Looking Good: Hidden Disability

I sit across the desk from the doctor. He’s young, thirty-five at the most, and handsome. He listens attentively to the exhaustive list of symptoms I present him. In this private exam room and under such a handsome doctor’s eye, my pain swells to almost tragic proportions. I briefly hope the doctor falls in love with me, and rather than being admitted to the psychiatric short-term unit, I’ll find myself in his home, with a soft blanket tucked under my chin and his clinical devotion sweetened with love.

The room, outfitted with a bare desk, two chairs and a floor lamp, is thick-walled, but that doesn’t prevent the low moan of a woman across the hall from sliding past the door jamb.

I know how I must look to the doctor.

I’m a young woman with advanced degrees. The clothes I wear (though scavenged from thrift stores) are tailored enough to indicate good taste, if not well breeding. I also have all my own teeth, which might not seem a big deal, but for those with chronic mental illness, it’s a rare possession. I’m also easy on the eyes, a fact that cannot be downplayed when it comes to psychiatric evaluation. For all this doctor knows, I could simply be over-reacting to a romantic breakup or to stresses in professional life. I am certain he’s wondering, on some level, how can an attractive, articulate woman like me be mentally ill?

I curl up in the plastic chair, my perfectly healthy body tucked into itself with yogic symmetry; my pale, clear cheek pressed against my knees so that a hank of hair falls over my eyes. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a man’s decaying soul is reflected in a portrait he hides in the attic. With each of Dorian Gray’s moral failings, his portrait’s face grows more decrepit. Where, I wonder, is my portrait of dissipation? What can I offer the doctors when illness takes possession? I have no picture of the panic attacks that stripped the last three jobs from me, no image of the depression that traps me for months in my apartment, no snapshot even of the moments when I rise like a whale, steaming from the cold depths, to float briefly under blue sky before sinking again.

A fellow mental patient recently told me that my greatest problem is that I “present well.” What does that mean? It means that in the eyes of the psychiatric profession, I’m the picture of health. There’s a legal term for this. It’s called having a “hidden disability.” In my case, attractiveness and intelligence have created a terrible situation-no one wants to believe I’m sick, let alone disabled.

The medical field is hardly exempt from judging books by their covers. There was the previous century’s practice known as craniometry, in which doctors and scientists judged intelligence and sanity on the basis of brain size, skull shape and facial features. The derogatory term “Mongoloid,” for instance, originated due to the Mongolian’s slanted facial features. In the introduction to a recent anthology titled “The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography” Dr. Eric Carlson asserts that “in the patient’s look and demeanor lie clues for understanding the nature of his illness and the expected outcome.”

How far have we come in our understanding of the inner self? Of course we can generally note the blatant examples of mental illness and alcoholism, yet even for those folks, there was a time when the bag lady washed dishes in her own sink and when the mumbling man who sleeps on the bench once slept with his favorite blanket tucked under his chin. The line between sane and insane, or mentally ill and mentally sound, is far less concrete than the arc of an eyebrow or the shape of a hand.

With this hidden disability, I’m sure to make a good first impression, and a second one. The problem is, even in the crisis points, I’m still cute-as-a-button compared to the homeless women in the street or those ladies I meet on the hospital grounds with their plaid-on-plaid ensembles and uneven red lipsticks. At the mental hospital’s cafeteria, I discover how fluid the line between patient and professional truly is: On the days I shower, dress nice and wear eyeliner, the cashiers give me a staff-discount; on those “off” days when I arrive for therapy still in my pajamas, I must, like the other mental patients, pay full price for my coffee.

One doctor turned me away from a hospital on the grounds that if I could read Spinoza and wear a pretty dress, he felt obligated to give my bed to someone more destitute. A counselor at a mental health clinic found my despair unreasonable given that I had “everything going for me.”

When the handsome doctor asks me what triggered this latest bout of my mental illness, I have an image of myself in my bedroom, rocking back and forth with quiet hysteria. For months I stayed in that room, convinced I was utterly alone in the universe. It didn’t help that I stopped using the phone. I tell the doctor I can’t stand the loneliness. Mental illness is inherently isolating-one lives within a gauntlet of self-perpetuated pain and distorted thinking. The link between exterior world and interior self is often fragile as a butterfly’s wing. Add to that the stigma of mental illness, the disbelief invoked by having a healthy appearance, as well as the message (often spoken between the lines) that you just need to try harder and then everything--the job, the lover, the affordable apartment-would simply return to you like the morning sun after a night of fevered chills and nightmares. For someone who looks good, the nightmare has only begun.

(c) kvg, 2007

This essay was originally published in "Spare Change News" Cambridge, MA in 2002 and reprinted in 2004 in "Clamour".

Shifts In Light

It happened suddenly, as all terrible and wondrous things do. From the edge of homelessness, I fell into an affordable Cambridge studio. It’s a large windowed room on the top floor of a house. Light enters from all directions. There’s a kitchenette. A bathroom with a glassed-in shower. An air conditioner that rattles chilly air over my futon. The studio isn’t large enough for a couple, or a family, or even a person with a cat, but for me, a transient woman on perpetually unstable mental ground, I’m ready to call this home.

Today, my home seems to be spinning on a silver tray. Even in the hot, overcast weather, the windows spread a milky white glow over the pale walls. As I look around the room, I notice the things that give me joy: the brewed coffee; the book on Van Gogh; the bowl of bananas, grapes and mangoes; my notebooks; the plastic art box filled with bits of charcoal and gray rubber erasers; the soft shaggy wool carpets and colorful Moroccan rug; the lone plant I’m managing to nurse back from a terrible bout of neglect.

I’m trying to capture this perfectly because too soon it might evaporate. The silver-blue tint of the sky will reflect a different room. It will be a room where the pleasure of pooled sunlight falls away and in its place, emptiness begins to breathe. This emptiness has a presence, like a quality of light or a smell, that touches where ever it dwells. Is it an emotion, this emptiness? If so, it’s a frozen one, a species of feeling that doesn’t pass through the body the way joy or excitement or even anger can burn along the veins and leap through the fingers. This emptiness is the psyche’s displacement, homelessness different but no less disturbing.

Each person’s life has rhythm. At this time, mine requires long stretches of sleep, such as the one I emerged from this morning. Sometimes the sleep takes on a pernicious power and I cannot stop sleeping, it will be days of excusing myself from work, of fitful dreaming and slumberous trips alternating between the bathroom and fridge before I find the shower and rinse myself into a new state of mind. Sleep like I had yesterday, a full 36 hours, more exactly, began as a necessity and ended with a renewed appreciation for the morning cup of coffee. To another person this kind of sleep might be impossible. For me, it’s a necessary. Without much forewarning, my emotions and thoughts will rampage away from reality. I find myself careening from a glacial emptiness to a fire-siren panic acute and debilitating even in this gift of a home, I cannot escape myself.

The studio begins to grow more luminous as the skies clear enough for skeins of white cloud to bleed over the gray. Simple questions preoccupy me: Should I make more coffee or fix some lunch? At what time should I do my laundry? I can’t help but note that these concerns, like the atmosphere in my studio, have unstable tones. What is possible today might not be so tomorrow. My ability to eat food, to wash my clothes, to make phone calls, to show up for my job, has an origin often times beyond my grasp. The most pragmatic way to define this situation is to say I have a sickness. A mental illness. It’s an illness painted in colors of disjunction: chemical imbalances, emotional disturbances, mental discord; an illness of mis-calibration, disequilibrium, disquiet and disorder. Some of it can be traced to chemicals in the brain, but even then, it’s an inexact science. Because it has a less concrete physical reality, the way a cancer or bacteria can be nailed down in a peitri dish, and because it finds expression in the same qualities that make us human (such as thoughts, feelings, instincts) the fact of mental illness is always in question—similar, in its way, to the unstable quality of my own life.

A few weeks ago I had an almost perfect week. Not since the last hospital have I found my life so regulated and serene. Each morning I woke up and wrote; then I went to the gym and ran the treadmill; then I went to my job as a receptionist and worked for 7 ½ hours. In the evening, I had dinner with D. or M, or I did small errands around Harvard Square. Before bed, I practiced yoga and read. What a fine attitude I had for those few days. My heart stayed calm. I moved without sluggish torpor. People’s eyes didn’t pierce me and I was unafraid of public places. I began to feel the rhythms of day and night again, which can enter the body like a lost melody and move you as a hand does through a crowd of dancers. I forgot I was different and so I looked back at my life and was surprised to see how many people I’d left standing in mid-embrace and how many promises broke like rotten teeth in my mouth. Then I looked forward and imagined making all this right. I would make myself right.

How can the self remedy the self? The philosopher Krishnamurti often used the example of a finger trying point at itself in order to explain the futility of the mind solving its own problems. My mind can be that redundant, that incapable of seeing its way out of itself. I can shift from fully functional to incapacitated in less than a day’s time. No other difficulty involves so many facets of life—the body suffers; the mind contorts; emotions and instincts and feelings fly loose from the predictable trajectory of social conventions; inner experiences stop corresponding to outer realities; time bends into itself in feedback loops of traumatic repetition or dissociative emptiness; sense of self fractures and dissolves. If the chemicals in my brain refuse correction I am fast reduced to a dependency on mental health professionals and social service organizations.

Last year, around this time, I was severely disabled by my illness. I’d lost two teaching jobs and with those went my health insurance. Once again on the cusp of homelessness, I applied for welfare (now formally called “Public Assistance”) and Social Security disability benefits (a task that made my graduate school applications seem like breezy paperwork) and, with not a little luck, I found a $350 rented room in Waltham, Massachusetts. In what I’m told was record breaking efficiency, Social Security declared me sick enough to receive my maximum payment allotment of $658.00 a month. The math isn’t hard on this one. With only a couple hundred dollars left over for food and living expenses (my new income overqualified me for food stamps) I settled into the one outstanding benefit of being a social service dependant—Medicaid.

For the first time in many years, I began to receive comprehensive treatment for my mental illness. Doctor’s offices and psychiatric hospitals and counseling clinics opened their doors and stayed open long enough for me to sort through the available options and piece together a treatment team based out of one location—Cambridge City Hospital. That integrated treatment approach includes a medication doctor (psychopharamacologist); a cognitive-behavioral therapist (the equivalent of a life-skills coach); a therapy group for emotional regulation; and a medical doctor.

I’d like to say it was hard work that's given me my current stability. I certainly seem like a success story. Not a year since my last hospitalization, I’m now off disability and holding a job as a receptionist, living in a glorious and affordable studio in a manicured section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. So far I’ve been able to weather the shifts in light which turn my cozy, warm home into a tomb of brokenness. It’s true I work hard on myself. My mental health upkeep involves four psychotropic medications, biweekly therapy, a weekly twelve-step meeting for addiction recovery and a boatload of hyper-vigilance. Some of my success is the result of dumb luck, like finding a great job and place to live. No matter how determined I am, however, a hairline fissure can split into a chasm. A bad social interaction can trigger an anxiety attack, which can escalate into panic and depression and uncontrollable crying and, in a day’s time, I’m like a crippled dog, curled on the floor of my studio. Did I do this to myself? I wonder. Could I have prevented it?

There is nothing more despicable and seductive to the modern mentality than failure of self-determination. In the cases of financial mobility or physical improvement, the poor and overweight will always be slated for a kind of self-serving slovenliness that belies the real causes of impoverishment. The climate surrounding mental illness is the same: The onus of burden falls on the individual who is offered a seemingly inexhaustible arsenal of helpmeets, from government aid to medical science, from self-help books to self-help groups, from solutions of divine nature to those of nutritional healing. With all the possible ways of fixing oneself, failure to throw off the chains angers and confuses. Why isn’t the medication working? Can’t you fix that in therapy? You’ve been sober for over ten years, why are you still so troubled?

How shameful and isolating it is when I fall down, again. When the light shifts and the room darkens and the joys drain away and in their place I’m caught in the empty expanse of this illness. In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” the Doctor travels into the Arctic icefields with the intention of slaying his monstrous self-creation. Sometimes I can engage with this Creature, as Dr. Frankenstein often tried, and at other times, I’m simply fodder for its ploys, the way the Creature executed each of the Doctor’s loves, beginning with family members and culminating with his fiancée on the dreadful wedding night. Monster, demon, creature. Illness, chemical imbalance, disorder. Each gives a lens to the impossible condition of an inner self that has no resting place, no sanctuary. At least I can retreat into my studio and protect myself with the blessed sleep. In my home, I observe the shifts in light. I’m learning to read the map of this space and to notice how my internal world colors the walls and steals the sweetness. When my shadow overtakes me, I cocoon into bed with the white down comforter and an arsenal of pillows. I close my eyes and curl around the hope of a possible resurrection.

(c) kvg, 2007

This personal essay first appeared in "Spare Change News" in 2002 as the second in a series on mental illness and homelessness. It was reprinted (rather, posted) on the Boston Manic Depressive and Depressive Asociation's online journal "Into the Light".

LionHeart: For Moe Armstrong

The war is never over.
Savior of limbs, heart in your hand,
the war is a drum that beats
in time with your blood, your hand
caught between striking and saving.

They sent you in to destroy the small
faces you crawled towards and held,
and still hoping to stitch back with your
skilled fingers the rift between killer
and lover, savior and destroyer.

Here, on the streets, the embattled survivors
with tattoos on their arms swig
forgetfulness from fresh bottles of ruin.

You weep, lion-hearted, and usher their
ghosts into the cool white rooms of
rest where stories gather and are
shared.

In the morning, the Eastern sky
offers its light, far flung, unassuming
and you begin another day with
the same offering

to go where you're needed, for
you know the secret:

that we are all the walking wounded
and that even love can shred us,
shrapnel of past explosions cutting
those we hold to the breast.

South Belknap, McLean Hospital

(For Jon Dosick, Director of the Coalition for Fresh Air Rights)

1.
On our morning walk
pink clouds sharpen the etched
lines of the apple trees, where

geese bob for fallen
fruit, their necks
quivering like question
marks over their fat, punctuated
bellies.

Acorns underfoot, the expanse of
so much sky after baby blue walls,
we skirt the green hill, wet
as a tongue and just as smooth.

2.
When the birds turn their heads
and the orange leaves glow with
the burning weight of so much
color, you can almost hear the
tinkling of the silver tea services
pushed on carts into dayrooms
for powdered ladies.

It is the ghost-sound of privilege,
for the eccentric and the doddering heirs and
heiresses, for the passionate and brilliant
Brahmin poets.

You can almost hear the warm, solicitous
nurse voices, deferential as servants, Mrs.
Blaine, cream with your tea? Mr. Southworth,
would you like a window chair?
blankets pulled over knees, sunning on the brick patios
with potted ferns, a crème brule for dessert.

3.
Last night the Nigerian orderlies argued
over television programs in the day room
and a man named Joe, recently admitted, offered
me half his Rice Crispy treat. At 8pm, the toilet water
begins to steam and the showers shudder cold,
then, scalding hot.

“Some of us can’t move that fast,” a man complains
when it’s his turn to Check In.

From my bedroom with the baby blue walls
I heard a man scream. The sound of his voice
reminded me of my brother, how he
must have sounded as he died alone.

It reminded me of my dreams where I
reach out my hands and bray for my mother
but she has turned her head, and cannot hear me,
will not look.

McLean, I know, will not take those sounds
away from me. I can only try to make
it back to the wet hills, a return to footfalls
and motion and a different kind of isolation,

far away from baby blue.

(c)kvg 2007

Love in Abandoned Buildings

The homeless couple who accidentally started a warehouse fire in Worcester, Massachusetts, were described as many things by the public: vagrants, drug addicts, even murderers, for six firefighters died battling the conflagration.

When the papers showed pictures of the culprits, I realized they were not the usual kind of homeless couple you see in cities, bent over shopping carts with their matching coats of grime. This was a different kind of street coupling. The man, a thirty-five-year-old heroin addict, was with a 17-year-old girl who was said to be mentally challenged and on drugs. Media images showed a scraggly bearded man and a gaunt, vacant-eyed girl — not the stuff of a love story by most people’s standards, but it was there anyway, like the underhanded heat of eroticism itself.

They stayed inside the warehouse, in the corner room containing a makeshift bed of blankets, a candle burning in an empty soup can, and the remains of sandwiches nested in wax paper wrappers; the sound of passing sirens muffled by the brick walls and the glow of car lights that passed by. If you look, you can see their miracle, as well as their demise. I sometimes think of the girl with that man, so much older, whose body held a promise no social worker, parent, or doctor could offer. I imagine their lovemaking, the gossamer rainbows arched between unmoored bodies, and how they burrowed into each other’s flesh the way you and I nestle under our bed sheets, for that’s what homeless fucking feels like, when you’re stripped of the details, civilities, and necessities that allow homes rather than arms to hold you. The body of the other shelters you, mirrors and connects you to a feeling that I’m sure the young girl in the warehouse called love, but is even more primal.

When I was 17, I was also arrested in connection with an abandoned building and a man. Usually I spent my nights in the park, for it was spring and a lot of young people seemed to have the same ideas I did about home and school. We spread blue tarps under the trees in Cambridge Common and slept with our heads inside the damp polyester sleeping bags— I stole mine from my mother when no one was home. My homelessness, though possible to revoke at any time should I decide to return home and face the music, left me no less hungry than the mumbling, unwashed men who stood in line when the "Food Not Bombs" people came to the park with steaming canteens of beans and rice. I stood in line, yet always felt the twinge of self-consciousness when I took my plate of food. Compared to the "street people" (many of whom still stumble through these streets more than a decade later), I was a questionable example of displacement—educated, girlish, and from the large quantities of hallucinogens I’d been ingesting, oblivious.

One afternoon I met an attractive man named Featherback. As his name suggested, he was Native American — lean with long, deep features and black hair that shone in a thick ponytail. Six hours after our introduction, he suggested we bunk for the night at a place he knew with running water and electricity: an abandoned building somewhere in Central Square. I quickly agreed, imagining our possible privacy, which was more rare than caviar in such a crowd (such unions, though easy to initiate on the street, were less easily executed).

I was eager to have a body to rest against, since my boyfriend Sean had been put in jail a number of months back for possession of drugs. I’d met Sean during my initial flight from home to California. He and I became a couple one night in Berkeley when he led me through the back fence of an abandoned garden where his sleeping bag and foam pad awaited. We had to strip naked so that the sleeping bag could be zipped around us in a tight embrace. There, his arm became my pillow, and his breathing measured the course of my breaths. As we lay at night in that small garden with the wooden fence and the concrete outcrop of a veranda sheltering us, I believed I could sense his thoughts as they passed into me from his brow which lay against mine. I awoke from a dream and discovered his eyes open, staring at me with surprise, as we’d both awoken at the same moment, with the taste of a shared and distant country between our skin. Then, because of the heroin leaving his system, Sean began to itch, his feet and knees especially, and I was no longer dreamy or lost in the smells of us, but jerked one way and then another, elbowed and kneed. Nowhere to go, I’d allowed his body to invade me.

With Sean in jail, I returned to Harvard Square, womb of my adolescence, place of drug deals at the Pit, coffee at the Pain, sun soaked afternoons on the Brattle Street concrete rise; of ducks and naps by the Charles. That is, I went home, if being homeless anyplace can be called this much.That spring evening I followed Featherback and a few other men to the abandoned building in Central Square. At the back entrance, we climbed through a gauntlet of nailed boards and chained padlocks and emerged into a kitchen bright with lamplight and linoleum though empty of furniture. Featherback and I strolled the premises and chose "our" room, a cozy space that probably served as a child’s room, given the decorative animal theme of the wallpaper.

Under the grin of a dancing panda bear, we unrolled our sleeping bags and placed one on top of the other. Since it was only going to be a one-night visit, I’d left my backpack high up on the branch of a flowering tree on the Cambridge Commons. Many people placed their possessions during the daytime hours in the high branches of the trees, and unless one stood directly under the tree and looked high above, you’d never know what odd fruit it bore.

I did bring my toothbrush, however. Everyone took turns using the bathroom, preparing to go to sleep, when a loud booming on the door startled us."Open up! Police!" Since the front door was barricaded, we couldn’t open it up. I looked around to see what I should do — my heart was beginning to jump and my mouth turned dry and rubbery. Everyone, including Featherback, was hurriedly redressing and running in the other direction. I did the same. When I reached the back door, the police had broken down the front door and were storming the apartment with theatrical aggression.

Outside, I discovered we’d escaped into an enclosed backyard, muddy from the mix of rainwater with the mulched piles of last year’s fallen leaves. I hid in a pile of leaves in the far corner of the fence. With my brown poncho pulled over my face, I could almost be mistaken for rock, if I lay still and quiet, if I didn’t breath.A time of quiet followed. One of the officers shone a flashlight over my corner. He stepped closer and dragged his wooden stick over the ground and through the piles of leaves.

"There’s still one out there!" another man called out. I held my breath. None of this seemed real to me; being chased by cops, hiding in a pile of mud and leaves. The officer’s feet crunched twigs very near my head. I imagined him stepping on my head accidentally. If that happened, I resolved not to make a sound. The hard end of the officer’s stick landed on my leg. He felt the soft resistance of flesh, and struck again, now my stomach. I sat up indignantly, the way a child would stop a game of cops and robbers when the older kids get too rough. The policeman fished me out of the leaves and held his flashlight to my face.

"What is this?" he declared. I must have looked like a gnome, dressed in the garb of my most recent identity—brown leather moccasins, a brown ankle-length woven poncho, and a black and brown "tam" (a beret of a more ethnic design) with my long unruly hair stuffed inside it. The other officers had come to see the leaf creature. A few more flashlights fell on my face.

"I’m a girl," I cried out, hoping they wouldn’t get any rougher.

The officers laughed. "Some girl!" one of them guffawed.

I pulled the hat off and let my hair fall over my shoulders. It was long, curly hair, the kind that caused people to stop you in streets and ask, "Is it natural?" I knew that the hair transfigured my face and that I was, as the only female of the group just herded up, entitled to some kind of exemption. At least, I thought as much. They stared for a few seconds and then the closest one, who’d first hit me, grunted. "Get her in the wagon."

Handcuffs clicked my arms in place. The Cambridge City Police Station was the last place I saw Featherback. He, and the other men, had been placed in a separate holding cell.

"I love you, Kiera!" He called out to me.
"I love you Featherback!" I replied.

And I did. I had, in a short amount of time, transferred to Featherback my deep, capricious longing for a lover, a caretaker, a partner and best friend. Yet I never found out what life with Featherback would be like. Would we have hitchhiked to Arizona and lived in a commune set in a hidden valley with hot springs and natural mud baths? Would he have renamed me Little Leaf and given me bronze babies to sling round my widened hips with handwoven strips of cloth? In certain frames of mind, and I was certainly in one then, a person grows rarefied with so much expectation, not just his body, but the routes he might have opened. But I wasn’t let out with the others.

Being seventeen and without any form of identification and too proud to call my mother and stepfather, I went, instead, to Framingham Women’s House of Correction. That is, I went to prison.

The woman whose cell I shared took one look at me and declared, hands on hips, "Girl, you better call your parents!"

I looked about as criminal as Shirley Temple. Never had she or her friends encountered a girl so white, so well off, and so unwilling to milk the teat of parental intervention. Her name for me was "Crazy."

"Hey, Sharisha, meet my new girl, Crazy."

By the fifth day, my mind had cleared enough to notice that the rest of the prison population didn’t fully appreciate me. It was as though a dazed rabbit accidentally hopped into a nest of vipers. I stood in the cafeteria line while my now savior-like cellmate and her best friend stood on either side of me in body shield formation while tall, brutish girls shoved each other for a domino effect aimed at my head. In the cafeteria, street talk charged the air — furious, slippery voltage of power crackling between lips, epic and dangerous.

With the cobwebby remains of drugs in my eyes, I could just trace the shape of a problem. Up till that moment, my homelessness seemed precious, chosen, a rare freedom I saw others unable to acquire, tied as they were to convention and oppressive expectations. At that moment in the cafeteria line, with the raw outlines of my future dipped in regret, I realized I’d made a mistake. To my cellmate’s relief, I made the call home.

In story telling, this is the place of dénouement — the resolution, the ending, which can be happy or tragic, so long as we leave with a sense of completion. I did call home. I did leave prison. For me, the fire in the warehouse is a cautionary tale. And also a metaphor: If you think that in calling my family and being bailed from jail I was restored, reinstated to the life of home and hearth, then the nature of my displacement hasn’t been explained. I know why the girl lived in the warehouse, why she made love to the man. For us, the arms of a lover bind like glue the many sharp fragments of a broken self. In empty rooms, his eyes promise to mirror a new mosaic. A Prometheus, he revives an essential nature. Few moments live so bright.

(c) kvg, 2002

Originally printed in the May 2, 2002 issue of Spare Change, Cambridge, MA. Additionally reprinted in Real Change News, Seattle, WA.