Now I'm Not As S.A.D.

As some of you may know if you have followed this blog closely enough for long enough, I have a bit of an issue with Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.). Consequently, this time of year is my least favorite as you might imagine, especially combined with the recently previously mentioned significant family death anniversary dates that happen every year within this general timeframe.

In light of this (pun intended) I noticed night-before-last on the way home from mom's house around dusk that there was longer twilight and sunset had happened minutes later than had been the case for weeks previously. This made made me very happy! Tonight (the last night of Autumn 2016) I did a little research and here are some hard facts:

• Each year in Paso Robles, the earliest sunset time first occurs on November 29th when sunset happens at 4:50 p.m. PST.
• This sunset time remains in place through December 12th each year at Paso Robles, CA. 
• Due to the vicissitudes of astronomical movements and geometry, even after sunset starts coming later in the evening on December 13th, sunrise continues to come later in the morning and that change is greater causing the overall length of day to continue to shorten through December 21st when the Winter Solstice signals a return to ever-lengthening days. 
• Hours of daylight at Paso Robles shorten down to a minimum of time at 9  hours, 45 minutes from December 18th through December 26th. 
• Two nights ago when I first noted this season that the sun was setting later and the twilight was longer, sunset was at 4:52 p.m. PST. It appears I'm so light-sensitive that I detected that two-minute differential. 

Source: http://www.timebie.com/sun/pasoroblesca.php

Twenty-Eight Years Ago This Afternoon.....

.... I was at pre-game football practice on the game field at Atascadero High School as starting senior center on this date in 1988. This was after school and before the team was to drive down to Orange County to play Trabuco Hills High School in a CIF Southern Section semi-final game. I was interrupted mid-practice by mom showing up to tell me Granpda McGee had just died (at age 84) at his senior convalescent facility on Heather Court in Templeton, CA. I ended practice at that moment and went home with mom. She and my brother and I drove down to southern California and spent the night in a motel. My team spent a boisterous and distracted night in a motel even closer to the school. I participated in the game the next afternoon into evening. We got blown out something like 42-7 much like the Los Angeles Times sports section had predicted.

My head was only partially in the game for obvious reasons. I had just lost the second most significant male in my life following losing my dad three years earlier during my freshman year of high school. By this point I was already circling the drain mental health-wise as I slid further into chronic and crippling anxiety attacks and depression which I worked hard to suppress from those around me and this would only get worse. I'm still trying to rebuild my life to this very day 28 years later. However, rebuilding I am, and God is good to have me still be here and have rebuilt as much as I have with so much still to go.

A Healing Afterburn on "North Pole"

I first encountered this trance gem from the Golden Age of Trance upon first listening to Tiesto's 2000 album Magic Six: Live In Amsterdam which I purchased circa 2002. During that time I was really starting to come out of my funk although I had a long way to go at that point. One of the big things I did to heal myself to the degree was an exercise of my own agency and not that of God was listening to trance music, particularly while on frequent road trips. I don't know why it helped me but it did and that is all that mattered then or now. It was the right music at the right time for me. Music therapy is not without scientific precedent as some of you perhaps know. Anywho, this song by Afterburn a.k.a. Agnelli & Nelson was the great intro to this album and that version is featured in the player below. Note: an aurally awesome and musically masterful transition occurs at the 3:30 mark.

Jeremiah's Lamentation ~ My Lamentation - Pt. 2

Last November in this blog I posted PART ONE of this two-part series. Tonight I will cover the second part of the passage in question, to wit, Lamentations 3:22-47. By way of review I repeat my previous preface.

Back in the time of my wandering in the wilderness (biblically, metaphorically-speaking) during my 20's and much of my 30's I was lost inside my own head and lost from the world as I suffered under the heavy burden and dark oppression of mental illness and spiritual desolation. This was the direct result of  both spiritual as well as social things in my environment such as my father's untimely death when I was 15 and then losing Grandpa McGee when I was 18 just three years later which makes this time of year difficult. All the while I was dealing with the social drama on both sides of my family (and within it my immediate family) along with all the crap that comes with coming of age at that time. The real topper on this story was my having God actively in my life yet wanting little to do with Him. This placed me in direct conflict with the Him which is never a great idea.

There were multiple levels of environmental causation for this as well as spiritual causation from my losing my dad and not having any males in the family step in and be my mentor and father figure to my being under God's reproof for my pride, stubbornness, idleness, selfishness, and unthankfulness. My mental illness took the form of major depressive disorder, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder that I know of and perhaps others I don't yet realize.

I have turned back to God and I am doing ever better on all fronts, spiritual, mental-emotional-psychological, physical, social, academic, etc. This is not to say I don't experience up and downs and plateaus and an occasional two-steps-backward-to-get-three-steps-forward any different than anybody else. However, at least I am in a consistently healthy place yet with room to improve in some areas that continue to bedevil me and yet I am still ever growing and evolving.

On a morning a month ago at church I found myself reading my Bible in the cafe and opened to this passage and was blown away by it as it caused me to recall that dark place I know so well but have not been in for some time now. I am dividing this up into two parts for the sake of functionality on this blog and ease of perusal for you, the reader. The FIRST PART offered an insight into the place I was during those dark years, a place which I realize others have been in although in a different context and for a different purpose. This sequel offers the upshot resolution to my ongoing story, to wit, what I had to do to get back on track with God.

"It is of God's manifold mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassion fails not.

They are renewed every morning: how great is your faithfulness.

The Lord is my portion, I say to myself; therefore will I hope in Him.

The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul that seeks Him.

It advantages a person to both hope in and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.

It is beneficial that a person bear their yokes in the time of their youth.

They sit in silent solitude, because He hath laid this yoke upon them.

They put their face in the dirt, if yet there may be hope.

They offer their cheek to them that smite it: they are fully reproached.

For the Lord will not cast us away forever: but though He inflicts grief upon us, yet will He show compassion according to his manifold mercies.

For He does not enthusiastically cause harm to people.

Crushing underfoot those in bondage in the Earth, depriving people of justice before God, and defrauding people in their endeavors, the Lord does not approve.

Who says anything at all and it happens when God has not commanded it thus?

Out of God's mouth proceeds not things both bad and good?

Why do the living complain about the punishment of their sins?

Let us examine ourselves and  judge our ways and turn back to God.

May we offer upward our hearts to God in the heavens.

We have transgressed and rebelled and you have not pardoned us.

You have enveloped us in your anger and persecuted us: you have killed us seemingly without pity.

You have obscured yourself from us as if with a cloud so that our prayer should not reach you.

You have relegated us to the status of scum and garbage in the eyes of other people.

All of our enemies have criticized us.

Fear and hazard has come upon us, desolation and destruction."

~Lamentations 3:22-47 (Kimicus ad Absurdum translation)

Getting "Mental" at Cuesta College

This video features my dear friend Erin opening up briefly about some of her struggles. I remember these all too well from knowing her during some of her roughest years when I for some stretches feared she would be found dead someday. I can also personally relate to some of her struggles having trode that road myself albeit in a different lane in a different vehicle in a different gear.

Picture of the Day - 1100 Black Flags

Last week was Cuesta College's Mental Health Awareness Week. Active Minds is the on-campus club advocating mental health and they created the symbolic display above. This display features 1100 black flags symbolizing the roughly 1,100 college students who successfully commit suicide each year across the United States. This display was part of an awareness campaign by the Active Minds club. Given there are two major campuses to this college, last week this display was at the main campus in SLO and this week it was here at the North County Campus (NCC) as pictured above. My dear friend Erin Cunningham-Smith is the president of Active Minds and invited me to hang out while they set up this display but regrettably my schedule would not allow it. Photo by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Random Musings of a Ramblin' Fool XLVII

Well this is a first in a few years: two of these columns in "relatively" close succession. I have enough to say to warrant it without being too redundant and seemingly self-occupied.

I'm Not Fat; The World Shrank!

WTF happened to me the past several months? I'm now up to 260 lbs! I suppose a lot of things converged to cause this. I have not been exercising this year as regularly as I have for most the past few years. I have been eating for convenience and immediate-term performance while going to school and not eating for long-term health. I have been comfort eating to deal with my mild S.A.D. and my general unhappiness in my work environment which I have managed to hide quite effectively aside from the weight gain. I have also not been exercising adequate time management skills in order to make the time in my daily routine to regularly fix healthy meals. Consequently, I have ballooned out a bit and have nearly reached my maximum weight I ever recorded (264 lbs. although that may very well not actually be the heaviest I've ever actually been as I might have reached higher but never recorded the peak). Anywho, in any case I need to turn this crap around right now as I feel this weight on my and don't like it one damned bit.

Lemoore Gem & Mineral Show

This morning I carpooled with friend and fellow-Santa Lucia Rockhounds member David Nelson up to the  5th annual Lemoore Gem & Mineral Show hosted by the local club there. This was my first visit to this show and after hearing much about it over the years from my friend Keith Olivas, owner of the Art of Jewelry. He had wanted me in it on its inaugural flight but for reasons I cannot recall I did not do it despite the fact that was the last year I did shows within the context of my now-defunct business (well, except for my dabbling my K&K Earthwerks eBay store). Anywho, we hung out a few hours and then returned to the North County (it's about an hour's drive up there and likewise the return). However, that was not before I got a laundry list of things accomplished. Of primary significance I received back signed contracts and money from some of the dealers there who will also be at our 22nd Annual Gem, Mineral & Jewelry Show the first weekend in May. I also gave contracts to two other dealers there one of whom is definitely coming to our show and the other whom used to come and may send her son with some inventory as we need more lapidary equipment being sold in our show.  I also was able to derive some fresh ideas for our show from things I observed (and in some cases photographed) at their show which I shall share with our show board. I also got to have a nice, long talk with Susan Chaisson-Walblom.

Occupy CFMS Is Postponed (For Now)

The revolution against the Old Guard at the California Federation of Minerological Societies (CFMS) is called off for now! For years I have heard of nothing but problems between the various gem amd mineral clubs around the state whom host federation shows and the federation itself which has often been ham-fisted and tone-deaf in its dealings with its constituent member clubs. A few weeks ago at the Ventura show I heard some new grievances and it all seemed to point to the Old Guard whom are employed or appointed at the CFMS and are not elected. These people seemed and seem from what I have heard from reliable sources to be old and out of touch and suffering from delusions of self-importance leading to condescension and obstructionism much like I've been hearing of for years. I experienced an epiphany of sorts at the Ventura show by way of the idea that the clubs should simply refuse to pay next year's club dues until the entire Old Guard resigned/retired. As a group the clubs could go get insurance apart from the CFMS it seemed to me. Today CFMS Past-President and friend Susan Chaisson-Walblom set me straight and convinced me that now is not the time for this as some seemingly-meaningful change seems to be occurring from within the system there as generational shifts play out over recent years. I will shelve promoting the idea unless/until I hear that the CFMS has systemically and institutionally gotten stuck again. In that event I would consider it an honor to play the role of Thomas Paine in fomenting a revolution against the CFMS establishment.

The Drought Here Is Bad

I marveled today at how dry are the grasses along the route between Paso Robles and Lemoore, CA. We are technically still in late winter and there is hardly any green grass to be seen, no wildflowers, and lots of brown grass... from last year's crop. Earlier this evening there was a one-acre grass fire out in the Parkhill area of northern SLO County. We are so screwed this coming fire season... which has apparently already begun... or perhaps it would be more accurate to say last year's fire season has transitioned into this year's fire season without without ever fully ending. Elsewhere in drought news.: parts of Colorado are burning and the entire state of New Mexico is under Red Flag Warnings and has begun experiencing consistent wildfire activity. Just a little further east and from north to south from the Dakotas down to Texas are areas of extreme drought some of which have been going on for multiple years now such as in the Lone Star State.

A Strange Case of Roll Reversal

When my friend moved in next door in 1997 we hit it off fairly quickly and he become my older brother over the 15-1/2 years since then. At that time I was deeply in the throes of mental illness and the social isolation attendant unto it but was perhaps already into my long and gradual rise up out of it that would take another dozen years of my life to complete. Anywho, during those years of friendship with my friend he seemed a paragon of strength and self-confidence even if at times it came across as more bravado and braggadocio than actual foundational strength. However, even back then I noticed certain personality flaws and character defects and spiritual inadequacies which would intensify in their prominence in his life over the course of the years I knew him. Since these long-term shifts gradually played out over many years I did not recognize an overall deterioration until my friend retired from his state job. From that point onwards he seemed to emotionally tank upon retirement, a retirement he had long anticipated and believed would bring him the joy and peace he perpetually lacked.

By last year I noticed things that in hindsight now I must say were instances of the early advent of paranoid delusions and unstable hyper-sensitivity to imagined threats while not taking care of his affairs in the real world but that at the time I dismissed as my friend merely acting weak-minded and saying stupid things. Things are now in complete collapse in his life as he has lost his job and may not possess guns due to a suicidal episode. He is inconsolable and keeps repeating that his life is over and that he failed spiritually and in every other way and that there is no point in doing anything but awaiting the end. I employed my mental health first aid training today and empathetically listened to him and probed to see where his head was and if he was in danger or was a danger.

While he lay pouting on his sofa in his front room I asked him about his responsibility to provide for his wife and adult child who has developmental disabilities and he told me "they're gonna have to figure something out". I am in a quandry as to if I should be empathetic of his clearly suffering a deep and pervasive mental illness involving depression, narcissism,  a bit of being paranoid delusional and quite possibly being bipolar. Bipolar would explain just about everything up to this point. Or should I should be outraged at his callous selfishness and lack of regard for his family responsibilities and his utter self-centeredness and wretched self-pitying? Do I treat him like a victim and try to further employ my mental health first aid en route to facilitating his institutionalization or do I need to chew his ass for being such a selfish coward and demand he gird up his loins like a man? At what point does the mental illness segue into spiritual ineptitude and a crisis of character?

Why am I so cursed that the two most prominent men in my life are to varying degrees crazy and don't act like men? I was once crazy but now am dangerously well. However, it seems so many around me (and not just the two aforementioned "men") are going crazy or perhaps they always were but I failed to recognize it through the fog of my own past unhealthiness.

What I Did With My Day

I figure that given that I am Red Cross certified for physical first aid and CPR why shouldn't I be certified for mental health first aid as well?

A Marathon of Loss

Twenty-six years ago this morning I lost my father, James Gordon Noyes, in a tragic and freak accident less than a month after his 39th birthday. I outlined my experience with this part of my life two years ago today in my Losing a Father piece on the 24th anniversary of that sad day. Two years later and I reflect upon a marathon of years of loss in various forms.

My family was always small with both my parents being only children and their parents having not many siblings and those siblings and their offspring having at best a peripheral presence in my life or more commonly none at all. I lost my father in 1985 to start off the train of tragedy. Three years later I lost my maternal grandfather, the late Dr. J. Vernon McGee, as touched upon in my Dr. J. Vernon McGee Was My Grandfather  piece. At that time his wife, my late maternal grandmother, Ruth Inez Jordan McGee, began to die from her mind outwards through her body, a process that would not reach its conclusion until nine years later as she slowly descended into death which finally occurred in 1997. Then a year-and-a-half later my paternal grandfather, James Edwin Noyes, died at 84. Now all I have left are my mother, Lynda Karah McGee Noyes, with whom I have had an at-times troubled relationship with over the years although God has healed that fully. Then there is my only sibling, my  brother Andrew Carey Noyes with whom I am not close after years of a troubled relationship which seems to be undergoing some healing. Finally, there is my relationship with my remaining grandmother, Martha Virginia Van Stone Noyes, with whom I have also had an at-times troubled relationship which it appears God has likewise healed.

Loss has been an overriding theme in my life not limited to the physical death of people. Spiritually I was dead for most of my life until quite recently. My sanity died in 1988 and not coincidentally did not fully return until quite recently as well although that process began several years and preceded my spiritual Renaissance and Great Awakening. The church that comes closest to being my home church while I was growing up and which left the greatest mark on me in my life to date lost its way and made spiritual shipwreck while I was still young. However, it left an indelible mark on my both good and bad.

Through all of this there has been little comfort to be derived from my fellow human beings. I have felt largely on my own because I have been largely on my own. God has used this to teach me to not lean on people nor on myself but to look to Him for guidance and comfort and healing. My process of becoming who I was created to be is far from complete but at least I can see this process underway. Indeed, it has always been underway even when I didn't recognize it and was in darkness and blindness. Everything that has befallen me to date has been part of God's plan for my life and has been engineered by Him to instill in me the qualities I will need in the future and to teach me hard lessons I could and can only learn by experiencing my life as it has been and continues to be.

I remain to this day haunted by the subject of loss and how the news of it is delivered and received.

Dr. J. Vernon McGee Was My Grandfather

This is not a biography of my late maternal grandfather for which there is a good one on the Thru The Bible Radio website as well as a good one on Wikipedia. This is not my own life story (for which the following isn't even a complete outline) nor is it my testimony which is something I plan to share here at some point in the future. What this is for me is a public embracing of something with which I have had an uneasy relationship with all my life and thus have most often not embraced by not even acknowledging it to others.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I dearly love Grandpa McGee and I miss him terribly. I probably miss the version of him I never met that lived before I lived and was dead before I was born more than the version of him that he had become by the time I arrived on the scene. I was 18 and in my senior year at Atascadero High School when he died at age 84 in Templeton, California. He fathered my mother Lynda when he was about my age now (40ish) which made him a father who was old enough to be a grandfather and later a grandfather old enough to be a great-grandfather. Consequently, I did not have him in my life for as many years as most people get to have their grandfather who lives to be 84 years old.

Living under the shadow of a great man, and Grandpa McGee was a great man I can assure you, is never easy for anybody. Certainly his over-sized personality and life overwhelmed my personality and life. Like all great men he was very complex. Those who think they knew him in most cases did not. He had two distinct personalities, his public persona whom his listeners came to believe they knew and his private personality his family knew which was his true self. He possessed a great many internal contradictions which created tension between these two versions of himself. That tension never found resolution during his natural life.

As a young male human being growing up and later coming of age and trying to make sense of it all and just simply trying to fit in at a time when fitting in is a foremost social imperative I found the drama that being the eldest grandson of Dr. J. Vernon McGee engendered was oft disruptive to life and on some occasions even a bit overwhelming. That situation continued into my early adulthood and became conflated with my own mental-emotional-spiritual issues which lead directly to my present condition and status in life.

For much of my adulthood I would have given anything to have experienced a normal life growing up and thus one would think, a more normal adulthood. Given I had no other frame of reference with which to compare my life being Dr. J. Vernon McGee's grandson in some respects it often seemed somewhat normal even while clearly even back then being anything but normal. 

Being the grandson of Dr. J. Vernon McGee afforded a modest share of material comfort. For example, grandpa was generous at Christmas and for our birthdays and we often ate out at nice restaurants. Also I grew up in a middle-class Atascadero home that was payed for by Grandpa McGee. My childhood was physically comfortable while otherwise less so.

Although Grandpa McGee lived comfortably he was hardly a wealthy man by the standard of way too many of his contemporaries and even more so those who have come after him. After he died his trust left me enough money to pay for college outright which was quite generous. However, there were no grotesque sums of money accrued through his book royalties and no money personally gained through his ministry (Thru The Bible Radio) as grandpa was not driven by the love of money nor was he ethically-challenged as seems to be the industry standard for "men of God" (particularly those utilizing electronic media) in the modern era.

I experienced my own internal conflict growing up in Grandpa McGee's shadow. Part of this conflict was the sense of while loving grandpa dearly and he being my favorite grandpa I nonetheless felt trapped when talking to his fans who always seemed to tell me how lucky I was to have that legacy. These well-meaning people had no idea what they were talking about given the complexity of that "legacy" which was loaded with positives and negatives. Grandpa McGee was not always easy to be around (he was moody and self-absorbed at times) and I did not always get along with him even though he was often a lot of fun to be around, too, because he was also playful and funny and charming and highly intelligent. Another part of my own internal conflict was the sense that everybody expected me to follow Grandpa McGee into the ministry which idea I eschewed.

Like Grandpa McGee, I have always possessed my own set of internal contradictions. My entire life I have always been a free spirit and a highly socialized loner with many acquaintances but few close friends which is one of my own internal contradictions: I'm an introverted extrovert (or rather an extroverted introvert). To a fault I have always preferred to follow my own path. Part of this was driven by my own stubbornness. However, part of it was out of necessity as I struggled alone with mental illness for the better part of 20 years starting in my senior year of high school when the sum of everything in my life to that point, to wit, my dad dying and other family turmoil (of which Grandpa McGee was a central element) overwhelmed me and crushed me. This was possible because I was not walking in unity with God and He used mental illness to discipline and transform me in pretty much the same way He did with King Nebuchadnezzar.

I am now dangerously sane and yet to my somewhat surprise I have discovered that the world seems to have gone utterly mad (or was it already?) while I was away (in a manner of speaking). God and Time  healed me after years of reading and self-educating and journeying and searching a lonely path. That path has by way of a number of twists and turns led to where I am sitting this very moment in Paso Robles, CA, in my modest home where I live simply but comfortably while I make ends meet while underemployed following the demise of my small business in this moribund economy. I am now going back to school attending classes at Cuesta College where I am maintaining a 4.0 G.P.A. I am working on my general education there with the intention of transferring to a university sometime in the next few years. My current direction is Emergency Management but that could change if God directs because I'm through making my own decisions and am now simply following God's appointed path for me.

I am now starting over in life in my early 40's. For the first time in my life I am happy and have found peace. I have also thoroughly come to terms with Grandpa McGee and forgiven him and forgiven myself just as God has forgiven both of us. I am now able to embrace that legacy and can even see some of him embedded and encoded within me and my personality and am thus honored.

Other posts on Granpa McGee:

Dr. J. Vernon McGee's LA Times Obituary

A Marathon of Loss 

Top Ten J.V. McGee Things You Probably Didn't Know