A Phish Tale

From the time we finally departed from home on Friday, around 13:00, for the next 40 hours, we have been on one long, non-stop continual journey during our Phamily Phish adventure to Chula Vista and back again. Our plans went off course from the time we woke up on Friday until we returned home around 09:30 this morning, presently everyone is in various stages of disruption, illness and general blah-dom! I am a little chilly outside right now, the temp is a cool and breezy 61 degrees but I’m warm enough to sit here, listening to my Beatles Sunday music at a healthy and robust (but not too loud, I’ve a headache) volume. We drove from home all the way to Corona, California on Friday, it took us almost 8 hours because we took a scenic d’Tour through this little mountain town in Kern County that I favor called Tehachapi, I wanted to show the wife and kids where I wanted to live if I was to be an L.A. based artist. It was worth the extra times and miles because the family fell in love with the community when we stopped for dinner, drove around the town, looked at with an eye for a place to relocate to next…It’s a small community but only about 2 hours or so from Hollywood, about the same as it is up to San Francisco from where we are presently located in The San Joaquin Valley. It’s a place more akin to what we’re accustomed to, although it’s a little cooler than I like, it’s remote and safe.

Anyway, the adventure continued and we left Kern County about sunset and headed towards Corona via Interstate 15 and San Bernardino and that was a crazy traffic zoo that zapped our collective energies and wore on our patience. We arrived in Corona and ended up staying at THE WORST MOTEL 6 on the planet, but it was late and we all just needed to eat and retreat to bed which we did. In the morning we went to meet an old friend that I never met in person, a gut named Charlie Adams who I had met on blogster.com in late ’08 and in 2010, we penned “Order #831” together, an original screenplay based on a short story Charlie had made up; he’s not really a writer, he’s a real estate dude, but his story ws really clever and I was inspired to convert into a decent, kick ass screenplay. We have yet to sell the screenplay, but that’s another story (it’s in my book, “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…”), the point is, we’re really good friends, we’ve collaborated as artists but Saturday morning was the first time we ever sat one next to one another and had a conversation. Naturally we were late to meet him, the meeting and conversation was so engaging we stayed loner than planned and so when we finally got back on the road to head down to Chula Vista, we decided to book a room in advance and just go directly to the venue. We secured a place at a Travel Lodge in a San Ypsidro, about a mile from the Mexico boarder, paid in advance and made arrangements for an after midnight arrival. We stopped at food market before heading to the parking lot at The Sleep Train Amphitheater and sometime around 16:20, they let us into the parking lot.

The kids had long been hearing stories of old, about my carefree youth when I used to follow The Grateful Dead around, selling things in the parking lot to fund my adventures and when I explained that scene at a Phish show is very similar, they wanted to try doing that too! In the week before we left the kids and my wife spent hours painting little rocks with colorful designs, making friendship bracelets and amassing an “inventory” which even included the last four galley (advance print) copies of the book and a stack of my first screenplay “Kill David Spade!” (that story too is in the book)! We also planned on selling some grill cheese sandwiches and just hang out in the parking lot digging the scene before the show started at 20:00. We did have a good time, for the most part, but we sold only one friendship bracelet. The family was also tired, the rest at the Corona Motel 6 was terrible and we were all feeling cramped from being squished together in our little VW Beetle for the past 24 hours. It was all good, however, if anything we rested while sitting there behind our car, smiling at fellow hippies and stretching out in the balmy late afternoon. While we were chilling, as I wore my “BiPolar Dude” outfit and got to talking another dude of my vintage, we talked about how we each found a connection to Phish through our association with The Grateful Dead. The other dude was from Boston and had never seen a Dead show West of The Mississippi, his last show was June of ’95 at Deer Creek and my wife and I were at that infamous show (the gate crasher show) also…in fact, that was the week of “Deadheads on Parade”, a 3 day perpetual event we hosted at The Split/Apple (another story in the book). Anyway, when Jerry Garcia died and The Grateful Dead ceased to exist, his kid brother took him to a Phish show and ever since the guy was hooked! Cool story, I thought, I laughed that I did the opposite, I turned my kid brother onto Phish before The Grateful Dead ceased, in fact, I was turned onto Phish by trading my bootleg tapes from The Dead’s 1986 Spring tour with this kid in Rhode Island. You see, back in the day before the digital age, when we swapped 90 minute Maxell tapes (via snail mail or person to person hand off), there was typical 5-15 minutes of extra space at the end of each side of the cassette tape. I got some shows from the ’83 tour from this kid and as filler at the end of one tape was a Phish song called “You Enjoy Myself” and on the other side another Phish song, “Contact”, both off of “Junta” (the debut album for Phish). However, because of the way things were unlabeled, there was no information about this incredible music on these tapes. I wrote to the kid asking who that band was, but I never heard back from him so Life Goes On…

A couple years later, while playing that bootleg of the ’83 Grateful Dead show at a party, when the “you Enjoy Myself” filler music came on, some other guy at the party knew who it was and so, I learned, about Phish. As fate would have it, about a year later, in the Spring of ’90, before my first son, Cassidy was born, I saw that Phish was opening for some other band (I don’t remember who they were) at some joint above a diner on Belmont, around the corner from the infamous Vic Theater in Chicago, I went to see them for the first time. They played one long opening set and after the second band had taken the stage, before leaving, I saw the piano player for Phish, Page McConnell, sitting at the far end of the bar alone so I went over to him to simply tell him how much I enjoyed their music and performance. I ended up having a 15 minute conversation with him about how music is the fabric that holds a community together, when the guitar player from Phish, Trey Anastasio, interrupted us because the band was leaving. I got to shake their hands and then, the next time I saw them they were playing a huge place in Tinley Park, Illinois, The World Music Theater and they were way on their way towards The Big Time! I was thinking about this story after I told the dude in the parking lot when I was waiting in line at a Porta-Potty and I noticed the band’s tour buses parked over yonder and only one laid back dude manning the gate and I had an idea; I was going to get a copy of my book and then walk to the buses, knock on the door and say hello again!

So that what I tried to do next, I went back to our spot in the parking lot, told the family about this little plot of mine and tried to get my daughter to accompany me but she would have no part of it, calling me just plain crazy! I agreed but still planned on doing it, I needed a witness, I explained because if it works, nobody will believe me if I was the only one so my son volunteered to join me on this little mission to get a copy of the book to Phish! We strolled to the laid back security dude but he stopped me, suggesting I talk to somebody at Guest Services. I did that and came up with the name of the woman in charge, Darcy, I was advised to talk to her when I got into the theater. I did that too, I found Darcy, I charmed her and said I was an old friend of the band from 1990, they said if I went to the show to drop off a book and so here I was…then, surprisingly, Darcy said “Oh, that’s funny, I am going to meet with their tour manager right now, I’ll give it to him right away!” I thanked her Gratefully then joined my family as we found our awesome “miracle seats” and waited for the show to start. Phish did not disappoint, they were awesome, especially Fish (Jon Fishman, the drummer), they were on fire and I found a lot of joy and comfort in the music; the same, however, could not be said of the audience scene, it had a weird, almost tweaking energy to it and most of the people sitting right around us didn’t really seem to fit the scene. Aside from their “straight looking” attire and in general stiff attitudes, they didn’t seem know the songs very well (if at all). I was a little disappointed in the lack of enthusiasm from my fellow audience members and it sadly reminded me of the last tour I got into with The Grateful Dead (1990); the scene wasn’t about the music or the community or the Love, it was about the party. Phish knows this too, I suspect, I felt their performance reflected this notion too but I could easily be wrong because I’ve never experienced a Phish show on the West coast before, perhaps this how the energy plays out for them, I’m not sure. Anyway, we loved the show, it was a spectacular light and sound and performance event which our daughter truly loved and appreciated which was the entire reason we went, to celebrate her 14^th birthday!

We were all worn out when we got back to the car and the cops were clearing out the lot quickly, so there was no parking lot scene afterwards. We split the scene, planning to get to our hotel and finally resting. By this time, it was almost midnight, I had been awake since 06:00 Saturday morning, without a nap and had not had anything but kettle popcorn and pot brownies to eat all day. We pulled into Travel Lodge motel, the place we reserved, pre-paid and expected to simply check in, as we pulled into the parking spot and clibed out to stretch, the hotel manage came out and glared at us, not saying anything, but when my wife went in to check us in, the manager gave her a really difficult tie. First he told her the motel property was completely 100% smoke free…of everything. She said that was fine, we’ll go off property if we needed to smoke but then he asked for a $250 CASH deposit so insure we don’t damage or steal anything and that’s when she lost it…the manager, acting like a complete dick, was obviously discriminating us because we appeared to be hippies (he was a very straight looking corporate kind of dude wearing a suit and tie at midnight)! I was going to challenge him, I was really pissed because they had no problem accepting our money over the phone but in person, suddenly, at midnight on a Sunday morning, this motherfucker had the unmitigated audacity to demand a ridiculous sum for no real reason, for goodness sake, we’re a mom and dad and two kids, clearly! We drive a late model vehicle, we have several credit cards we could use for “deposit” but cash? Really… what the fuck?!? My wife stopped me, however, she knew I would go ballistic and it could easily escalate so we tried to find another place to stay. At 1:00 on a Sunday morning, after a concert, in San Diego, either everything was booked up or way beyond our modest budget so we started up Interstate 5 towards L.A. instead.

I was driving, my wife trying to find available, affordable accommodations and the kids nodding in and out of sleep in the back seat, by the time we got to Orange Country, it was evident we’d find nothing so I just starting cruising hard and fast, heading north towards home and everyone else fell asleep. Sometime past sunrise on Sunday, about 20 miles past Bakersfield, I could not carry on anymore. I had been up over 24 hours, not eaten anything and we stopped at the only open place, a Jack-In-The-Box, ate something awful that resembled hamburgers and switched drivers. I curled up in the backseat with my daughter and fell asleep while my wife drive the remaining 3 hours home. We arrived about half past 9, I stumbled upstairs and crashed for the next so many hours until about now! It’s not even been 48 hours since this adventure began, yet, somehow it felt like days on end. I am doing okay, I still ache, I’m hungry and other than a slight headache, all I need is a little more rest. Tomorrow I’ll be ready for a busy day, an incredibly frantic week ahead so we survived. It was, perhaps, one of the last times I’ll venture out like that, in good old hippie fashion because, well, I’ve been doing that almost 40 years and I’d rather enjoy it from another perspective for a while…perhaps from the perspective of being on the stage might be nice but I don’t think I’ll do the whole tour/festival scene as “fan” anymore. Been there, done that (so many bloody times), I want to change it up for the next half century!

So, that’s my little Phamily Phishing Tale, I do indeed hope you enjoyed it and perhaps I’ve inspired to check out both my book (“My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…, available now at my website, www.dphilipchalmers.net or November 1^st, everywhere…) as well as one the most incredible bands on the planet, Phish! However, the real message of this entire article is that it’s important to share with your family time doing things together. This was showing my kids a little something of how my youth was and it was giving our daughter something she’ll remember all her life, her 14^th birthday adventure! Have a great week, enjoy your life and be well!

Peace, 

d'Philip

The Weight

d'Philip, October 2014

It’s sunset on a Wednesday evening in late October and I’m writing this article while sitting in our family chill space behind the Farmhouse. The air is a cool and comfortable mid-70s and as I write my wife and son are creating “Spirit Rocks”, ornamental pieces that reflect a magical moment. We’ll be selling them when we go see Phish this next Saturday in Chula Vista, California. It’s amazing, however, that we’re able to go because if you’ve following this blog a while, you’ll know, we’ve been struggling with financial issues while waiting for portions of my royalty advance to be made. That process is started, but the first deposit went quicker than anticipated due to paying off the collective debt we incurred to get here from Chicago last June. This trip, a celebration of our daughter’s 14^th birthday, is something we cannot miss and though a more pragmatic family might cancel these plans, we’re not that pragmatic family. We are more the Intrepid types, we forge paths despite the odds, we venture across the country to discover new opportunities and so driving a few hundred miles for a weekend of Phish and Phun is a walk in the park, so to speak…despite the fact we’ll spend more than we’ll earn, it’s worth it and we’re not going to miss it for the world! This Phish adventure is symbolic for our family, it’s time for us to celebrate a little because we’ve not done that since arriving here in The San Joaquin Valley and very shortly, the next week in fact, my book “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…” is released. I’ll be very busy and not available for the family too much so this a great opportunity to nurture the deeply rooted bonds we share and dance our asses off for nothing more than a good fucking Saturday night!

This article, however, is not about our future plans, it’s about the past couple of weeks of this seemingly never-ending wait we’ve had while various details and legal issues are worked out for the successful launch of the book. I have never done this before, well, I have authored a book (“SCHLEP”) and had it published by a “micro-publishing” company in 2010, but I didn’t have anything to do beyond simply getting available on Amazon or my own humble little website (dphilipchalmers.net). In the four years since it’s release, my first book has sold almost 1,000 copied; however 750 of them were one bulk sale to a European distributor. This time, with “My BiPolar Reality…”, it’s a very different animal. I’ve had to work with editors and attoneys, I’ve had sign legal documents to both protect my rights and, at the same time, give away (or “share” might be kinder) some those rights too. Throughout all of this, it’s been enough to drive me to the brink of madness, I don’t do well with the day-today business operations and if there’s money involved (there is), I get REALLY freaked out! This past month, while we wait for the funding to come, has become such a weight upon me I could not carry it alone. I had fear of failure, I was slipping and my illness was being triggered by this stress…the only thing that saved me, and I swear this is the God’s honest truth…the only thing that saved me was Love.

You see, only about 48 hours ago I was in such a state of mind that I was beginning to understand why Robin Williams, the funniest man on Earth, someone who has it all, struggled with his illness and demons for so long, so successfully, could have “snapped” and did what he did when he tragically took his life. I was feeling suicidal, please don’t misunderstand, it was more like having a deeper empathy for him and his actions. I was there, a little too close to that edge but if were not for the strong pull of Love given to me my wife and kids, from my family afar and friends I miss…I found some hope, something to float my spirit a little longer and when the storm finally passed, like all things must do, I was here to live today with a very grand spirit, an abundance of Love and support and a lifting of that terrible weight.

In the end, I suppose this article is simply about finding Love wherever you can and grabbing it for all you’re worth because it truly is a form of salvation we each have the power of bestorying upon one another…Love Each Other.

When Personal History Doesn’t Repeat Itself

Sunday//12 October 2014///21:24;//The Farmhouse Estate.Ceres.California

As I sit here on a balmy Sunday evening, listening to old Beatles songs of days gone bye, I'm reading my own book (“My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…”) because I’ll be doing some interviews and discussions about it this week. I was picking out my “talking points” when I started noticing the patterns that I always seemed to repeat in my life. I recall those other times when I have come to this point in my career when I’m almost there, I’m about to break through but, instead I don’t break through; I break down, I crumble and fail, I falter and trip or stumble into some kind of strange vortex full of fear, sadness, anger and rage. I feel myself at this point right now, in fact, I have been this far before but the difference is this time, instead of crumbling in on myself, I have learned to master these emotions and I’m trying to utilize them in the management of my BiPolar Reality. For the most part it’s working too, I have been more successful this time than any other attempt before, we’ve successfully relocated ourselves to where I need to be, I am making connections and reaching out to larger contacts who, I hope, will see the spark of creative insight I offer and they too will step forward into this parade I feel myself leading…but there is still one other thing that’s significantly different with this time around, this time I have the truth on my side.

One of the common contributing factors in all my past failures has been the missing element of absolute truth to the vision. I have these moments where I can see how things will work out but I don’t see it all so I filled in the blanks with bullshit. This time, there’s no bullshit about it, this time around I am following the absolute truth, as strange as it seems at times, it’s what is real in this current we’re flowing with now and so I have faith and conviction, this time it’s very different because nothing has been a figment of my over active imagination. I still don’t see all the parts of the visions, but instead of filling them in with my imagination, I’ve just let them fill themselves with whatever happens. The strange part is, even though it’s a little more scary, sometimes I feel like an abolute idiot because I won't know the exact answer and I don't like feeling that way about myself. Yet, given a little time things do indeed seem to be coming together just about exactly as I had seen them in the first vision I had of this reality. Things are coming together, just not how I would have imagined them and that’s the key to our success this time, I am spending my imagination on my work, not holding together the bullshit. It is hard, don’t get me wrong, I struggle every day with managing my symptoms, helping my family feel at home 2,000 miles from where they grew up and dealing with a mass amount of business and legal shit which drives me crazy. I recognize that I can’t continue doing this for too much longer too, I need help in different ways both now and in the very near future (when the book is released), but again, I’m trusting these “blank spots” to fill themselves in so I can just do what I do best…being d’Philip, an author/artist/activist and happy family man!

The night grows later, it’s nearly 21:30 and my music is reaching a climax with side 2 of “Abbey Road”, so I’ll take that as cue to start wrapping things up and shutting my little outside work space down. I love having the ability to work outside, especially at night. It’s my favorite place to write because almost all other outside stimuli is obscured in the shadows. I focus on the glowing keyboard and screen of my little XPS, I get lost in the music and I’m writing, reading, imagining and thinking for hours…just like I saw in that last vision of how to get where I where I need to be in my life…which, surprising to me, is very much like that very original vision I once had for myself all those years ago, when this Beatles music I’m now listening to was still on The Hit Parade, I wanted to be here, in California, a family man and famous artist. It’s not exactly how I thought I would get here, but yet, here I find myself and although it’s still evolving and happening as I live and breathe, this is what happens when my personal history doesn’t repeat itself!

As I conclude this article, I suppose the message I really find is that one should always remain focused on THE TRUTH of one’s vision and nothing else; at least that’s MY message in this post. As I think about it too there’s SO MUCH bullshit out there in the world, we get it from ALL SIDES every day, don’t we? I see on the news, in our leaders, in the companies who try to market things…I even see it in people I meet, sometimes in the people I know and love too, don’t you? Therefore, when I find myself in moments like this, completely alone with myself, there’s at least one truth I can still cling to, my own truth. What is that truth I hold on to? I suspect it might be different for different folks, but for me it goes something like this; There is Nothing Closer to God than Family because All You Need Is Love When You Give Peace a Chance to Imagine a Blue Planet of Bliss! Now, you may say I’m a Dreamer, but I’m not The Only One and so, there you have it…at the conclusion of side two, with the love you take being equal to love you make and all that, there’s the little bit of Truth I Know For Sure.

Thanks for spending your Time reading me, I hope it was worth your while…I’d be honored to have it shared with your friends, if you think it matters and otherwise, I simply wish you all nothing but the very best health, the most fair of fortunes and an ever-lasting sense of Love for Life…

Have Peace, Share Love, Find Bliss!

Gratefully yours,

d’Philip

Maybe I’m Amazed…The Life of A BiPolar Wife

Wednesday, 08 October 2014, The Farmhouse Estate, Ceres, California…

Greetings To & From The San Joaquin Valley!

As I’ve both made clear in my last two blog posts, as well as with my new book, “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…”, I am an individual who is successfully managing a (potentially fatal) mental illness. But the truth is, I am not the only one who is working hard to deal with my sometimes problematic symptoms, side-effects or other “abnormalities” I sometimes exhibit; I have a very supportive family with an amazing amount of loyalty, faith, hope and especially Love poured into my mixture of medications from my wife…aside from my mother, I know there is probably not another woman on the planet who would not only tolerate me for almost 20 years, but help me so much in becoming the successful, healthy, happy and peaceful man I am today. My wife, who married me when she was only 19 years old (I was 33) and after knowing one another for only 5 months, ran off to Las Vegas with me while I was riding an incredible manic wave and truthfully, not in my “right state of mind”, I was not healthy. Yet even after I was forth coming about my suspicion of being mentally ill (my previous wife left me when it was suggested I was BiPolar), even after I compared our vast age difference and the notion that when I’m 64 she’ll be sexy 50 year old MILF, she married me. In fact, as I tell the story in the book, she almost DEMANDED we get married!

We did get married in July of ’95 and like many newlyweds, there was a year or so of turbulence and aggravation; it’s tough to start sharing your whole life with somebody else, perhaps even tougher when you don’t really know everything about each other, but we stuck together. During the 2^nd year of our marriage my wife was with our first child and I was again on a high flying manic episode, but a three month serious of very angry and rage filled violent bouts of resentful fury! I was a maniac, smashing things without real provocation, foul mouthed, disrespectful and very arrogant. I was impossible to live with, one time during an argument with my wife I threw a ceramic coffee mug so hard at her that when she ducked and the cup smashed into the wall, parts of it stuck into the drywall! She took cover in the safety of her mother’s suburban home but still came to see me all the time. I even accused her of stalking me, but she kept coming around to make sure I was eating, bathing, behaving and basically alright…even though I was horrible to her, I was such an ass but she always came back. Towards the end of that year, ion a cold December night a few days before our first child was due, I had a crash and burn episode that left me unemployed, homeless and so far down it looked like up to me; I only remember stumbling up Michigan Avenue, the stiff Chicago winter wind whipping me hard, freezing the tears before I could shed them, I found a pay phone in a swanky hotel and called my wife. She was there to get me in less than an hour and we have been together ever since.

In my book, “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…” I depict the catastrophic complete psychotic break I suffered and detailed the damage this event had on both my wife/family as well as myself. It was several years before I even started making progress in the recovery process and it left me as being on “permanent disability” so the entire burden of supporting our family of four was completely on my young wife’s shoulders. She not only rose to the occasion, but worked so hard that she became the first woman General Manager for this chain of liquor stores where she had started as a part-time cashier only 3 years before; not only a stellar career curve, but quite the accomplishment for a woman who had never had college or formal adult education! My 19 year old child-bride, by the time our 10^th anniversary rolled around, had blossomed into a strong, resourceful and authoritative woman. Simply amazing, she has not only stayed with me, helped me through these tragic and traumatic events, raise two amazing kids and still managed to improve herself, to become stronger, smarter, more confident and assured; wow, my wife is an incredible individual! I almost feel guilty writing a book about my own struggles when in my humble eyes, my wife is the real hero who deserves a story!

Understanding that until I got the book offer in April, we didn’t consider relocating to California for several more years. It’s been a goal of mine, I cut my teeth here and I have been longing to come back home for a long time. We were stuck in Chicago, we were concerned about pulling the kids from school, of being so far from our aging parents, our network of friends and all that…before last April moving to California was not something we considered. I had always promised myself, I would never go to California to live until I achieved my dream of a selling a screenplay or scoring a book deal; I didn’t want to be one of those “wannabe” kinds of people who come to California seeking the Golden Dreams of their Soul. That’s not me, I am not the “wannabe” kind of person, I’m more the “I am what I am” kind of person. Then something happened, something completely unexpected and one of the best things that’s ever happened for me…I got a book deal, in fact, I got a 5 year, 3 book deal! My wife came to San Francisco with me when I signed the deal at the end of April and she barely thought twice about it, she too wanted to live in California. Since our lease was up in June and instead of relocating again in Chicago, we made a huge migration of our family to The San Joaquin Valley last July.  That fueled our motivation to be here now, but truthfully, it’s not an easy transition to make. Moving a family of four, with one child still in school and two family members who need specialized medical care (our daughter is diabetic type 1 and myself), two thousand miles across the country is a very big life adjustment for everyone. It’s still a process and although we’re feeling more at home every day, we’re aware it could a year or more before we establish real friends.  

d'Philip & Wife at Paul McCartney at Wrigley Field, Chicago, Illinois 1 August 2011

Over the last few weeks, however, while the final legal matters were hammered out with the publishing companies and as we’ve been waiting for this very large sum of funds (book advance money), it’s been very stressful for the family. There has been countless delays in getting paid, so many changes of plans that my wife started to suspect me of somehow organizing and executing this giant charade; as if I made everything all up…the book deal, the advance money, the whole change of plans…she started to frame the circumstances around my past history of symptoms. I have done outlandish things in the past, some pretty crazy things, even some illegal things but this was a charade far beyond the scope I could ever pull off…and, furthermore, over the past 7 years of the recovery process I have become a completely different person when it comes to managing and controlling my symptoms. I am really good at it, in fact, I even wrote a bloody good book about this disorder, so I knew it wasn’t me. I knew this was all very real, as strange as it sometime seems, I knew all along it was the truth. But wife, in her own moments of weakness, expressed her doubts. It isn’t about the money, I realize, it has to do with her sense of security and the fact that this wait (weight) has been enormously long to play out, simply shook her confidence in me. It was okay, although I’ll admit it hurt for a moment to think she somehow was giving up on me, now, when we’re at this pinnacle point in our lives together…but then I realized the ridiculous logic of that thought and trashed it! I know it’s not me, she too knows now it’s not me (the funds have been deposited) but more than that, she knows it’s not me because like her, through this amazing relationship between us, I have grown and evolved into a better version of myself too. So hell yeah, maybe I’m amazed at the way she really loves me, but what’s wrong with that? 

When Love Is All You Need

Wednesday, 01 October 2014, The Farmhouse Estate, Ceres, California…

Okay, I made it through the week and once again I find myself sitting here on a comfortable late afternoon, enjoying the sunset over the mountains to our west. I’ve been working on my things while sitting in the groovy chill space behind the Farmhouse all day long. I like this work place, this space to sit and create, it’s what I longed for when we lived in the Midwest. It was often too cold or raining there, we lived in a high traffic, congested area so I never felt very safe nor like I had enough isolation for my imagination to roam freely. Things are different here, I have pretty much exactly what I imagined I wanted and naturally I offer my most Grateful appreciation to the Cosmos for helping me get to the place in my life. I am indeed fortunate but it wasn’t always so, there was a time in my life when both chaos and pain ruled my daily routines. I used to have such terrible luck, I was always failing at the things I tried, I had trouble keeping a job or friends or lovers or even my own family. I was such a mess but the odd and curious bit was, I never really noticed it when it was happening. I was the center of the cyclone and rarely witnessed the destruction or impact I had all around me. I went through much of my life with this blind-sided view of reality, I stumbled and tripped through situations and relationships like a trapeze artist swinging across the three ring circle of life. It might have been a graceful thing to watch at times, but it was always scary. I never used a safety net either, so when I did miss the next swing or try to do one too many mid-air flips, I flopped hard on the ground. Splat, my life was once again an instant mess and it’s truly a miracle I survived as long as I have…I’ll be 53 on my next birthday and that’s as long as Jerry Garcia made it, so I figure I’m doing alright.

The difference between those circus days of my former life and the idyllic life I enjoy now is really very simple; Love. Love made the difference, corny I know…I am a parrot for The Beatles but I am absolutely positive, beyond any and all reasonable doubt that, in fact, All You(I) Need Is Love! Given you don’t really know me and unless you’ve read my book (“My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…”), you may not really understand what it’s like to grow up and try to function as an adult when you have a mental illness like I do, it isn’t easy. It’s a hell of a lot of fun sometimes, I have had some completely amazing adventures, but it’s also very painful, so much that there were times, for days and weeks, I would have no desire to live at all. I contemplated suicide often, I even tried it seriously once but luckily I failed. I have Rapid Cycling BiPolar I, along with a diagnosis of PTSD and General Anxiety Disorder all of which came upon me like tsunami of my soul, crashing through my realities and leaving me in a catatonic state, laid flat on my back on an expressway during rush hour (none of which I remember very much); six weeks later, just after my 45^th birthday, I was discharged from an extended stay in a psych ward but I remained incapacitated to care for myself, unable to work or even function on a daily basis. I could not care for my family, I couldn’t even leave my apartment for months at a time. Almost two years later I was eventually I was deemed “permanently disabled” but started receiving medical insurance. That was the key to the recovery process, a process which still (and always will be) in motion. Eventually, through a combination of “trail by error” with various medications, engaging in different forms of therapies and working on my own very hard to develop better habits, routines and self-managed care skills, things got better and better. Last year (2013) I sat down to write a book about this experience and this year, this month in fact, that very book is being released! That’s a very long road for a person once deemed “permanently disabled” and, like I started to say, Love Was All I Needed.

When I was a boy, I thought as a boy, I acted like a boy, I felt like a boy but my mother, someone who has more Love for me than I can imagine, knew that despite my unique abilities, there was something not quite right with me. Mom voiced her concerns to everyone, to doctors and school counselors, to the rabbi, a priest and after I started getting into trouble with the law as a teenager, she took me to psychologist, psychotherapist and even a church bible youth group. Nothing worked so by the time I was 17 I split the coop to make my adventurous way through life. However, despite it seeming like it was in vain, all mom’s efforts to get me help planted a seed inside myself; something might not be right about me and I might have to do something about that, some day. It didn’t get any better as I got older, in fact, it got worse, much worse. I was dabbling in dangerous and illegal activities, I was out of control, I was unhealthy in my body and I lived every day as if it was my last, without concern or regrets for consequences seen or unseen. Even after I became a father for the first couple of times, with two very different women, both who tried to love impossible me but not enough for me to ever feel (or return) the Love. When I reached the pivotal “Christ age” of 33, however, a young woman came into my life and from the very moment we met one another, both of us knew, we belonged to each other. Again, I sound a bit corny, but it was indeed love-at-first-sight, although she was only 19 and I was a lecherous 33, we ran off to Vegas and got hitched within weeks of meeting each other. We’ve been together ever since then, twenty years next summer and if it was not for this relationship, this one Love, my life would be all but over, essentially…if not dead, I surely would be one of those poor souls you see shouting cries of anarchy and doom in the shadows of the city streets.

Without that one Love, I would not be the man I am today because it was through this devotion, throughout the many years of pain and suffering, both for years before my psychotic breakdown and in the so many since then, this one Love, my wife…along with the beautiful children we’ve grown in with our Life, it was that feeling that kept me alive. Before the breakdown, after I had given up my criminal life and tried to find a straight life, it was this Love for my family that motivated me to walk the walk, talk the talk and never give up. Even though I repeated failed, job after job, gig after gig, nothing ever worked out for us, they stayed with me and I stayed with them, because I held onto that Love as tight as a life raft in a stormy sea. Once I had the PTSD episode, while I was in the treatment and recovery process, when I had little to hope for at all, it was that Love of my family that ignited my will every day. I saw my wife’s gentle eyes, her easy, comfortable smile, her soft touch and found inspiration to keep working on myself. I hugged my children, I made them laugh, I cradled their cries and in the innocence of their eyes, I saw the Love they had for me. I could never let them down, I wanted to be that man they saw with such awe, even if I didn’t feel like that man back then, I had that goal for myself. It was all because of Love. The life goes on, as it always does, in the most ordinary of ways except these days I am feeling so much better, I am strong and confident, I had both vision and the will to see this into reality and like John Lennon sang, all those years ago…Love Is All You Need.

Well, thank you once again for spending the time to read my little blog…as always, I invite your comments, I kindly ask you share my blog if you like it and please, if you too have a blog, why not invite me to read you too? In the weeks ahead, as we near the release date for “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…” I suspect I may not have as much time to write, but I will. I can be found elsewhere, both on-line and in real-time, live event things so I humbly encourage you to stay in touch!

Have Peace, Share Love, Find Bliss…Take care and be well!

Peace,

d’Philip