Without any cure in sight or anyone really giving a flying crappola about PTSD, servicemen and women are forced to live lives likened to a horror movie, every single day of their lives. Within the Native community PTSD has become a cottage industry for social workers. Street kids roam in perpetual trauma in an underworld filled with death. What goes through their minds?
Well being the unofficial poster-boy for PTSD and that I’ve just come out of an episode, this is your lucky day boys and girls since I’m going to give you a live action report on what goes through my mind anyway, when a PTSD event occurs. Mind you, this is going to be graphic and filled with expletives directly associated with a traumatic event since I do go off on the subject and there is no other way to describe an event other than it’s raw reality. I can already feel the anxiety…
Ironically there are more people who suffer PTSD that professionals within the field can possibly address for funding is nearly nonexistent. Many folks are left to fend for themselves until they make the front page and get labeled ISIS for political purposes or simply hidden in jails across the country like other people with mental disorders. Everyone has experienced a traumatic event to some degree and not all people respond to the same stimuli as others.
Though I say that I can eat a cannoli while sitting on a stack of ‘stiffs’ and I can, I’m only over compensating in reality. Granted it would not be the most quaint setting to eat a fresh cannoli but there are others who would also dip the cannoli in the human gravy. Talk about GMO, humans are loaded and another reason not to be a cannibal. At least check the liver first, gads do I have to teach you everything? You know, ‘spots bad’.
To me over compensating is when I try to make light of an absolutely grotesque situation in order to retain my sanity over the brutality of it’s reality. In other words, I fake not being physically and emotionally troubled by the sight of human remains in a state of total disembowelment with body parts scattered like toy dolls in the sand box. And all that human gravy (blood, intestinal discharge etc)
Yeah, I thought that was kind of disturbing since you could smell crap still dripping out of a disemboweled string of ‘noodles’ (intestines), man that stinks in a funny way. Guess it’s all them juices that make crap smell different than when it’s expelled normally. But you know something, only a person who had the joy of smelling another humans innards could possibly know what I am taking about. And the pleasure it’s memory brings when something else similarly fetid enters our olfactory. Some call it a trigger, I call it a walk down memory lane, how special.
Exposed digestive juices mixed with partially digested food in the intestine smells different than normal fecal matter. Gross huh, but anyone who has experienced this will have a ‘moment’ when a similar smell enters his/her nasal passage. “Wow man, that smells like bad shit”. To non traumatized people crap is crap and it all gets flushed away in the toilet, how pretty as far as shit goes anyway. I’m sounding more like the late great George Carlin eh…Oh Shit!
The smell of a gut injury always means trauma of some kind whether it’s from violence or an accident, gut shiza spells death and dying and there is a garden variety of smells associated with different traumatic events. Knife fights are good for intestinal dripping like I mentioned in the beginning where you have a string of noodles with fecal matter in various states of digestion. Included are a variety of digestive juices intermingling giving it a more chemical aroma that distinctly smells of death, not to be confused by the unique smell of rotting humans.
My particular PTSD takes me to many places I really don’t like to go and even a slight hint of a smell can send me into fight or flight mode in an instant, no thinking about it, just the adversarial aspect of survival. How intense is this feeling? At that instant, I would be frightened enough to kill you because I don’t want to die. I’m not much on flight and that explains my punctures and gash’s. Don’t you just hate it when someone tries to cut you open or simply startle you?
It’s a moment, a flash or millisecond when I react making an evasive action, I am preparing to kill you and anyone else in my way by any means possible, and I can be creative, to survive by the time turn and focus my eyes on my target it’s that fast. I will gut you like a fish because I am scared to death, ah that funny smell again. I don’t play grab ass nor do I touch or like to be touched unexpectedly like so many of us. In my case I think it has something to do with being tortured, beaten and actually left for dead. I prudishly have an aversion to that for some reason.
You know how street kids are, running around all times of the day and night bumming spare change, no where to go, nothing to do, just live in a good dumpster, I had a good one to. And I’m not tellen where it was, just in case you know. Once you’ve lived on the streets you always keep an eye on where you could live or stash. A group of dumpsters is a condo you know. Where the street elite reside in comfort.
Now that would make a good reality show, ‘Survival in The Land of Milk & Honey’. I could take you on a tour of where I lived as a kid and how I peeled ‘the good stuff’ off of rancid maggot covered meat, mmmm scrumptious, were is Bear Gryles? I could even take you to our ‘secret place’ where homeless kids gathered and told of the rich perverts who would stick things up kids asses and of kids who simply disappeared and this was the 60’s. Street kids are a pedophiles paradise. Sadly Prime-time would be out of the question. But there is always cable.
What really takes me to the fringes of sanity is my early childhood. Have you ever seen a fire boat in the harbor firing off all it’s water cannons at some ship launching, water squirting out in defined streams in every direction? Well thats what a little old man looked like after being whacked in a robbery I believe, I was only 6 at the time.
It was my first year living in the Big City. I used to go downtown with me mum and I would always walk past a haberdashery where this old man would always give me a piece of red rock candy. Only this time, I got more than I ever imagined because I came into his store, and like they say, I could still smell the death in the room like it was today. Poor ole guy was squirting blood and gurgling as his arms and legs twitched, no candy.
Later in life I had the golden opportunity to experience things that far outweighed and out gored the site of a old man bleeding to death in his final throws of life. It still freaks me out for no other reason than it was my first time I experiences a human body fucked up and fucked up big time. The worst thing I ever saw before that was Popeye struggling to open his can of spinach, open, open OPEN!!!
Dare I mention my sortie on the streets during a traumatic but really sad moment in my young life I accidentally ate a piece of my buddy’s brain? I did and I am guilty as charged though I did not intend to munch on his brain like some elitist cults do to this day. It was the usual scene, my homeboy was shot in the head. I mean the top of his head was gone and I could look into his head with an eye ball stew in the bottom where I think the neck connected since I saw the tongue. What did I know, I was just a sidewalk commando.
I was sniveling,wiping tears away as his head oozed with juice and tiny morsels of tissue, then some splashed into my mouth. I wiped it clean but accidentally licked my chops and down it went. Think there was some skull fragments mixed with blood and that squiggly buger-textured brain matter. Hmm, maybe it was a buger, it was salty. No telling what it was since the inside of his head looked more like a soup bowl when I got his gravy splashed on my face. Don’t think I ever wrote about this before.
This was not a biology class so it could have been a epiglottis and eye ball stew with tongue meat for all I knew. Guess after a few gun/knife fights, bombings, turf wars and pure evil mustered from the darkness of revenge you’d think the site of some old buzzard twitching and bleeding to death would not be so traumatizing to this day. I better watch what I say or every grease-ball that had an attitude with me will chasing me down with a dying old man squirting blood everywhere. Gawd, I hate that…..
Well now you know my Achilles Tendon for that still strikes fear in me and I wake up screaming at the top of my lung because ‘I am witnessing this death through the eyes of a six year old kid’, not a street savvy cannoli eating goon or former fist responder. Will I ever get over it? No, now that I outlived Methuselah there is no question I will never get over the sight of this kind old man who gave me candy dying right before my very eyes.
Just the thought of it as I write gives me a rush of emotions I can’t hardly describe. Weird I can still muster a tear for that old man but everything else, is just business, except for the death of my daughter, that was totally fucked up. Yup, that one still burns all right. Mother fucking son of a bitch that one still burns and it burns deep to. Sucks but thats how it goes with PTSD, your brain flies around thinking up all sorts of shit you really don’t want to think about. On a side bar, I dug her grave by hand on a hillside overlooking the Rocky’s.
You know, that brain did not taste bad even with bone, blood and indistinguishable human matter in the soup. It was not my intention to consume my friends brain in part or the center piece of the evening meal. With the usual seasonings it would most likely have tasted like any store bought brains and probably taste good with eggs and roasted garlic, hmm. But in this case, no I only tasted a small portion, not enough to count. A chefs taste, if you will. Just enough to tell if there was enough seasoning and there you have it.
Sounds cold blooded huh, but PTSD has an intense energy that digs deep and decisive on the subject at hand and thats the tricky part. A colleague of mine with whom we share many traits reminded me of how she utilizes with her enormous energy and it is really quite simple once you get the hang of it. Apply that energy in a productive way. I know she is absolutely right for I have applied that technique myself. Easy for me to say now but not a few hours ago, but I’m back in my pen now, gnawing on a femur.
Why do I have visions of a crowd of villagers coming up a mountain path towards my adobe shack with torches and a dying old man on a stick bleeding like a fountain? People for miles around chanting, “The Ogre Must Go! The Ogre Must Go! The Ogre Must Go!”
Wheres me donkey?!?
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I Don’t Leave Home Without It
Your Devil’s Advocate
Buffalohair
Through my camera lens I witnessed history and I also observed greatness, a true humanitarian & acclaimed author,*Robert Perske, champion of the innocent and the abused. If you met him you would know how inspirational he is and the battles that he fought for those who had no voice. But for me, he became my mentor, my personal inspiration and my dear friend.
Oldies But Goodies On and Off The Pow Wow Trail 