I saw the 1993 movie Mr Jones at some time during the years when I was retiring from FT, PT and volunteer-work, 1999 to 2005, and from extensive involvement in Baha’i community life.1 I had had a working life of 40 years and been involved in the earliest years of community-building for Baha’is in Canada and Australia. I don’t remember now exactly when I first saw Mr Jones, but I watched the last half of the same movie last night.2 In the movie Jones was, like myself, first diagnosed with manic-depressive illness in his late adolescence. He had several hospitalizations over more than 20 years; in my case it was over more than a dozen years: 1968 to 1980. Jones talked about his serious suicide attempt at college; I have had suicidal ideation or the death-wish, as it is also and sometimes called, for more than half a century from 1963 to 2012.

Watching this movie made me reflect on my own experience and the result is this prose-poem.-Ron Price with thanks to 1 The Universal House of Justice, April 1996; and 2Mr Jones, 7TWO TV, 10:40-1:00 a.m., 23 & 24 March 2012.

Richard Gere is a lovely fellow;
Lena Olin is even more lovely.1
But bipolar disorder is not-so-
lovely & needs to be watched
all of one’s life. After Gere &
Olin form the bond that ends
the two hour movie I wonder
what happened to him in his
middle age, late adulthood &
old age…Did he come to full
compliance of his meds; did
he have more talk therapy or
did his battle continue with a
win-win as one likes to think.

1these were the leading actors

Ron Price
24 March 2012

My literary activity on the world-wide-web is a personal and quite industrious enterprise. When I can find the time, I am engaged in creating across this global internet a tapestry or a jig-saw puzzle of poetry and prose. Readers will find my internet blogs dotting the cyberspace landscape.

Site administrators and moderators have different ways in which they allow writers like myself to place their series of posts. Often, at least at some sites, a writer or author, an editor or publisher, a journalist or independent scholar---roles which I have taken on in the evening of my life---engages with others and the responses to his or her posts by others are included. These are responses that these site organizers have decided are worthy of being included among the threads of discourse.

There is now a mechanism for others to reply directly on my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ and I will get back to them. Should anyone want to reply to what I have written on any one of literally 1000s of sites on the world-wide-web, they can do so with ease but only if they are registered at the site.

My series of posts at any one site, posts in addition to my website, are just one of the many parts of my internet tapestry, my immense jig-saw puzzle, of prose and poetry which I refer to above. Sometimes the series of posts at some site becomes lengthy and sometimes it remains brief. Like pieces of cloth or pieces of that jig-saw puzzle, the size, the shape and the length remain a bit of a mystery until some of my story, my comments on various topics, and my interaction with others unfolds, until time takes its course across life’s path and across the threads that are part of the particular internet site in question.

My website in 2001 had 42 sub-sections of prose and poetry on topics of personal interest, with nothing for sale and with no aggressive proselytism for one or more of the umpteen causes now proliferating across the planet. There were some 450,000 words, the equivalent of six books, which readers could get ‘into’ if they wanted and several thousand did.

By 2011 my website had some 50 volumes of my prose, poetry and resources at 80,000 words per volume. With some 300 million websites in cyberspace my site was a dot on the landscape.

This literary creation, this literary industry, has been created in the early evening of my life, in the last years of my middle age(56-59) and the first years of my late adulthood(60-67), by this retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, now journalist and independent scholar, who will become 68 in July 2012. He attempts to endow many a theme from the social sciences and humanities, from the physical and biological sciences, from popular and academic cultures, from spiritual and secular subjects, with many layers of meaning. He tries to combine a high seriousness with a light and humorous style when appropriate and when he is able—for there is more to life than interaction in cyberspace. This literary goal, though, is difficult to achieve. It has been a slowly evolving literary ambition since: (a) settling into Australian society in the 1970s after moving from Canada where I was born in 1944, (b) marrying for a second time in 1975 and (c) raising three children who in 2011 were: 45, 41 and 34 years old.