Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 60) Final summer of school and Dan comes back to town

A few months before my final summer, I moved out of my mom's house.

It was very difficult living with her. She was working as a nurse in Bedford and came home just fried-out angry.
I begin to suspect that my anger stemmed from her.

Anyway, I needed 12 credits that summer. There were hard track business classes I could take, but I needed rest and elected beginning science classes: Antopology I and II ... and Astronomy I and II.
Turned out, those four courses were so easy it was unfair.

I had been reading the newspaper since 12, and every science development across those years was reported ... besides, I like the physical sciences because they notched-in with what I was studying on a bicycle.
Bicycling lifts you into the natural energy of Earth where you feel the gravity and atmospheric conditions, and experience the change that time wroughts on everything.

At the end of the summer, my main astronomy professor invited me to join the science department. Apparently I was a scientist and never knew it. But mostly, it was flattering because I had never been invited to join anything ... except the church league basketball team my last year high school. They were Methodists, by the way.

After serious thought, I concluded that the science curriculum might be in my wheelhouse, but my math skills were suspect since I am best with estimation and lacking precision ... meaning ... I would not generate new science. My career in the sciences would be outshown by younger peers. Besides, I wanted to go to Houston.

I worked nearly the whole summer painting two apartment complexes for a lady who owned property around town. Working for one person was a lot easier since I didn’t have to hustle new work continually, and my depression lifted and the all-vital energy came back

That summer Dan the Informer moved back to Indiana and tried to resume his painting business. It takes a while to re-build a business, and he was having problems … but he had bigger problems. One of his customers told him he should go to the mental health center. He was very distressed by that.

One afternoon I stopped by his apartment, and he looked scared. He told me he had been hearing voices. I said it must be somebody outside and looked out the back window, but he was adamant … these voices weren’t outside.

Man … he was terrified. I can only imagine how he felt.
Today I would drive him straight over to the mental health center, and tell him it was going to be okay, but back then, I didn’t know what to do or where the facilities were.

He started reading the Bible seriously and changed his diet radically, but one day he stopped answering the door. The apartment was dark, but he was in there … I could feel him … and then it became clear why he sat in a dark apartment when I visited him in California. He was hallucinating and the dark-quiet kept those distortions to a minimum.

He had schizophrenia, and that’s bad news because it slowly spirals a man down into delusion, but the whole time the man is acutely aware of his own mental state. It’s like being caught in a spider web and the terrifying spider keeps coming back to take a bite, and each time you’re left with less and less, but you can never flee the web.

A few weeks passed and his parents told me Dan returned to California. We lost contact after that, but eleven years later he called out of the blue.

Following the call, he wrote a letter about living in the woods when he first returned to California. I wish I saved that letter. He said one night he fought the devil all night long and in the morning he won and knew he was going to get better.

Schizophrenics do get better from time to time, but relapses reduce their state one notch at a time.
That Christmas I got a card from his sister who said ‘Dan is doing better.’ She enclosed a photograph but he still looked quite ill. I hope he is better … he had a job last I heard ... he got married, had a house, built a fence … he is writing very complicated religious work and sends me hand-written copies … and he stopped riding a bike and got a car … I owe him a letter … I’ve been very remiss of my friends.

Chapter 61 My mental state
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