Can I lay this ghost to rest. . . at last?

This is one of those times when I want to write my way out of a maze that I can barely comprehend. Having scraped through a near-death experience a year  and a half ago, and still learning to deal with compromised energy and diminished physical ability, I find that my mind is jumping back in time in a way I don't want or need, but somehow can't stop. My way out or through every difficulty I've ever had (and I have had some doozies) is to write about it. Though I was able to exorcise a couple of dire spirits that would not leave me alone, I am still left with Glen Allen, a man I never met and never knew, and whose writings about alcoholism and mental illness enthralled me then - but they disturb me now, and I can't leave it alone - or it won't leave ME alone.

I see in now. I see deeper. I am not fooled. Being one myself, I know all the writer's tricks: writing that calls attention to itself, writing that postures, and - most of all - reporting (for isn't all writing actually just reporting, especially the kind of bittersweet poetry Glen could produce at will?). I have read and re-read Glen's harrowing report on his own life and struggles with what we so delicately call, nowadays, his "mental health". In our long correspondence, we spoke mainly of alcohol addiction and bipolar disorder, but when I re-read much of what he wrote, all those self-revealing pieces from a man who seemed almost insanely private, I can see or feel conflicting threads: the need to tell the story, the need to put a good face on it, the need to open a vein in front of everyone while still  hiding out behind that facade of almost pathological shyness and introversion.

I keep thinking of this piece he wrote that appeared in a newspaper in 1999, then was reprinted when he committed suicide in 2005. At the time I felt shock - and  compassion - and I still do - but also considerable horror. I realize now that what he suffered  from could not have been bipolar disorder alone. The symptoms he speaks of, the hallucinations, the delusions, the paranoia and the voices in his head - these are the province of schizophrenia, the disease that killed my brother Arthur when he was only 30 years old. 

I used to think I could "see" schizophrenia, not just in a person but in a photograph, that "look", removed, remote, a person dwelling in an inner world that has little or nothing to do with what we roughly agree on as "reality". When I look at early photos of Glen, I see it, that look, and I realize that he didn't  stand a chance - it was going to get him in the end.

And it did. But here I sit more than twenty years after his death - not exactly in a psychiatric crisis (for once), but in a different kind of existential turn, a place of stopping, of saying, "Am I going to survive?" Will my body make the decision for me?

So I have thought of a way to try to exorcise this haunting, this obsession (call it what it is!) that I don't even want to be experiencing. Can I do this? I want to be ruthless here, I want to be a reporter, and see if I can get at this thing by offering my running commentary. It's one of the most bizarre writing projects I've ever undertaken, but why am I still here after my own sometimes monstrous experiences, except for that voracious need to FIND OUT?

I need to lay this man to rest, and as with poor Bohdan and Gabor Mate, I may need to do a sort of psychic surgery. Will it work? Can I even begin to find out  unless I go ahead and do  it?

So here is his harrowing memoir of mental illness and the equally harrowing treatments he endured to try to regain his health and his sanity, a war he ultimately lost. I don't want to be cruel here, but I have to get AT this at last, and tryto get to the truth of how I really feel. 

I decided to include the original images from my initial post on Glen's travails, partly as illustrations, but mostly to break up the text and make it easier to read.

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity into the addled spheres of my brain.

OK then - this is Frankenstein territory! A ready vein? Electrodes on my skull?Flips a switch? Even the "out I am" is macabre in some way - "I'm dead now", it seems to say. Electrodes, currents of electricity - all that's missing is that howling cry, "It's alive! It's ALIVE!"

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name, the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. 

Note from someone who has been there: a sudden boost out of a very deep depression is dangerous as hell, which is why I approach the subject of ECT with a degree of horror. Suddenly from the depths, colors spring to life, birds are twittering, and everything is beautiful again. Not so fast - the same thing happened to me, when I was ascending the most harrowing part of my worst manic episode - all the world was beautiful, it was all like a Disney cartoon surrounding me, birds were twittering and the sun was shining and colors looked unnaturally  bright - but those  supernatural sounds and colors were more dangerous than I ever realized.

I am climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital - the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

This is a common one. I've seen it again and again, even in that louse Gabor Mate, taking meds for his ADHD for the first time and swearing this is what everyone else feels like all the time. It's not true, we can't jump inside someone else's head, not even an artist with words who lays his soul bare in a way I now see is frankly dangerous. And this "every decade" thing is a misnomer - he's putting more space between episodes to try to make it palatable to his readers, or to himself.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady caught up with me once again.

Some things stand out. More minimizing:  every ten years? When you continue to read this story, you realize he never had anything like this length of remission,  trying to frantically outrun himself as he literally moved all over the world and kept finding himself there, lethal wounds and all. His work history must have been appallling. That "worst time in my life" likely refers to the kind of schizophrenia that commonly manifests in young adulthood. I am all too  familiar with it, watching my brother diminish from a charming young man with a bizarre sense of humor to a shambling wreck barely able to keep his  shoelaces tied.

And that "successful career in the construction industry" was, to put it more bluntly, manual labor. He dug ditches for ten years, during which time even darker things happened to  him which I will comment on later.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable "highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

OK Glen, we know you're a reporter and there's no doubt that  this is an example of good reporting. But it's your own entrails you're reporting on here. It's  almost as if you've taken this out of a textbook. But what comes next is hardly by the book.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to do.

I'd say yes, except no. Bipolar disorder almost never pushes the brain to these extremes. I'm not saying it wasn't present - but in spite of what almost everyone seems to think, it's NOT "either-or" with psychiatric diagnoses. Human beings are complicated, mental health ebbs and flows, and yes, you CAN have any number of overlapping conditions that can blend and separate. But I think I know what I am seeing here.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek tomake a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the passenger door.)

This isn't a joke, but it's almost presented as a funny story,  the  kind of tale you hear at AA meetings and support groups for the mentally ill.  And that brings us to Glen's absolute obsession with his father, Ralph Allen, then a well-known magazine editor who has been largely forgotten, along with that other obsolete Canadian institution, Peter Gzowski. Glen kept referring to his father obsessively in his letters, though he hated the man or at least felt the man hated him. 

Complete a novel his father wrote? When, where? How do you "complete a novel" anyway? I've written five (well, five and a half), published three, and I cannot imagine trying to complete anyone else's unfinished thoughts. And I don't think his father wrote novels, none that was ever published anyway. Was he trying to correct that situation or what?

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated treatment.

I have to say now, if ECT is still used at all, it should be an absolute last resort, and my feeling is that it is a dangerous practice which can briefly propel a depressed person straight upward - it can act as a sort of catapult, bringing all that Disney goodness back for a brief time. But the brain was never meant to receive those mysterious ("no one knows how this works") Frankensteinian shocks. If there is any benefit at all, the returns are ever-diminishing with repetition. Carrie Fisher is an example of  a celebrity whose brain was basically turned to jelly with multiple rounds of ECT, eventually leading to her death by drug overdose -  one of those cases where they  found 15 different drugs in her system at once.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach, subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

I can't begin to wrap my head around the kind of child  abuse that was going on here, and I have other ideas about what happened to Glen when he was 15 years old and working with a crew of drunken men in their 30s on a remote Northern highway. He was, to put it bluntly, a sitting duck, and the sexual assault I am virtually certain he endured rendered his innate fragility into something that was eventually terminal. But somehow he took  this unmitigated horror and transformed it into a ten-year "successful career in the construction industry". And to think of an adolescent boy entertaining such terrifying thoughts and fears is harrowing, and far beyond any description of bipolar disorder I have ever seen.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what itwas, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness. That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after me.

Schizophrenia, friends. Not just bipolar. This was grave mental illness of the most intractible sort. And the "eight or nine trouble-free years" is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. It's the kind of minimizing we do when we need to convince ourselves it's not REALLY that bad. 

But it is. It's worse than that. It kills.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

This is hardly an illness that moves out of the way for a decade, then lands in again like a hurricane out of nowhere. This is a horror show, an ordeal that I can barely wrap my head around. 

And all that time, the tone, the even reporter's tone that seems oddly detached and unemotional, creeps me out in a way I can't even describe.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways. Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

Until I read this account, I had no idea just how "restless, irritable and discontented" Glen really was (to use AA parlance). This is extreme - incessant moving, ending in hospital here and there and everywhere. And in my experience, it's actually very hard to get yourself admitted to a psych ward. Usually, I was sent home to cope with my misery alone, with no support at all. But this kind of chaos seems to imply extremes, even the kinds of brushes with the law that Geoff Pevere wrote about, or at least being so deeply sunk that hospitalization is the only recourse.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness. The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy, passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations. Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds. Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or angels and may sound like commands.

OK then Glen, you're denying again, and you just finished telling us how  chaotic your thoughts were and how  extreme your delusions were. These were thoughts, not just  feelings, and you acted on them. The voice of God or angels? That's schizophrenia. I don't know if he was never diagnosed, or was just underdiagnosed, or if it was just too much for him to bear to face the possibility.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, thoug to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term "bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator. They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in part, be at fault.

Reporting, reporting. I don't  know how he does this, scribbling on a pad and then almost casually opening his guts. It's very strange, very disturbing to me. I see what he was doing here, but these kinds of raw and horrifying revelations seem in total opposition to how private the man was - actually, almost pathologically shy and introverted, finding it hard to even talk to another person. He often mentioned in his letters that he would literally go days without speaking to anyone at all.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands - even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of 13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill. But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope, I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be alive.

Many years hence? Within five, he would be dead from all this. He simply could not endure the chaos any more, or the "treatments" that likely contributed to his eventual death, which was also, not coincidentally, very public. The police had to hunt for him until they found his frozen body beside the railroad tracks. Hospitalized in Toronto, he had taken an overdose and wandered off - and the amount of planning this must have taken while on suicide watch is headspinning. He meant business this time.

But his safe reporting tone begins to seem like a form of whistling in the dark, while the bare facts scream in the background.  Glad to be alive? I don't think his respite lasted long at all, and having jolts of electricity fired through your brain seems like an extreme way to get a little peace.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale? 

He refers to it as a "sorry tale" and even uses the word "tawdry", but this is at odds with his insistence that mental illness not be stigmatized and that he feels no shame in it. He did. I read it in his letters. I don't blame him, I felt the same way about my own disasters, but this stepping away from it is an eerie form of distancing that ultimately isn't helpful at all.

Was there help  for Glen? His own denial was one of the obstacles, though it's kind of understandable given how extreme his case was. One of his colleagues mentioned that it was remarkable "how long he was able to park that pain". True, it was heroic in a sense, but the denial that pushes reality away eventually comes around and bites you in the ass. 

He got sicker and sicker, the treatments more and more desperate, and they continued to damage the part of his  brain that might have ultimately saved him, had there been something - anything -  that would have actually helped him. He mentions a coma, but there was a near-drowning, a stroke, and losing his ability to write, the one thing that kept his personality (though fractured) in a semblance of one piece.We still throw drugs at mental illness, we still shock the brain like  those cattle prods used to humanely kill livestock. But does it actually help, or just shove the person back on their feet for another endless, meaningless trudge?

So what is the answer? There isn't one, and I want to put all this in the past. I have no idea if this is going to help  me or not. I have no idea if I have ten years left to live or ten months, and I don't  want any of that time blighted by depression or mania. But trying to put a good face on it, while it seems brave, ultimately works against you. 

I read about a very grotesque suicide once in a memoir written by a psychiatrist. Another doctor he knew committed suicide literally by doing surgery on himself - injecting local anaesthetic in his neck, making an incision in his own throat with a scalpel, and tying off the jugular vein with surgical skill. His last therapeutic act. Freezing to death by the railroad tracks is horrifying, and I can't and won't minimize the horror of it. No, I have to finally let Glen go, the way I had to let my dear brother go. 

Whatever the quality of it, I have more living to do. I am not finished yet, and I hope mental illness does not swallow me the way it did Glen. But it's beyond ironic that the coping devices we resort to (cool-headed reporting on horrifying situations) can work against real recovery. Black is black, and calling it white or even grey does not alter the reality of tbe total absence of light.

CODA. It's the next day, and I have more thoughts that are less charitable. Unfortunately, I left out the worst part. He told me in a letter that he lived with a woman for 18 months, fathered a child with her, then abandoned both of them in  the middle of the night, never to return. He sneaked out with his belongings in a garbage bag. The baby was six months old. This happened during one of his "well" periods. 

Much as I want to feel compassion here, I just don't. Abandoning a baby is unforgiveable, and I have no idea why I was willing to let it go by for so long. The so-called avuncular good guy Peter Gzowski also had a “secret son”, whom he paid off to keep his mouth shut. Glen’s daughter no doubt had “abandonment issues” – how could she not? – then had to endure his  very public suicide many years later. Due to his status as an "award-winning Canadian journalist", reporters even asked her how she felt about all this, as if they didn't know. But what a great start to your life. No matter how rough Glen's childhood was, his parents didn't walk out on him as if he never existed. 

But his version of events was all very public, veering between too much information and a dishonest rewrite of the truth.  That is the point. He kept doing this over and over again, true confessions that were sometimes extreme and unnecessary (do we really need to hear about the "ready vein", the needle plunging in, the electrodes on his skull?), even though he was supposedly this shy, sensitive soul who hated the “confessional”. The exact same phrase appeared in his Morningside followup, in which he admitted he wasn’t staying sober at all.  But why did he keep doing this? Was it really for the public good? It was a play for sympathy, even  pity, and a compulsive need to call attention to himself in the worst possible way.

But to me, the worst of it is the hypocrisy - saying one thing very publicly, but obviously not meaning it, or at least never able to face it. And I can tolerate just about anything in a person except this. Hypocrites do not and never have deserved my sympathy, no matter how much they spill their guts and beg for attention and forgiveness. Some things truly are beyond forgiveness -  and running out on a child you have fathered and pretending she never existed is far past the limits of my compassion.

Fifty Shades of Bigfoot

Troll Towers: the view from the ground floor

When I sneaked back into troll-collecting, I know not when or how (or why), I had to find a place to stash them. I saw these pictures of massive collections, seemingly thousands, all lined up on shelves on the wall, and didn't want that. It seemed to me you wouldn't be able to find a specific troll, and I didn't want enough room to let my collection get that big. So I racked my brains for something I could use, something with shelves, something I could put on my desk and look at and access so I could have trolls right beside me all day.

So I came up with this. I didn't even have to buy anything! Old CD racks, gathering dust in the corner. I came close to painting them, as they looked kind of  jail-ish, but someone in my troll group (yes, I have a troll group) told me to leave it alone, it had an Elvis jailhouse rock/'60s discoteque feeling to it and made it look pleasingly like trolls a-go-go. The clear shelves make photographing them from the bottom floor kind of interesting.

This is an earlier model, and since then I've added trolls, and added a breezeway between the two towers, mainly for more shelves. I soon had to reinforce the middle ones (made from more empty CD cases) because they kept flying out the back. 

Bentley, yes, Bentley does love these trolls, and he sometimes grabs one by the hair and makes off with it (though lately his interest has waned). I peruse Amazon and Etsy sites to see what I'd love to have, and can't afford. I think I wrote about Trollina already (didn't I?). She was a rescue, and I had the predictable reaction of bonding with her. Since then I've become, if not a serious collector (can't afford it), then a fairly serious obsesser.

My troll Facebook page displays things that would cost me hundreds of dollars, if I could even find them. They aren't supposed to buy and sell on that page, but most of the posts seem to be in the nature of, "Look at this gorgeous thing. I am looking for a forever home. Are you interested?" Sometimes I think it is set up to incite troll envy. But never mind, I post Trollina in hand-knitted things, and so far no one has thrown me out. I will never be able to afford a 17" Dam giant - hell, even a 7" is a hardship for me. 

Why am I doing this? I collected "Dam things" when I was ten, the best year of my life. I associate it with two significant friendships (both of whom I am still in touch with on Facebook).  I also think it's a sort of echo of empty-nester syndrome: the grandkids are now either pre-teens or adolescents, and the sense of loss is palpable. 

I look at videos of reborns, some of whom move, breathe and make sounds, and even pee. It freaks me out, but I am still drawn to it, the "morning routine", the "shopping trip", the "temper tantrum" and reborn toddler getting sick and running a fever and even throwing up. There is even realistic poop - I don't know if you make this yourself or buy it. I am sure there are recipes.

I am not that far gone yet, but sometimes I wonder. I will do almost anything to dodge the clinical depression that nearly finished me through most of my life. You can't cuddle a troll or make it talk (or, at least, if you hear it talk you're in trouble). But they tweak something in me, something I like. I want to dodge the elitism I already see, which seems to be part of human nature. A lot of my trolls, the majority in fact, cost me $4.50 at the dollar store. Then I make them over with new hair and eyes.

Where does it end? I guess, when I get tired of it. It hasn't happened yet.

Obsession: the case of the Bentley Embiricos

The 1938 Bentley Embiricos.

Unliving dolls

An obsession I return to over and over again is the creepiness of dolls, rivalled only by the creepiness of clowns. Both are meant to bring joy and pleasure to small children (or rather "children of all ages!", as they say at the circus). Come to that, circuses are pretty creepy too, or at least the circuses I saw as a kid:  tawdry is a better word, with sad elephants, bad smells and clowns who had probably seen better days and likely fuelled themselves from a flask.

This is the first video I've found with a complete set of Edison Talking Doll recordings. Or, at least, I fervently pray it is a complete set and I won't find any more. God only knows where they got them, as I would've thought the wax cylinders would have melted down by now. 

The dolls had a most un-cuddly steel  body with holes in it to concentrate the "audio". I think either the crank or the cylinder broke down almost immediately. Did this freak out kids? It might have filled them with wonder. Even some of the stranger dolls from the 1960s were seen as completely charming, like the one who had different facial expressions when you wrenched her arm around (and what was her name, anyway?), or the one who said creepy things like, "I can see in the dark" and "I wish we were twins".

"Doll" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I first heard about "reborns", they were dolls with realistic-looking arms and legs and head, and a cloth body like a conventional vinyl doll. And they were vinyl. Originally, you just took a vinyl doll and mucked around with it until it looked more-or-less real.

Soon the dollmakers upped the ante, placing beating hearts in these things, heaters, voice recordings so they'd cry and coo, and even the capacity to wet and (I think) poop. Jesus, you might as well just have yourself a real kid!

But soon that wasn't enough, either. I began to see dolls molded out of silicone, one-piecers I mean, their limbs jiggling like a rubber frog's. These were so "lifelike" they scared the hell out of me. One of these might run as high as $10,000.00, though I just found this one on eBay:







5h left (Today 5:06PM)
From China
Soft Brown Hair Full Silicone Vinyl Reborn Baby Dolls Lifelike Newborn Baby Doll
$1.99
0 bids


Though it's described here as "full silicone", I have a feeling it's the kind of doll you might find at a dollar store: "Mo-o-o-o-o-m, can I have that doll?" "Oh, okay. It's only worth a couple of bucks."

I have weird feelings about these dolls. I honestly do. After watching a number of "Kaylee's Morning Routine" videos, which made me gasp, I began to wonder what it would be like to own a doll so real-looking that cops broke the glass in hot car windows to rescue them. (Doll owners are not above such pranks and love freaking people out while shopping at Walmart, sometimes casually abandoning them in the ladies' room.) I even. . . no, I didn't, but yes, I DID look at some of them, decided they weren't worth my while and that you needed to pay five grand to get a really good one.

Now I wonder what I was thinking of. Getting a cat seemed to rescue me from such thoughts.  I didn't realize I was at such a low point. At least the cat is real.

If you watch their YouTube videos, the collectors cannot understand why anyone would find their obsession creepy. "Full-body silicone" seems to be the Cadillac of these never-born, never-dead things, quickly replacing those clunky old cloth-bodies that can't even be bathed. This rarefied cult strikes me as stereotyped and largely misunderstood. Wikipedia says reborns are owned almost exclusively by elderly women who at some point suffered the loss of a child, but that's simply not true. Nearly all the videos I've seen are of women in their 20s and 30s, and quite a few of them are teenagers.

I can only assume that they just like having them around to feed, dress, bathe and take on "outings", and collect them obsessively. Elaborate, thrill-packed box-opening ceremonies abound on YouTube, each one packed with as much fun and excitement as a baby shower. These are actually entertaining to watch: though the disaster openings ("ohhhhh noooooo, his head is warped. . .") are even more fun.

I keep thinking of a chant we had in school: "Rubber baby-buggy bumpers". You had to say it ten times fast, or something, though I am not sure why.

POSTSCRIPT (there's always one of those!): I found this weird little entry in Wikipedia, which gets just about everything wrong about reborn dolls:

A reborn doll is a manufactured skin doll that has been transformed to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning and the doll artists are referred to as reborners. Reborn dolls are also known as Bodo dolls or unliving dolls.

I've scoured the internet and found NO reference to "Bodo dolls", though I did find "Bobo dolls". These are the roly-poly clown things that bounce back up when you push them over. For some reason, all sorts of scientific experiments have been done on these that don't interest me at all. "Unliving" isn't easy to find either, except on really creepy sites that have nothing to do with these dolls.

And then there's this:

Social issues and reactions

The overwhelming majority of reborn customers are older women. Many women collect reborns as they would a non-reborn doll, whilst others purchase them to fill a void of a lost child and may treat reborns as living babies. Media features and public receptions have used such adjectives as "creepy" to describe the reborns. This can be explained by the uncanny valley hypothesis. This states that as objects become more lifelike they gain an increasing empathetic response, until a certain point at which the response changes to repulsion. Department stores have refused to stock the dolls because of this reaction, claiming they are too lifelike.

I don't know if I have seen any "older women" on the YouTube videos, if older means 60s or 70s. Many of them are less than half my age. Wikipedia makes no reference at all to the "full-body silicone" doll which is all the rage now. This information is at least ten years out of date. Wiki is mostly put together by guys in their 20s, the ones that live in Mom's basement and really don't get out much, or do much of anything except steal each other's research.

As for department stores not selling them because they are "too lifelike", it's more likely they don't sell them because of the price factor. Really good ones cost hundreds or even many thousands of dollars. Unless they bolted them to the shelves (hmmmmm. . . ), they could stand to lose a lot through shoplifting. Picture it: reborn kidnappers wearing maternity coats sneaking into the toy department and smuggling the little blighters out past the store alarms.

BTW, I'd be interested to see if there is any feuding between "old-school" cloth-bodied reborners and the newer, full-body-silicone crowd. I have never seen a video of a conventional reborn which could be bent and twisted and slung around like this. Nor do they have realistic genitals, a detail which squicks out even some of the most die-hard collectors. That hunk of quivering pink silicone looks EXACTLY like a real baby, folks, and that is exactly what makes it so creepy.

Bodo, anyone?

Damn, I thought I was finished! But I just had a horrible thought. These dolls are molded, right? HOW DO THEY MAKE THE MOLDS? The only method I can think of is to make a plaster cast of a baby. How else could they make it that realistic, down to those last minute bumps of scarlet prickly heat?

Dear God. This is worse than the squawky, distorted, Night of the Living Dead Edison doll recordings! I found some instructions for making a silicone, baby, but I find them kind of hard to believe. Nevertheless, in the interests of science, I will share them with you:

There is one way to do a full mold for a full silicone baby, and I have been researching this, but haven’t done it yet.

You start off by drawing a line through the center of the baby, around its head, fingers, toes.

Then you take some white clay and put it on the bottom of the mold, and pack it into the center lines all around the baby.

You take a flat brush and dampen it and go around the edges making sure the clay is sealed.

Cut off excess on sides to not be wasteful with product.

Take the end of a sharpie with the lid on it, and make holes around the baby, which will be the center holes that hold the mold together. You can even put the round nuts around it if you want to.

Close the mold, and mix the dragon skin, or silicone you are using for the mold, and add flocking for the color you want the mold to be.

Pour the product into the mold covering the baby half that you can see.

Let it cure.

Cut the mold open and remove the clay and any loose silicone that is dangling.

Clean all of the clay off.

Turn the baby over and roll up a clay hole maker to put into the center for the pour hole.

Cover the remainder of the baby.

Let cure.

Remove. It comes apart, but you can pour the baby into the pour hole.

Make sure to Tap tap tap to get all of the air bubbles out, because you don’t want those. It will waste your silicone product. Also turn to cover every nook and cranny.

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