look into the eyes of a bipolar one of these days. you'll never see such an array of conflict. lights, engulfing black energies, angels, demons, god, the devil... they all have their laughs in the non stop spin cycle known as life to a person diagnosed as bipolar. these are my final words as i will eventually be ending this personalized hell. i've reached the end of the road. i'm not the brightest guy but i've pretty much figured out that i'm not fit for the world that unravels around me. being stuck inside of my head, even if for just a day, is the step behind that my fellow "comrade" needed as he advances and i fall further behind in the race of accumulating cheese. 

i'm not sure if i'll have the balls to point the shotgun to my head in the way my dad did. for some reason, i feel i owe it to the very few around me to at least have an open casket. but enough of this self pity for now. let's uncover the root of this mayhem & maybe even debate biological vs. conditioned before it's all said & done.

my first real memory is being around six years old. i don't know where the prior five years went lost, but six is what i can recall. it gets specific because we had just moved into our house in dublin. dad was always busy. meaning he was a construction worker who woke up at 4am everyday. i should know this, because right before i got the belt (and this was often), he'd remind me of how fucking tired he was and how he got up at 4am just to get to his shit job. being busy - he was always aloof in the garage. that fucking garage was his last haven for the late adulthood that he apparently missed out on by having me pop out of my mom's womb. everything that was of importance to him lie in that garage. the rifles, the shotguns displayed, his baseball bat, his hats, buckets of fucking paint, cement bags, his football, his weight set, the rack of the deer he shot down, stuffed duck trophies, his tools: drills, saws, wrenches, anything you'd need to build another fucking garage he had available right there at his reach. the walls were decorated with more hunting trophies, a raiders flag (even though he was a converted 9'er fan the rest of his life - he said al davis was a bullshitter). right by the door was a cheesy as hell poster, the kind you'd win at a fair. it was an over sized image of an overflowing beer that read 'mug shot' on top. in that pitcher of beer was a photograph with more depth and soul than you'd ever imagine, especially of something coming from a fucking drunkard local carnival in the east bay area in the late 70's. with his toughguy half smile and my mom's confused wide eyed grin, they were cemented together through that picture as a young couple trying to make the best of life at that carnival, and the proof would hang on the wall in his haven/garage. between being busy at the job he hated, drinking as soon as he got home, and spending time in the garage with his buddies - i'd still have to say William Richard Stewart was a real fuckin' man. not some poser chump that a lot of other guys are/were at the time. this guy was as tough as nails, walked around with a chip on his shoulder, cared more to look like a badass than a heart throb. he had facial hair that did nothing but cover his prettyboy looks and he wore his daily hats low to cover his bright blue eyes. his looks obviously were the source for his rough upbringing in a ghetto neighborhood where fighters were ranked in high school through brawling right outside of class. having an older brother who was a brute that stood over 6'3 and a solid 200plus pound frame, william fought with his heart even though he wasn't as physically gifted at a mere 6'0 180. the fact that not even drinking with an intent to die would diminish his looks into the later years still baffles me. hoarding jack daniels & smirnoff bottles like a savage in his later years only gained him an honest 5-10 pounds. he definitely wasn't shredded or anything, but he still maintained his old man strength through hard labor and living a fucking hard life in general. he wasn't one to be fucked with, and even with those bright blues and a slight hunch in his shoulders the majority of on the fence trespassers did not want to fuck with him, because as he always told me "they might be able to take me, but they know that they'd at least get hurt." despite his lost self esteem when he was older, he was still a source of high praise from the girls i brought around. he was 24 when i was born.

getting back to my point about my earliest memory: dad was out in never never land chopping it up with one of his lackeys, slamming some budweisers down with the music cranked up. mom must've been in school. i don't remember her in the dublin house. steve usually was by my side but he wasn't for this particular moment. the sun shined through the window. i lay in the empty white room. it was my first perception of light, how it entered effortlessly through the cracks of the window. i had no emotion in my body or mind. as a scientist probes his discovery, i simply stood in an observing phase. light bended as i looked at this ray from another angle. the carpet suddenly had a yellow circle on it, which could be manipulated by my shadow. i sat down and stared. partly in awe, partly in a state of not knowing what to think. this single incident would sum up the later years and story of my life - a careless observer without the capacity to analyze future events while being stuck in a particular moment. numb.