I've been rewriting my account of what happened to me with my surgeries fifteen years ago, which I haven't really recovered from yet, if I ever will, including all the gruesome details, and trying to vent, and I'm still at around 2003, let alone what's happened recently. So I thought I'd just write about what happened today, and kind of try to summarize all that shit, and post it on my blog, and maybe Facebook.
My sister Joan got me signed up for General Assistance and Food Stamps, and she said she was going to get SSI back, too, and I would have both. But this month there was no GA and Food Stamps. I managed to get her on the phone, and she said that I'd got SSI, but they cut off GA and Food Stamps, because you can't have both, even though she just came up here and went there, got them to reinstate it, and they sent me a pro-rated payment for the end of the month. It's some kind of Republican scam, because they're officially against welfare. But she pulls strings to get it. She was Founding Chairman of the Barbara Bush Campaign For Family Literacy in the 41 White House and Asst. Chief-of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Reagan White House.
So I said, "You said I could get a car when I get SSI," and she said, "I never said that. We have to keep some for your expenses." Then I called her a few days after that and she said, "The SSI check was only $631," and we used to get around $800 so that was probably why she flipped on the car, but she flipped again and said, "Maybe you can get a car with the SSI if you get a job too." So they're already trying to steal the SSI. She said, "Robert is going to keep sending you money."
When I was getting the GA a few months ago, they would send me $336 GA, and I think it was $200 or $211 food stamps, for a total of, say, $536/mo. I would spend the $336 in the first 2 weeks of the month, and then my brother Robert would send me $100/wk. for the next 2 weeks, for a total of $736, and she would pay the rent, phone, tuition, more food, and some other things. She said, "Robert is going to keep sending you the money," and he just sent me $100 for the first week of April, "and we'll find out how much you need, but $631 is less than $736, so she's trying to cheat me and steal the SSI. Before she tricked/forced me into making her SSI payee, I forget how, she was going to refuse to do something, or pay something, unless I signed it, and I knew better, but I caved and did it, and she's already grabbed the money. She said, "I'll pay Robert back, I've been paying Robert back," which I didn't know, to cover up the money trail. Maybe they're going to try to force me into a board-and-care home again by withholding rent and/or food money. I'll get a lawyer and I won't do it. Those places are worse than this. I think they just want it for the cheap rent. The original idea for that was when Richie from the Hog Farm talked to my parents on the phone and said they wanted to pay for me to live in the Fairview board-and-care near the old Hog Farm House at 1600 Woolsey St. where Richie lived, where Wavy Gravy's wife Jahanera Romney put her mentally ill brother Brooke Beecher. I tried it, it was horrible, a joke of Richie's, and I threw everything in my red Toyota pickup and moved right out. Brooke was really messed up, a lot more than I ever was. He's dead now. I don't know if Jahanera was mocking me and my sister when she got her brother involved in the mental health system. Brooke had been in the mental hospital at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, that's all I know. Also, when I lived in New Mexico, Karen Castagna got her sister in some kind of drug treatment or psychiatric program, maybe mocking me and my sister, so maybe that was a thing with those old hippie ladies. It's just not a good thing to happen. Karen's sister was super-messed-up, too. The Olmsted Act says "least restrictive environment", and when she got me before, the lawyer told me I should have refused, that was all. I knew that, but I was afraid of her threats, and she had Laurie working with her. I don't even know why they might want to do that.
Joan took me to Social Services to apply for SSI, and she pulled out a letter from Dr. Shadoan, who I hadn't seen for a few years, with a new diagnosis, for him: "paranoid schizophrenia". If I ever see him again, I'm going to argue with him, because when I did see him, I told him that Dr. Auerbach had misdiagnosed me with that when my dad sent me to him to get a note to get out of the draft. I came all the way from the Hog Farm in Llano just to do that. If all the rest of those people on the Hog Farm were mentally OK, and I was the only one, then I didn't have "paranoid schizophrenia", which they only tried to pretend they meant seriously later. At that point a psych tech said they were just doing it to get insurance money. Maybe that's why Dr. Shadoan did it. I just told him I wanted to get rid of that diagnosis.
The last time I saw Shadoan I just hoped he could help me because a math professor, Dr. Sharon Buckley, told me someone told her to lower my grades, and I thought it might be my sister or brother-in-law, and he could talk to them and make them stop. I found out later they didn't count an entire year of "B's" from Yale, eventually causing me to be disqualified and lose my financial aid, which I need because they cut off my $60,000/year trust fund, formerly $100,000/year, and before that defaulted on all 12 credit cards, leaving me still in debt to the credit card companies for around $15K, which they still refuse to lift a finger to help. They still haven't counted the Yale grades, making me call the Yale registrar Daria Vandermeer three times to request her to send the same information over again, which flabbergasted her. I was hoping to get a law degree, like Joan. Anything is possible with the Bush family.
Dr. Shadoan arranged a meeting with them and my mother, and then they backed out. He said, "I can't make them do anything unless they're my patients." The last time I was in his office at Mt. Zion he was trying to make me quit, talking about "judgment" and "people skills", and then he started talking over everything I said, without even letting me speak, so I just got up and walked out right in the middle of the session, and I'm glad I did. Dr. Fine, the psychiatrist before, had told me, "When you go to Cal State, don't come back," but my mom and Joan wanted me to.
My clinical psychologist friend in practice in Lancaster, Mike Bernath, told me, "Go to a clinical psychologist, get retested and rediagnosed." I'd told him about Dr. Auerbach, so he'd already told me I didn't have it. Also, right after my meeting with Dr. Auerbach, I was in the office of psychiatrist Dr. Moshe Feinberg at UCSF-Langley Porter, and he said to me twice, emphatically, "You do not have schizophrenia." I think it's just my family's trick. I've been through more than one type of therapy, I don't think I have the symptoms, and I don't think I'm like the other patients. Some of them I think really do have severe mental illnesses, and those treatments are probably good for them. I think maybe these guys have tried real hard to make me crazy, or as one person told me, "Your family is trying to make you look crazy to steal your inheritance."
I told them about what Mike said, and they made sure that I was never able to do it. At that time, they had forced me to go to psychiatrist Dr. Bill Stubbeman, and Mike said, "They should have let you pick your own therapist." I told Stubbeman what Mike had said and after I stopped seeing him, and Joan had corralled me in the Brentwood Manor board-and-care home, she pulled out a note from him that all it read was "paranoid schizophrenia", the exact thing I had asked him to erase.
Mike Bernath said, "They're trying to get a "dual diagnosis", a psych diagnosis and "substance abuse", which according to Mikey Katz from the Hog Farm, who admits he has it, is addiction to cocaine or heroin, there is no evidence of that with me. Maybe they have me conflated with Alberto Castagna, deceased, because I had just come from Santa Fe, and I stayed with the Castagnas for 3 weeks. Alberto worked in the "Trip Tent" at Woodstock, worked his way up from EMT, to paramedic, to Director of Taos County Ambulances, all 5, and his wife is a nurse. He revealed to me that he had Hepatitis C, which was caused when they had a big fad of injecting cocaine. I missed out on the whole thing because I spent 2-1/2 years as a member of a neo-Pentecostal church in Colorado Springs, Lighthouse Temple, totally drug and alcohol-free, including being a music minister playing hymns on the electric guitar in every service. I would've stayed, had to, but my parents came and got me. I have never injected cocaine in my life. Richie said, and though he officially died of liver cancer, it might have been connected to Hepatitis C he also had, and he was in the backstage crew for the Grateful Dead, the wages of sin, "God saved your life!" I met Richie at Woodstock, too. We're both in the movie.
Phil Lesh had Hep C too, from the dirty needles, and had a $90,000 liver transplant at the Mayo Clinic, being a big rock star. David Crosby tells in his book about having one at UCLA Hospital. But Alberto said he had bad insurance from Taos County. He asked me, very seriously, if I would call each member of my family individually, mother, father, sister, and brother-in-law, and ask them if they would give him $10,000 for a liver transplant. He was taking interferon. Each of them in turn refused. My mom said, "We don't have deep pockets." Maybe that was the trigger for why they came down on me. At that point, they had already taken away the 12 credit cards and defaulted on them, cut the $100,000/year to $40,000 (later they said it was $60,000). I
I had sent Laurie back to her mother's and moved to New Mexico. Alberto really was not much into drugs and alcohol anymore, you might imagine. He did like to smoke pot, and then, in 1993 or 4, the medical marijuana movement and the Green Party were coming on really strong in New Mexico. It took me awhile to really realize it. A Green Party member nearly got elected Governor. There was a lot of sentiment. Northern New Mexico, especially around Santa Fe and Taos, he lived in between, has always been that way. Then there were lots of artist studios and art galleries. He was a sculptor, and he had exhibits in art galleries in both Santa Fe, on Canyon Road, and Taos, which is a big deal. Everybody knew his name. So he smoked a lot of medical marijuana, maybe that's good for Hepatitis C, I don't know. I never saw any other drugs up there the whole time, even in the early '90's, when Clinton was President. Nobody was going to bother them about it. He was practically a cop himself—they would call him on his radio, he would put on his jumpsuit uniform with the Taos County patches on it, pick up his black bag, and drive down into town, get the ambulance, and drive to the auto accident scene or whatever it was. There were other ambulance drivers in the neighborhood. When they would get to whatever the emergency was, the State Police would always be there. Nobody ever got busted for drugs, let alone pot. He told me that they wrote him up because he hit a deer with the ambulance one night, and they knew he was on pot, but they just let it go. He wasn't even really worried about it, he was just laughing about it, he thought it was funny. You know, an EMT, ambulance driver, paramedic, is a sworn officer, almost just like a cop, at an accident scene.
But I'll bet the disease from shooting cocaine in the old days freaked out my family. But it was him, not me. I was just his old buddy. I think there's a legal term for "contagious guilt" or something like that, "guilt by association"?, which really is innocence, of course. And of course, they never, ever, asked me, or even let me speak. I think that's called "due process", or denial thereof. Anyway, Alberto's under the ground, poor guy, so it's a moot point. There was a song by the Yardbirds, "Mister You're A Better Man Than I", and I could've sung that to Alberto, Argentinian art school hippie and Yale Jew or not; he was better than me x1,000,000. He was wise and he knew everything. He was a grampa. Now Karen's a widow, Renata and Miel are orphans, and the grandkid's a "grand-orphan". I don't know if she's old enough to know. Karen says it's harder work with one income. If everybody in New Mexico wasn't a sculptor he could've been the next Latino Michaelangelo, with forests of life-size alabaster and marble nudes, real marble, $5000. How old was he, 60's, 70's? Totally healthy except our gov't hates that disease, like AIDS, a slaughter. He built one of the greatest owner-built homes in the world. He made the stained-glass windows, carved the door, the furniture, put in the plumbing in the bathroom, the sink, shower, toilet, dug the well, ran the electricity from the poles, tiles in the kitchen, bathroom sink, he built sliding plate glass doors to the backyard, and a huge flower-garden in front. The whole place was 20 acres or something, but he had to rent near there for years, and only a good Spanish-speaker could pull it off. They'd run the white hippies out. You couldn't see the nearest neighbor, and next-door was the Kit Carson National Forest.
Hilary Clinton announced for President today. I think I'll vote for her. Just because Democrats are more likely to defend Constitutional rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights than Religious Right Republicans like my family, who think the Constitution is the work of deist devils like Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. It's still partly based on the Bible, "endowed by the Creator," etc., or maybe that's the Declaration of Independence. But the Bible has the 10 Commandments, including "Thou shalt not murder," "Thou shalt not steal," and, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," which the lawless don't like to think about much, either. They still have Kagan, Ginsberg, and Sotomayor left on the Supreme Court, the President might look at it that way, and the Clintons might, if the votes aren't suppressed.
