Louis Shalako
I’ve suffered from depression a few times in my life.
It’s been chronic at times, and this has gone on since I was about fourteen.
There are times, long periods, when I have been happy, and it was held at
bay—yet I also remember my best girlfriend holding me as I cried, for reasons I
could not describe. Those few years were the happiest time of my life, probably
because I was getting laid—
Go figure.
That was a long time ago. But the fact is, I was
suicidal at the age of twenty-six. All this over a woman. (A different one. –
ed.)
Fifteen years ago, the same thing again when I lost my
home, and got chucked in jail, (the bogus charge was later dropped), the loonie
bin (that one’s on the record permanently) a couple of times. When some
authority figurine tells you that there is something wrong with you, you tend to
listen. What else you gonna do? This guy’s gone to school for a real long time
and there are two cops standing behind you.
This time it went on for a year and a half, when every
day, multiple times a day, I thought about suicide—and worse. I thought about
killing other people, cops even. Mostly to make them pay. It was only when I
realized that they were wrong, and that there was nothing really wrong with me,
well…that was what saved me.
This shit can come and it can go, and yet we do have
some control, because we have some experience, some coping skills after all
these years. For one thing, we drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney, and say
fuck a lot.
For some reason, winter seems a lot worse than summer,
when at least I can go and sit on a beach for a couple of hours. In winter, I’m
kind of on lockdown, for an average of twenty-two and a half hours a day.
That’s the trouble with the Ontario Disability Support Program, all of that
state-sponsored isolation.
This winter is better than last winter, when I
definitely suffered from some depression.
This results in a lot of tailgaters being pulled over,
dragged from their vehicles and beaten to death by the side of the road. (Just
kidding.)
Last winter, bad enough, was better than the winter
before.
A year ago, say October or November, I managed to hook
up with a few ‘shrooms. I bought a gram, and then a gram, and then another
gram. I’d been reading about micro-dosing, and I thought why not give it a try. It’s not going to kill me, right? Supposedly,
it is an aid in battling depression and yet how would one ever quantify
this…??? No one can say. None of them are scientists, and a lot of them are
assholes.
I’ve been self-medicating since I was fifteen years
old, with varying degrees of success.
Micro-dosing on mushrooms, (psilocybin), involves
taking about a fifth or maybe only a tenth of a gram. You can feel the coldness all down along the spine, (it’s
working all right) and the hyper-awareness of one’s breathing. Colours and sensations are lightly enhanced, and yet you
aren’t hallucinating. At that level, it’s more of a tonic.
This story could go on forever, I won’t waste your
valuable time. There are any number of things that you could try, not the least
of which is to try and be a little bit more like me.
So, for whatever reason, melatonin is an aid in
dreaming. Think about what it’s doing: it’s liberating the subconscious, in an analogous way, (it’s a completely different
chemical process), to a micro-dose of a good hallucinogenic. I can vouch for
this. When I wake up in the middle of the night due to some unfortunate
pounding incident, you know, like from a neighbouring apartment, I can honestly
say that I have been having really crazy dreams lately—and I haven’t been all
that depressed. Although I did have a few crying jags today, that’s probably just
a little back pain, life circumstances, and a few poor moral choices along the
way. Sure, some of that comes from fucking
bullshit, the death of a loved one, abject and hopeless poverty, living in
geared-to-income-housing and the like.
Like the way my brother has changed, living in the
rather grim 9-14 here in Sarnia, Ontario.
My nephews live there too. (Louis sure hopes they make
it out of there someday. – ed.)
The dreams seem to go on and on. When I wake up, I can
still sort of remember the most dominant or startling scene, and in going back
to sleep, my thought is, ‘Boy, do I want
to dream some more’. It works pretty well. I’ve seen family members, my
best friend from way back when, the only thing missing so far is that first,
really good girlfriend. The second one wouldn’t be bad either. The third one, maybe not so much...
Yeah, the
visuals are really something. The cities, the towns, caves, cliffs and sparkling
underground rivers, the odd-ball interiors, all up and down in some really
skinny buildings, the tunnels, the boats and the cars and the crashing alien
spaceships are really something.
Dreaming is cathartic to some extent. More than
anything, it would appear to be the imagination at play.
Maybe that’s what was missing: my mind needs to play.
Maybe it's just me, way down inside, that needs to play...
As circumstances presently stand, the daily thoughts
can be pretty grim sometimes, as we try and figure out where our next meal is
coming from.
END
If you really loved me, you'd check out my books and stories on iTunes.
Thank you for reading.
