Mr. Blue Sky

Caltech is where dreams go to die. Creativity can live on, but at what cost? Sky was so beautiful, in his prime as a grad student in the Victoria Orphan lab. Every single person I knew the cause of death has been from suicide. Why, Caltech, why?

This is my essay upon graduation from the cruelest most grueling college in the country or world at the moment, which is complementary to my Why Caltech? Essay, the second in a 3 part series.

I understand biology, neuroscience, psychology, and so much more and I can’t understand why people would hurt others so much and want to change them when they have always been fundamentally good. I can’t stand how companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Intel wish to steal and plagiarize private writings for their own corporate and investor run profit.

The NSA and TSA work together, but how do you prevent intellectual theft? How do you prevent home grown terrorism when you terrorize your own citizens especially the most vulnerable the venerable mentally different?

Justice for all or justice for the richest Standard and Poor’s in the nation, but I digress naturally because the world around me seems to forever be changing in a non-ideal fashion that points to a true idiocracy: a meritocracy whose merits I cannot see personally.

Sky, his real name, will live on in my memory as well as the collective memory of every single person he touched not physically, but emotionally. He would brighten every day just like Mr. Blue Sky brightens mine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by the Electric Light Orchestra (E.L.O).

Jim Carrey, who were you really playing in all of your ingenious disingenuous movies not least of which may have been Ace Ventura or should we say White Devil, the Pet Detective? Charlie Kaufmann is one of the greatest screenplay writers I have ever had the pleasure of falling in love with in every single creation told over time.

I feel so vain for falling in love with nature’s most beautiful creatures, but when you see real beauty inside and out you want to keep it in your memory forever. Who was your Clementine, Jim Carrey? They can try to take away my vision, but I don’t want them to take away my memory because that is what has created me and how I find the courage and strength and conviction to finally speak my mind, which is a beautiful thing.

I just wish I hadn’t taken his kind demeanor, beautiful smile, face, and joking attitude accompanied with jovial laughter for granted because his death was so sudden that I can’t remember what his last words to me were.

I will not rest in peace when I see the peaceful world that was once a utopia, the Caltech I fell in love with in a propaganda pamphlet after taking the PSAT my sophomore year in high school fall around me like so many chess or go pieces.

Brian Go’s death, the president of Page House and boy genius I never knew or met, and the resultant lawsuit changed the landscape at Caltech and other elite universities to a singular objective, preventing suicide on campus. But does a university’s liability stop at their doorstep or in a House?

Death makes you appreciate life, and there really shouldn’t be a reason for dying, but sometimes I wonder why I have to live this life like Richard Feynman would say:
I wonder why, I wonder why, I wonder why I wonder? And he needed no translator to recognize the rhythm of music in language when his professor spoke in such a thick German accent that he couldn’t comprehend anything but the lyrical content of his words.

What have those who suffer from any mental illness, no matter how trivialized or stigmatized it has been, done to deserve the treatment they receive from so called mental health professionals? Those professionals may as well be professional assassins or mercenaries who show no mercy because they cannot relate to those they treat like chattel or cattle or sheep to be herded in mass to their graves just as the Nazis exterminated the Jews in the Holocaust.

There is nothing wrong with being moved to tears. What is wrong is insensitivity: an absence of pathos, egos, or ethos (ethics). Why does the media and Hollywood vilify? They should share every angle no matter how obtuse, acute, equivocal, or right it may seem to a few or many.

I do not want to stay hidden.

I am sick of being marginalized.

I have my strength and it comes not from muscles or adrenaline or testosterone, but from my mind and heart, from words and music, love of all forms of art besides the obviously hurtful ones I have come across time and again.

People say they want to die young and be forever young, but how young is too young? Sky was way too young when he died. The reason I was given when I attended a makeshift counseling memorial, which was unfortunately poorly attended and administered like his death is that both of his parents had died within just a couple weeks of each other and he couldn’t bear that great of a loss.

Even at that young age for me, I could still think critically and questionably, and as a biologist I wondered if the antidepressants he had been prescribed could have played a critical role in his suicide?

Depression is insidious. It can creep up on you or take you suddenly as in good grief, Charlie Brown (that is sarcasm for those who aren’t listening to this on a podcast or audiobook).

There is no good grief.

I don’t fall in love at first sight. I can’t remember all the first impressions I have made or others have made upon me, but there are certain indelible things that you would never want to change and for me that is a change of heart no matter how painful or dire my current situation has become.

I am a mental illness survivor and this is MY STORY. I tell the stories of those I love in any and every sense of the word or world. I am not a professional in any sense or field, but that is exactly what makes my message so universal, so visceral, so deep, and so real even if it has to be told anonymously, posthumously, or humorously.

Drugs don’t always ablate the brain, lesion or get rid of part of the cortex or highways in the brain, which serve as the pathways connecting different cortical areas that coordinate and result in what you feel, sense, think, believe, or do actively, subconsciously, or unconsciously.

I don’t know the manner of his death. Caltech would hide the details, but no one has to wonder why men succeed cynically in killing themselves more than women despite women attempting suicide more often.

It is almost always a lack of love or love lost. Brian Go’s girlfriend broke up with him. Heart ache, heart attacks, broken heart syndrome, and suicide are really all one and the same.

Antidepressants are a dangerous gamble you take when prescribed to someone prematurely or who may suffer from bipolar or hypomania, which appeared to be the case in poor Sky Rasby.

What is it that is so wrong about being happy all the time?

I see no problem in my hyperactivity at the moment. I enjoy living when I can live pain-free, unmolested and this I mean physically. I relish the moments that make me appreciate the times when I can get lost in the process, details, and I apologize if I seem to be a little too exuberant at times.

This is my style of writing and nobody speaks for me. They never have. I wouldn’t change my speech for the world that can never be mine because I have been deemed unfit, of an unsound mind, and alienated from my loved ones time and time again in the cruelest social experiment one could possibly design or manage or administer just like a fatal lethal injection.

I can’t have a good death. I have never been truly suicidal or homicidal, but physical and emotional and psychological and yes psychiatric pain can be too much to bear for me at times and I am weak and may weep for the lost souls that my mind keeps.

I feel like time and time again, I have seen that the real reasons for men committing suicide is love or paradise lost. Caltech used to be a child’s playground with cool sculptures, true celebrations of art and form, but it has expanded and grown so much monetarily that it has to expand in any direction it can just like a viral or bacterial encephalitis of the brain (when it swells to the point of danger). [Welcome to the Danger Zone music]

I know I have a smaller skull than most people (3cm less according to the person who most recently did an EEG on me or 53cm for the numerically curious), but does that mean I have a small mind?

I expand my mind without harming other people by using whatever methods I can to help store the memories and I know that for me the memories that I lose most are the stupidest ones: names, nomenclature, jargon, which is just too cunning. I’d rather have stunning not static electricity, by beauty in whatever I try to engage myself in at the moment.

Sky definitely died of heartbreak and it should break your heart when you lose love. I know he had a girlfriend and I have to wonder if the isolation from becoming so engaged with another singular entity could have exacerbated his cognitive and psychological decline. I am not privy to such information but the philosophical implications of suicide and heartbreak are interesting to say the least.

How can you still be in love with a dead man even one you barely knew or got to know? How can you drink Dead Guy’s Ale? I may like the Bittersweet Symphony, but what really is mine?

Nothing at the moment because I am single, unmarried, cohabitating, but afraid of marriage since I grew up in a cult where there were arranged marriages and where things inevitably Fell Apart for me and other highly dysfunctional families.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is not just about yams in Africa. It is also about my jams and the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I could not stop eating as a child after reading Ella Enchanted but perhaps my mind works in different ways. I may not have a diminishing marginal utility because my utility is precisely in being marginal.

Can we have the Grateful Dead? Robin Williams is no longer with us, but voice actors can keep the voices and memories and accents of those that TRAILBLAZEd for them before. I can continue loving until my death but I have been so traumatized by things that are currently happening (my and the world’s current events assisted by entropy and chaos theory, Moore’s and Murphy’s law) that I cannot pay attention at times to more than just one stream of consciousness.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps [Cake’s theme cover song for the TV Show Coupling, which was a British sitcom like the Friends that aired in America in the 90s] I had predicted mine and other people’s lives in my artwork or just captured events unconsciously through other people’s eyes.

I wish I were always captivating, but alas I am getting old and tired and feel like I am in hospice care because the pain in this body can and has gotten that great, but I am the fool for inviting other people’s pain in it to try to spare them some or quite stupidly all of them.

I am not a female Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, God, Aphrodite, Poseidon, a witch, but I sure can be a bitch at times. I am not Lazarus. I may wonder at times if I am dead or have a sixth sense, but I use all of my senses Just In Case.

Well, I don’t want to be in pain anymore or in any form except perhaps hypothethical.

I am sick of harboring individuals that wish to just plagiarize, pillage, loot, and rape me even if it is just in a fantasy, night terror, or nightmare. I lucid dream and I can’t control when or what happens to me, and it is so terrifying that I don’t know where I end and others may begin.

Am I a blind visionary? A Po Prophet? I am just a fine artist that wants to have a fine time, but which my family and U.B.F./U.H.S., Inc. (University Bible Fellowship or Universal Health Services, Inc., which are hopefully unrelated, but which have both damaged me irreparably) will not let me have because it is not in their vision of future, which is just hell on earth because more people believe their Christian story and not my atheist one.

I try to tell the truth all the time and I am sorry if that may be forever changing, but the truth to me is highly subjective. If I could tell it in a movie, I would, but no one would allow me to play myself, just like I don’t like to play with myself.

When I play the pain in my songs, I collaborate with others who help me create, but I hate the cognitive and vocal distortions created to denigrate me, demote me, and dean me unfit to be heard especially by ears and minds which are too small for the very reason that they are just too lazy to do any real good on this earth of ours or too paralyzed by the fear and paranoia that can seize and grip your heart at any moment.

Let us have a moment of silence for those who are sadly still mute either by nature, nurture, predicament, or forced as fellow prisoners of conscience.

All I wanted to be when young was a Disney animator. I fell in love with music too late in life, and I know that some wish to give me a better life but I feel like my immediate family stole everything from me because I had erroneously voiced adamantly to my cop brother and my parents that if they hospitalized me again, that would be the last time they would ever see me.

I have never been able to live in a complete community of mentally ill sufferers alongside me as at Caltech. The people made that academic fire hose bear-able, but I cannot bear forbearance anymore. I don’t love any bears besides the real animals or the stuffed animals I imagine cried for me to become real (Yes you Javi especially, my first son and baby polar bear cub).

Everyone’s biology is different and it should be something that we celebrate not bring down. This is something that I want the Pope and Catholics to understand. You cannot convert me. Stop trying to cure homosexuality. Stop correctively (misnomer) raping lesbians with knives, needles, and dicks please.

Rape is bad, mmkay [South Park reference], but love should never be wrong except when it hurts the innocence of any kind of creature. Vengeance as an eye for an eye (Hammurabi’s code) shall not be mine because I would not wish all of my most painful experiences upon any empathic creature no matter how I may feel about them at the moment or however salient it may be for them or me, but I see no problem with unusual punishment so long as it isn’t too cruel.

I want my writing to be like a conversation, and I am sorry if I find my words more interesting to my own ears than yours, but I am really full of myself when I am hallucinating, which would be misnamed psychosis. Let’s stop pretending or start pretending that we can still be friends in the end.

Please end Judgment Day. Haven’t I been in Hell on Earth long enough?

Stop making your students your slaves, graduate, undergraduate, or other wise men and women doing your bidding.

Thank you for taking the time to hear me out.

I hope this convinces you to live another day to the fullest and love who you will.

Source: [Clip Art Kid] (www.clipartkid.com/images/154/blue-sky-with-sun-clouds-and-airplane-trail-picture-free-photograph-Kmb9QX-clipart.jpg)