as mental illness, i find that the anti-psychiatry crowd is particularly lucid on this point: “Psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels phrased to resemble medical diagnoses, applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others” writes szasz. it’s true, probably nobody would care about doing anything about crazy people if they weren’t so annoying. there is, unfortunately, no longer any place for them apart and a part of Society as mystics or shamans or prophets or holy men like in the old days. the only thing our modern totalizing Society cannot abide is those who do not abide by it, but i digress. my brother makes huge messes around the house and seems practically pathologically incapable of cleaning up, leaves the tv on stupid news channels that he doesn’t even pay attention in the living room while i’m trying to read and gets mad when i turn them off or mute them, randomly plays loud music and slams doors in the wee hours of the night, and then accuses me of being a selfish narcissist when i refuse to drop everything and immediately get him another pack of cigs at the store or let him have the tv while i’m in the middle of an episode. i could go on but i won’t.

it's also going to be a peaceful fall because i have finally quit my “job”. technically i have quit my “job” three or four times now (it’s complicated), but THIS time, it’s for real. i no longer have any passion or enthusiasm for it whatsoever, not that there was very much to begin with. i have perfected the art of not actually doing any work while working, in fact in some ways i have even managed to become counterproductive by being an active nuisance, and yet i think i’m still doing too much work. worst of all, i feel as though i’m a lowly hired goon in a grand evil scheme to relieve the america’s humble honest hardworking families of their meagre disposable income under the pretense of delivering a “fun family event”. it’s like i’m working at a circus but it’s run by the evil clowns from horror movies. i have done my part to try and offset it through petty theft and using my modest authority to give stuff away for free, but at the end of the day i know it’s nothing but a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of dollars i see pass through without any ability to challenge it.

if i had to trace it back all the way to its origin, none of this would have happened had i not happened to make friends with a certain australian kid on a minecraft server back in the Year of our Lord 2012. he would later go on to inadvertently introduce me to my minecraft arch-nemesis several years later, who over the years would unexpectedly become my former minecraft arch-nemesis/friend/business partner. partially due to minecraft and partially due to covid, he happened to get involved with a certain traveling family event, and in this capacity he extended an invitation to me to work with him on it. for reasons to be chronicled in a potential future memoir (tentatively entitled “off the rails on the train to nowhere”), i accepted the offer. once, in a team meeting before a show, the boss (but not the BIG boss, think darth vader to emperor palpatine) who comes out only on rare occasions went around the table and asked as an icebreaker (among other things) the reason why people decided to work for the show. i replied “i am conducting research travelling across the country so that i can eventually write the Great American Novel”. maybe i will write about it more once the dust has settled, but suffice to say thanks to this job i certainly was able to travel across the country and put together an unparalleled collection of coffee cans and see some of the Great Cities of America like new york city, kansas city, and oklahoma city. i am, however, no more qualified to write the Great American Novel than when i started.

to make a clean break, i think it is also finally time to symbolically cut my hair and also symbolically go on a trip to maui which i booked while drunk last night (i also bought a pop’n controller, i cannot spend more than $100 at once while sober). because of the wildfires, everyone is scared to go there right now, which has pushed prices down to rock bottom. this is the unfortunate thing that happens whenever an area that relies heavily on tourism gets hit by a natural disaster: the economy grinds to a halt right when they need money the most. most of the island is just fine, the damage is more-or-less contained to just one area in the upper bulbous part and “luckily” avoided all of the luxury resorts where i will not be staying because they are too expensive, but tourism is still dead because people now associate maui with the flames of hell. this is why i got an email from alaska airlines (who mostly make money flying to hawaii) encouraging me to join the humanitarian effort by “supporting local businesses” in open-for-business and unscorched East Maui (while giving West Maui communities “the space they need to heal and recover”) and most importantly offering 40% off all flights to maui in the next month. i don’t usually get out of bed in the morning unless there’s a deep discount involved, so now i am going to maui where i will do my best to contribute to the relief efforts by spending money in the local economy. unfortunately, as a cheapskate, i have to balance this against my own economic austerity, so it is probably not going to be much help. instead of spending $1000 a night at a luxury resort like they want me to, i’m probably just going to end up camping inside haleakalā national park, which i suspect is so cheap because the campsites are inside the caldera of an active volcano.

completely unrelated but i was bored the other day so i spent a couple hours making a monochrome theme for the website inspired by UI design from my favorite animé. i can't come up with a good way to handle images with it so i don't think it's ever going to go into production unless i decide i REALLY need to make my website compatible with palm pilots (what is a palm pilot? hold a séance and ask your great-great-grandparents).