It all started in Chicago. I was in college and in love with the best girlfriend I've ever had. She was so beautiful.... a Norwegian goddess with long blond hair, blue eyes, and so full of life. We almost got married but schizophrenia took me first. Her name was Kari and I miss her so much. Now, she's engaged to some prick she doesn't really love and I've given up trying to change her mind about me. She wants nothing to do with a psychotic. The stigma of schizophrenia. She's just afraid I think. Afraid of me flipping out again.

I started spending more time alone. I would go out into the forest and nature trails with my pipe and spend all day out there with Nature smoking and getting high. It became such a ritual and it was so much fun at first. I got to see some really amazing things... which I thought at the time could be Nature Guardians. They sang to me out there under the trees and I thought I had gone to Heaven. There was a moth that flew around me and made the most beautiful and haunting chirps. The moth gave me some kind of energy and I could see the auras on trees and animals. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I wrote a book about it and self-published it. I get some sales now and again... so that's pretty cool.

But then I would come home and I could hear my neighbors banging on the walls. They would make so much noise! Every time I was happy they would knock on the walls as if I was disturbing them. I moved like 3 times just to find a quieter apartment. I still don't know why they did that. I don't think it was a hallucination because I was visited by the Chicago Psychic Association. I came home one day to find their card on my door with a phone number to call. "Please call us!" it said. Someone had obviously contacted them asking for help in dealing with me. Like I said.... I don't know what I was doing to my neighbors. I was just happy and this disturbed them somehow. I still have their card to prove it. So something was obviously going on.

Then I started hearing voices in my head. I would watch a lot of science-fiction and it was crazy when these Star Trek and Star Wars characters appeared in my mind. I felt like I was in a movie of my own. They where nice at first and I thought I was making contact with the real actors or something. But then they turned evil and called me names and hit me with invisible fists over and over until I cried myself asleep.

One day I just had enough. I had no idea that I was ill or had schizophrenia. I ran away from school, and from my girlfriend, and from Chicago altogether... took a bus to Texas to see my old friend who lived out in the boonies. Spent some time with him but the illness took me again. A few weeks after that I was lost. I started hitch-hiking around Texas, wandering around just walking from day to night and sleeping in garbage bins. It was winter and I almost froze to death some nights. And all this time the voices would get worse and worse. I thought that aliens where coming for me and that I was the One and had to protect the Earth from their psychic invasion.

The voices where out of control. So one night I went into a supermarket and stold 3 bottles of sleeping pills. I went out to a secluded part in the woods and swallowed them all with a Mountain Dew I had also stolen.

I took the pills and lay down. It wasn't long before I could not even move my neck. I was going under. And then I could hear something coming toward me... footsteps. There was nobody out there in the dark woods. And yet I could hear footsteps getting closer and closer to me. My last thought was... The Angel of Death.

(continued in next post...)