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thing as making eight dozen cookies and eating four dozen and then just feeling sick. This was after a whole day of being so very, very careful with food. The mental hospitalizations that had happened to me by 1981I had been hospitalized three timeshappened every fall. For three months each year, I was in a mental hospital. Mostly, I'd fight the drugs they gave me, but I would have to give in eventually because they'd say they'd take me to court: they'd inject me.
I had no way of explaining why I had breakdowns. It was another inexplicable thing in my life. When I was a kid growing up, I never thought I'd be having delusions, and be hospitalized. In 1981 I started the diary, and in 1981 I didn't have a breakdown. I think it might be because I was going to film school: I had somewhere to go, I had a camera to borrow. I made several other short films the fall of 1981 and then began the diary.
One short film was called
Locomotion
[1981]. It shows me against a blue wall, screaming and exhibiting the side effects of medication I had observed in the hospitals. The first real breakdown that I got on film was in 1982. I showed my delusions. I showed that I was afraid that root vegetables suffered, so I was going to take them back to the garden and replant them. You can see me getting on my big rain slicker and getting out the beets and carrots and onions and preparing to take them back, making sign language in front of the camera.
In fact, that first breakdown occurred shortly after a person at school threatened he'd call the cops and take the camera away from me. Losing that camera, I lost my mind. Every time there's a breakdown, I try to take pictures of it. My problem with a film diary (and with a written diary) is that sometimes I become so paranoid and obnoxious. Voices in my head become so frightening, and I cannot bring myself to document them. It's just too terrifying.
I believe in film being necessary every day. Monet did his haystacks and I have done the gazebo in the backyard. This winter I was so depressed, after getting out of the hospital and being put under a whole lot of restrictions, I was taking pictures every day of the gazebo in all kinds of weather. In fact, just this last week I stopped.
So for a while in the diary there are pictures of the gazebo, and of Tom Baker on
Dr. Who
. Daylight is the gazebo, where I'd hoped to get married someday (I've discarded that notion since I think a justice of the peace is just about as good). Evening is
Dr. Who
.
Anyway, I had so much trouble from my paranoia of the people across the pondthe neighbors. My problem is that a lot of my paranoia is warranted. I can't say the voices in my head are warranted, but I'm
damned
if I'm going to say they come from me! When a person starts getting third-person stories, more hideous than they've ever heard be-