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Pops.

This isn’t something I was intending to write yet. I’m going to be honest though, I was drinking and I got to thinking about him so couldn’t help myself. Don’t worry. I don’t write inebriated for the most part — I will start a draft, close it, and finish it another time as I am now.

My Pops, my Dad, my Father, my Hero, my Man, my Idol, my Map; has saved my life.

Probably more than I can recall. I’m sure he knows more than I do. This is about the one time, though. The one time he had a conversation with me that I know he remembers maybe more than any other.

I’ve heard it a lot of times from his perspective, but I’m not sure yet I’ve shared it from mine. This will be the closest in the timeline yet that I have written about — to when I lost my mind.

Kahi Mohala
The courtyard my family and I threw a football together in, at Kahi Mohala. Photographer unknown.

I was still in the mental hospital at this point, Kahi Mohala. It is a facility that I volunteered (was deftly convinced) to put myself in after being bailed out of jail, in tow of my Mother. I remember trying to hide from the “Yakuza” in the car seat — backed all the way down so nobody could see me, on the way there. It wasn’t even just on the way there. We stopped at another facility beforehand that didn’t have the capacity? Or something. Before that we went to the Punchbowl memorial. That is when I remember realizing I was being “followed”, though it wasn’t even the tenth time I’d made that realization in the preceding few days.

If you go to the memorial today, I remember signing the guest book. It was 2008. If the page is still there I may have signed it Trevor, Trayber, Travor, Trebor, or otherwise. It would have been December 24th.

That and my soap totem are a story for another day, though.

I remember my Pops and I sitting in some furniture. It was on the other side of some glass, with an enclosed garden beyond it. There was a, if I remember, budless tree surrounded by rocks within the garden.

I sat in the chair, facing parallel with the glass on its right side. I cannot remember the color — but the pattern was raised, and consistent. It created a sense of comfort.

Pops sat nearest to me in the corner of a sofa. The sofa was placed in a ninety-degree rotation of the chair, facing to view out the glass. It was of the same fabric. I need to place the scene very deliberately because that is the last I can remember of it.

Everything else I can remember is the pure intensity in his eyes.

I wrote earlier that I was deftly convinced to volunteer myself unto this place. It couldn’t have been seventy-two hours after that — I decided I was perfectly sane and should be released. Pops’ entire mission was to convince me not only to stay, but that I wanted to stay, and he succeeded.

He remembers the exact words he used with much more lucidity than I. What is in my memory though is that he made me feel like I needed the people in that place. Not only for my future as a functioning adult in society, but as a person.

Pops remembers convincing me to stay because I needed the doctors to tell the lawyers and the judge that I was just some kid that made a mistake and needed to learn from it. I remember him convincing me that those doctors, and those nurses, actually had my best interests in heart.

That I was safe. That I was where I should be and that I wasn’t okay.

It was like a pinhole camera. My Dad was the light and he found his focus, holding on for dear life — my dear life. I was not at this time capable of looking outside my insanity. I was still bopping to random Beyonce songs on the radio and drawing really uninteresting tribal shapes thinking I was some sort of messiah.

He broke through, though. I can only explain how by the intensity of the love that he had within his eyes when he spoke to me. I’m not sure I have ever seen so much concern and care in a man’s eyes before. It makes me feel like a better person just thinking about it now. The connection he made with me, and with his eyes in that time — legitimately brought me into a moment of true, realistic, clarity.

I don’t remember what it looked like, but I know he does. He’s told me about it. That he could see my body language, facial expression, and own eye contact — return to normal for just the slightest of moments. Enough for it to register.

It wasn’t shortly after I went into an existential conversation about how the Devil & Angels live among us and I am a combination of them both realized — or some such nonsense of the like.

I stayed, though. Without much more complaint or argument.

Details of my time in there are still rather fuzzy for me, but I did stay, and did behave; as well as have a number of the patients enjoy spending time with me. I did the activities and talked about my feelings and must have balanced out a bit — because I was out a week or so later.

Another powerful memory I have about that place was leaving it. I can remember how satisfying it was to finally smoke a cigarette again. To smoke it just outside the premises before getting in the car with my Mom to a hotel room. It gave the experience such finality to me, at least the Kahi Mohala portion of it.

I still wasn’t right for a long time, and I’m not sure if I ever will be. There’s definitely a lot less wrong with me today maybe than ever before in my life. I owe a lot of that to all the support I got from everyone throughout the ordeal.

In this piece though, in this moment in time, I owe it all to Pops.

Thanks for being there for me, Dad. Thank you for finding a way to get through to me that day. I’m not sure anyone else could have.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured photograph taken by Derek Lofgreen ©2013
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Jury.

If you have been reading my writing of late I am sure you have noticed a theme. I am often tip-toeing around a very particular time in my life. Bringing a lot of my experiences back around to it, but not specifically writing about it.

Not yet.

People who know me closely know my recollection in person, but I am not ready to write what I remember of my insanity yet. Often when I write something it is released from me. I feel a weight lift up and outside of me. Or at least, the burden of that experience and those thoughts lessens.

I think through life we are constantly gaining more burdens and finding more strength to carry them. I am not ready for that burden to be any lighter yet. It’s something that keeps me in check every day.

So this will be the story of how I got to be a jury member on a murder trial, and how seriously I took it.

I want to say this was five or six years ago now. So a year or two into my probationary period. I got called into jury duty like any normal person, but figured I was Scot-free because they would tell me to get out as I walked in.

I was on probation for five felonies, plus some. Multiple burglary and robbery charges, multiple breaking & entering charges, assault on a police officer (which thankfully was reduced, because of a guilty plea). It was on a deferred sentence, so I didn’t have to admit to it on job applications and only the court system could pull it up.

If you did a background check on me today I would come up squeaky clean. I’ve checked.

Though I and my family have the paperwork to prove otherwise. This is nothing I am proud of, it’s just a fact. I have a criminal past that even though it was expunged and there are no state records of it any longer, I will live with for the rest of my life. If I did not admit this and did not carry it with me, I would not be who I am today. Who I was is proof positive for me of what and who I never want to be again.

Back to jury duty.

It started innocently enough, I just walked into the Adams county justice center and sat in a room with I want to say a couple hundred — maybe a hundred and fifty very unhappy people.

This was like a snow day for me, though. I was able to get out of work for the day and my boss at that time couldn’t find a way to get me out of it. He did try to tell me to figure out any way I could, but I was so stoked I got a letter from the State saying I could do something that every American citizen has a right to do — that wiggling a way out wasn’t in the cards for me. I was really hoping I had a real shot.

I very nearly sat in front of a jury of my peers, awaiting their judgement. So I really wanted to take this seriously.

When the clerk came in maybe a half an hour after signing in, she made an announcement:

“Alright everyone, we have a few civil suits and a murder trial today. Please be patient and we will get the jurors called. Once that happens everyone else can leave. We will have a short orientation video to watch and form to fill out before we get you to your courtroom.”

There was a collective gasp throughout the room when the word “murder” was mentioned. This seriously only made me more excited. If I had the chance to be on any kind of trial and try to do my best as an American citizen, I wanted a murder trial. That is something that I would take even more seriously just based on its gravity as an act.

Be careful what you wish for.

Looking back on it, it’s almost like fate or something — the way it all worked out. I was put in the group for the murder trial, the exact one I wanted. Then when it came to the questionnaire I filled it out more seriously than any test I have ever taken in school, or otherwise.

I answered every question 100% truthfully and with so much information that I ran out of paper. I admitted my criminal past and how the thought of being a juror really hit home with me. How I felt it was my duty as an American citizen and recovering criminal to give back, to do something right. To try and make it right.

When all was said and done and the voir dire process was complete, I was the 13th, alternate juror. By the end of the following day I was locked in as the 12th juror. I was in. I was going to be a part of something and make a difference of some sort that would mean something to me.

I know Bill Curren was a murderer but we had to let him walk.

One of the very first things the judge told us as jurors when he introduced himself is that all the information we hear and see needs to be put into context of the law. That the law is black and white and cannot be interpreted. We must take the law at 100% face value if we want the system to work how it is supposed to.

This doesn’t mean that the system is always 100% correct. Like anything there will be mistakes, but hopefully if taken in this fashion less mistakes overall will be made. That’s why I am still upset that I have to live with letting a murderer walk because the prosecution decided to charge him incorrectly.

I can’t remember the exact degree he was charged with but it broke down into “Defendant went to willingly rob victim and victim lost life in process”.

This man went to murder the victims first, and robbing was just icing on the cake.

That may seem like a small distinction, but it’s not. The entire prosecution was all about how Bill among others treated the victims — torturing them and then killing them, before taking the pounds of Marijuana in reward. Which was in an entirely separate location as well. There was even evidence of a meeting beforehand about murdering them and then robbing the drugs — at Shotgun Willie’s, a strip club in Denver. The case was a fourteen or so year old one that happened in the late 90s. I can’t remember why it took them so long to get a jury on it.

The trial went on for two and a half weeks or so and I was only paid $50 a day by the state, while still having to provide/purchase my own lunch. I’m lucky that I misunderstood how the whole thing works with companies legally and told my boss he had to pay me like I was working. He definitely wouldn’t have if I hadn’t, and he admitted as such.

During this trial I got to see and hear about things that I had some experience with, but these people went much farther, and lost themselves far more than I did. I can still see the maggots crawling throughout the victims’ faces after they were pulled out from under a ditch overpass on a county road — where they were disrespectfully and unceremoniously dumped.

I can still see the layout of the backyard where they pulled in an Atlas moving truck. Which was then used to transport the bodies to the disposal site. I can still see the shoes, duct tape, trash bags, and blood.

I can still remember being one of two or three jurors at the start trying to convince the entire deliberation that we didn’t wan’t him to walk, but the law stated he HAD to walk.

There’s such a dichotomy of emotions for me when it comes to this experience. Because there is a part of me that is so proud that I really stood for something I believed in, with a small group of others, and we made a difference.

Then there’s the fact that what we stood for was letting a man that all the evidence pointed to — was a murderer. A 100% arrogant, sociopath, scum of the Earth human with total lack of remorse.

Regardless, he was charged incorrectly.

It was not our duty as jurors to tell the prosecution what they should have done and then decide to find Bill guilty because that’s what we felt should happen. We needed to take this seriously, so maybe in the future the prosecution would think a bit more about what they were doing the next time.

Even during the trial itself it was interesting to me. I really felt like the prosecution thought they had the thing hook, line, & sinker before the horse was even let out of the gate.

The defense was made up of two older gentleman. One who was portly, sweaty, and often couldn’t tuck his shirt in to completion. The other looked of an aged crane, very tall and lithe with the most glorious beak of a nose you will find. Mr. Crane mostly took the lead in the proceedings and would often lose his place in his notes or his train of thought.

I believe this made the prosecution very complacent and they forgot exactly what they were supposed to be arguing for, because otherwise I am not sure how they could have chosen the course they did with the charge they went with. As I stated previously the entire prosecution was all about the abundance of evidence against Bill that his whole mission was to kill these people and then take their stash too.

So why charge the murder as if it was happenstance?

It just baffles me, still. The worst part is that the memory most emblazoned in my mind is Bill’s family walking out of the courtroom thanking us profusely. As if we had just saved their relative’s life, and that we did it from the kindness in our hearts.

Nothing about me felt kind, happy, or even correct. I think that might be what justice is supposed to feel like. I’m not sure justice is supposed to be something you feel good about. I do think it is something that is supposed to stick with you, though. Now when I hear or see about any kind of court proceeding with a jury I know what they are going through.

I have been both a criminal with the fear of a jury, and a juror with a criminal’s fear in my hand. Neither is something I want to recommend, but I do think that being a juror is a privilege, honor, and duty as an American citizen.

The larger meaning in this piece for me is that I am going to take it seriously every time. Whether it’s a traffic dispute or a murder, I want to treat it in the same way I would want my jurors to treat it if I was a part of the proceedings.

I hope you do too.

We could have just interpreted the law the way we wanted to, and given a guilty verdict. Philosophically though, where does that stop? How else could things be re-interpreted and looked at as a means to an end? I feel that’s a bit of a slippery slope to go down.

This is my burden. I may have let a murderer walk, but I didn’t compromise my values as an American citizen.

I’m pretty proud of that.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured photo by Katie Wood, ©2016

 

Posted on by Trevor Elms · 12 Comments

Care.

Something that people who know me closely are aware of — I generally don’t like people, strangers. I’m distrusting and they make me uncomfortable. Something that people who know me very closely are aware of — when I care about people I truly and deeply care about their well being and their life. I would in a split second give my life for them without question.

Today I am going to write about how I spent two weeks living on my friend’s floor to save his life from opiate detox, and how I don’t know if he is alive today.

This is another one where the person will not be named. For one, because if he is alive, I don’t know if he would want this story written about him or not. I would rather err on the side of respect. So this person will henceforth be known as Ben.

Ben is one of my very best friends. You’ll find I have a lot of them. Whether we are in touch or not they will always remain my best friends because I love them for who they were at that time, and whom they have helped me grow to become as a person.

My brother Alan is my other half, just like Megan. Two sides of the same coin. When I went to Hawai’i I had this very large void in my life that needed to be filled. I very much missed my big brother who at that time was more mature than me in a lot of ways. Ben filled that void extremely well. He really took me under his wing as a true drug user and distributor.

That last sentence is a bit sharp, and honest, but it’s also exactly at that time what I was looking for and what I wanted. I’ve already written about how I don’t like school, it was really hard for me to apply myself, how confused I was, and the fact I like to try everything once.

So, I decided the thing I really wanted to learn was how to make a living breaking the law.

Not the things my friends and I in Colorado were messing around with at the time. I’m talking weight, weapons, lack of personal welfare — and a willingness to lose one’s humanity.

That is probably as specific as I will ever write about those times. I honestly can’t even remember too many specifics, one of the worst things about it; or maybe best things. It just goes to show how deep I was into my substance abuse. I also just don’t remember a lot of things about that time because I’m still getting chunks back that were lost within my mental break with reality. Just recently a friend reminded me that the name of the tree we were always sitting under was a banyan tree. I have forgotten simple details like that.

This is about the thing that caused me to hold on to that humanity, and how I was able to see where I was headed if I didn’t correct course.

I still lost my mind after this, but I think the stress of taking care of Ben, and his business; as well as my own consumption of a concoction of substances from Meth to experimental hallucinogens like 2Ci — really compounded into what became my crazy spell. That puts it a bit lightly, but I was. I was absolute batshit crazy. I went to bonkersville.

Spending time with Ben meant I progressively didn’t spend much time with anyone else. I began to spend less time with my friends in our self-described Ohana, and Ben and I even hid from his roommates quite a bit with the door locked. Talking business, bonding over different substances, just in general being best buds. Brothers, so to speak.

Over this time I watched Ben who was never tall, but very stout — go from a very healthy looking individual shooting up a water solution of opiates into his anus, to a very frail — hardly ever lucid sack of skin and bones. A skeleton that wanted to physically assault myself and his roommates for taking and disposing of his terribly hidden stash of black tar heroin.

It was then that I began sleeping on his floor. Getting up any time he needed to release himself in any way, in any fashion, and help him accomplish that.

If I remember correctly his roommates helped him just as much, as I was still running around campus at times during the day and night; trying to close out a lot of Ben’s business. As well as get him out of the nonsense and debt he was putting himself in with the heroin. Classes were so far from a priority at this time that I’m not sure I went to a single one.

Shortly after Ben’s detox I remember one of his roommates getting a hold of family to get him a way out of Hawai’i in hopes to save his life. His room was empty, locked, and closed out but someone still attempted to break in at knife point to get some money from Ben. I’m honestly glad that I was really well known and friendly around campus, but in my dealings with Ben’s business I worked pretty hard to be quiet and not make too much of an impression. I think it may have saved my life.

I skipped ahead there a bit, but it was just to illustrate the kind of people Ben and myself had in common with at that time.

It’s​ this period that caused me to see what things other than alcohol can truly do to a person first hand. Someone who is close to me. Someone who I care about. I’m really glad that Ben had a huge stash of marijuana so that we didn’t need to worry about smoking at all. I’m really not sure he would have survived without it. Pot gave him great relief from the pain, fever, and convulsions that he needed to be helped through.

Nightmares with cold sweats, and absolute full body retching which would not stop no matter how empty his stomach was. It was living death and I never wanted to see anyone ever go through that again.

Not long after Ben left campus my friend Tony passed, and that was the nail in the coffin of opiates for me. I’ve been an advocate for marijuana over the corporate-fueled and socially accepted heroin that are prescription pain meds since. I was very close with people that it has hurt greatly. The two mentioned in this piece both started with 100% legal pain medication which is all too often shoveled into peoples’ hands without any afterthought.

Of course when I broke my shoulder years later I had a great time abusing my prescriptions like the addict I am.

No one in my family even gave it a second thought at that time, including myself. I’m not sure if we all thought I had gotten past it or not, but I very quickly went through two re-fills in a week. By the following week I was popping four pills as I woke just to take two more in an hour to actually feel it.

I think the greater meaning I have been looking for in this piece when thinking about caring for Ben is that:

Opiates are a really dangerous thing. Please be really, really careful with them. They, just like any other addictive drug — can turn an incredibly bright person into something very, very dark.

I really hope I never have to see someone go through that again, and that I never put anyone through something like that myself again. I am an addict, I will always be an addict. It’s something I strive to be better at every day just like my bi-polar. When I say that I am sober I mean from everything but alcohol and marijuana. Those are two things I feel like I have the ability to be a responsible adult with, and I feel like my current life has proven that.

The last time I spoke to Ben was not long after sending him a Facebook message to tell him that I was able to plead guilty on all my charges — and lucky to get five years probation on a deferred sentence.

His way of congratulating me was by calling to ask help him move some weight of Ecstasy through the mail from Hawai’i to California, where he was now residing.

He’s since disappeared from Facebook and I can’t find him anywhere. I do not know if he is alive, and truly wish him the best. However, it was the phone call that proved to me he was lost beyond all doubt.  I did not need to be in contact with him any longer if I wanted to make something of myself.

Thank you for all the support and love that was given to me during my recovery. Ben is the big brother I never want to be.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Photo taken December 13th, 2008 by Mariah C. Pictured w/ Kelli K. just days before mental break with reality.
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Kids.

I was feeling a little worn out again today. I thought, let’s take a break — it’s been over a week of me consistently putting out a good 1000 words. Legitimately the most consistent amount of writing I have been able to accomplish in my life. But it’s also not the first time I have been able to write approximately this many words in this amount of time.

I decided to go into my drafts and saw this picture. One of my very favorites.

My wife and I cannot have children in the traditional fashion.

I will not be going into the reasons why because those do not matter. What I am going to do today is write about what that loss means to me.

You see, I have never known what I have wanted to be when I grow up — except for a father. Since as early as five years old I can remember looking up to my Dad, wanting to be just like him, and wanting to raise a family.

My Dad has given me memories like lifting me above his head, just by his thumb.

I am also a very scientifically driven person when it comes to my intellectual beliefs about this existence and this lifetime. So I have spent my whole life wanting to continue the genes of my family and continue our line.

I was always either consciously or sub-consciously growing up looking for the person that I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and pro-create with. When I finally met Megan I knew I’d found her. Megan and I had a long journey together before even being official, but I knew from early on that I wanted my kids to be drenched in everything about her personality — and her physical traits as a human being.

So to find out that our child in no way will be 100% the both of us, no matter the path we choose — is the worst heartbreak I have ever felt in my life.

Sure, there is a chance for a miracle — with an almost scientific certainty it won’t because that number has so many zeros in front of it I could hit my word quota just by typing it out. This was the one thing I always knew I wanted. Through all my troubles and my confusion. It was constant — even when I thought I was Jesus Christ who had lived for 1000 years in some poor tenants house, I knew I wasn’t a father yet and wanted to be.

I now know I am completely capable of love no matter where the child comes from.

The picture featured in this post is part of the proof for me. I have been around my nephews and nieces for long enough now for me to consider them mine. I care about who they grow to become and care about being the best example I can be for them.

I would do anything, and everything for them to keep them safe and happy. And I know that I can do this for whatever child comes our way in the future too.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt.

One of the first things my psychologist told me when I first met him is that I deal terribly with loss. Insofar being that when I met him… I really didn’t deal with it at all. I thought I did, but much like a lot of things I was doing with emotions at the time I was just letting them be and putting them somewhere where they couldn’t “affect” me.

This is still a loss that I am having difficulty with, and it is why I am happy that Megan and I are taking until 2020 before we decide what to do moving forward. I’d rather now spend this time appreciating time with her, and the time and money that we have, without a child — since we cannot so easily have one right now.

I am a strong believer that everything happens for a reason.

Not that the reason comes from some divine force or third party with a plan, I believe that we find reason within the things that happen to us so that we can grow and push forward as people.

There’s a large part of me thinking in this moment that had Megan and I been able to have a child that I would not have started this website — and would not be accomplishing a dream of mine. I would be too busy being a dad, dedicating myself to a child and already working my fairly time and attention consuming career.

Many times in my life now I have been hit with something that isn’t fun. Every time I have picked myself back up from it and gotten stronger because of it. There’s a really cliché saying in there about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; what I have begun to learn is that these clichés exist for a reason.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

Megan and I have been making a lot of really good lemonade lately. Like the best kind. We have all sorts of travel plans for this year, tattoos, expensive dinners, buying cool things on a whim.

We’re just enjoying the things we have now — and not the things that we can’t have at this moment. We’re enjoying each other, and what we bring forth from one another. At this point, I’m not sure I’d even have it any other way. We can take this time to be as selfish as we absolutely want to. So when it comes time to do the most selfless thing any one can do,

We will be ready.

I think the larger meaning in this piece is that finding a purpose, and a meaning within the things that happen to us is in my experience what helps us grow more and become stronger as people.

I do not know how our child will come to us, but I do know that child will have more love than they know what to do with. That is a pretty cool thing to think about.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms.
Pictured from left to right: Trevor Elms, Lucas Miller, Derrick Miller
Featured photo taken by Megan Elms ©2014
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Friendship.

I want to preface this piece by saying that I have a good amount of friends and I care for them all deeply. Moreso than I can express. This is about one friend, though. The one whom through most length in my life has always accepted me for who I am and loved me regardless. Without him I do not know what I would do.

Not shortly after my mental break with reality I told my friend Alex Thiessen.

Alex Thiessen is not just a friend. Alex Thiessen is the closest and best friend I have ever had in my life. He is not the only person in this category, but he does have a category of his own within it. Just as each of my friends does.

Alex Thiessen literally owns a piece of me, and not by choice.

He is someone who I am uncontrollably myself around. Whom when we do not speak for days, weeks, or months at a time — it feels as nothing. We are the same as always. Like a rock in the sea. Life bashes against it and it changes over time, but in the end it is always the rock. Ever the rock.

It was not but 60 seconds into the phone call that Alex told me he was flying himself to Hawai’i.

You have to understand — I was a nineteen year old recently bailed out of jail/mental rehabilitation center dragger on, and he was an eighteen year old hard working, putting himself through college badass.

Friendship 3
Pictured from left to right: Neal Radia, Jack Russel, Kisa Vanderford, Austin Haigh, Trevor Elms. Photo taken by Neal Radia in the Lexus February 1st, ©2009.

Alex didn’t think twice about dropping everything to come and see me. And I didn’t have to wait long at all. If I am remembering correctly, I was able to pick Alex up in the used Lexus that was purchased with one of the last drops of my college savings — which wasn’t going to legal fees, less than a week later. That car was too good for me.

One of my favorite things about Alex is that whenever I get around him I just want to spend time with him. We were always using our imaginations and playing trading card games. We can talk about video games, Pokémon, comic books, really any kind of media that until recently wasn’t all that accepted in pop-culture — for hours.

Even though Alex and I are odd ducks that got into real trouble in our teenage years, we never got into any with each other.

I think, mutually, we never wanted to be a bad influence on each other and we never wanted our parents to dislike us spending time together. So when Alex and I spend time together, we spend time together. It’s almost like no one else is there, because honestly I don’t think in those moments they are.

I think something that people don’t understand about true friendship is that it is true love.

I have a relationship very similar to Alex that I have with my wife. I tell him everything. Everything. 

Friendship 2
Photo taken by Alex Thiessen in Honolulu ©2009

Alex is one of the friendships in my life where I have true love for him, and him for me. We always try to end the phone call by telling each other we love one another. There is nothing subtextually or overtly sexual, but I love Alex Thiessen with every fiber of my being. He is one of the greatest people I have ever gotten to know in my life and we have both helped each other improve as human beings over our time together.

The morning after Alex arrived, the first thing we did was take the car for a walk to go to the rental store.

I can’t remember if it was a Blockbuster or not but I do remember that we grabbed a few movies and video games. The games being Prince of Persia (2008), and Infinite Undiscovery. We also grabbed an unhealthy amount of junk food and soda.

This was further rehabilitation for me, support.

Something that I believe anyone from any walk of life who goes through a hard time needs. I had a lot of support from a lot of people, which a great many people unfortunately are not afforded — and that is a tragedy. There is a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy that goes on in a person like myself’s head & life when we do not seek and gain the support we need to function.

Alex’s support was exactly what I needed at that time.

I’ve been trying to find a meaning within the words to end this piece on and support is the word to focus in on. I could probably write 30,000 more words just about Alex, but I think being as concise as possible can more often than not get the point across most clearly.

Please support your fellow humans, you do not know who they are or what they have gone through.

I feel if we spend more time supporting one another and less time judging one another then maybe we can accomplish more than we already have as a species — and that is a pretty cool idea to think about.

Give a homeless person extras while walking to your car, give a glass of water to a person working in your home, give a person who looks alone just a little bit of your time and introduce yourself. Just a little can do a lot. I have seen it and experienced it myself.

Support and give to your fellow human beings, you never know when they need it most. Give them friendship. Give them love.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured Photos taken by Kathleen Thiessen & Edited by Trevor Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 11 Comments

Experiences.

I had a tattoo session recently where my friend as well as tattoo artist Jayce and I got to talking about all the stupid shit I signed myself up for as a kid.

We got to talking about this because I legitimately was about to jump into another stupid idea on a whim. Graham, another artist at the shop who I have gotten to know pretty decently over the last ~40 hours at All Sacred — made mention of something. He just blurted out while Jayce was adjusting his machine for going too fast –

“You should just do it. Check it out, get tatted with it going that fast.”

I responded without a second thought:

“Fuck it, why not? Let’s do it.” — though immediately pivoted and asked a pertinent question,

“Wait, if you actually try to tattoo me is it going to mess up the tattoo?” There is no stupid questions, only stupid answers — but I think we all know the answer I got to that question.

I told Jayce to just keep working on his stellar artwork and we’ll revisit the idea after the session, because I truly was interested.

I was interested because it was an experience I had not gone through before.

This is a very big part of my personality that I very much embrace within some bounds of personal safety. The motto “try everything once” is a creed I believe in.

I believe we can often gain wisdom and learn more through life experience than anything else. And the more we experience the more we can gain empathy and be able to put ourselves in one’s shoes.

Growing up I opted to do things like take an XL water balloon sling at full blast in the back — point blank.

I opted to to be taped in a cardboard box and slid down a flight of stairs, rolled down Niblick Dr. in a garbage can, as well as sled over a large cactus patch (we all did that one, multiple times).

My earliest memory of something like this — I don’t think I could have been much older than four or five. My cousin Kevin who is a little over a year older than me and absolutely brilliant, convinced me of a grand farce.

If I were to ride my Mongoose bicycle down my grandparent’s wooden stairs a magical fish would give me three wishes. I’m not sure where he got the idea of a fish, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter what he told me. All I needed was a cool thing to do and a reason to do it.

One thing I need to mention about the stairs, and this memory. They led to my grandparent’s driveway down a very acutely angled hill. The driveway is not very wide, and the stairs are perpendicular to it.

Did I mention there was a flatbed trailer on the opposite side and a partition of very old, very stoic pine trees behind that?

You can see where this is going from here. I ended up flying ass over handlebars across the flatbed to land softly in a bed of pine and branches. Thankfully young children don’t have much mass, so I got a scrape here and there as well as a way cool story.

Actually, how could I forget when my brother had me take the snow tube down the back of the house? I hit a log going at a decent whip and backflipped into an olympian-like landing.

I was two years old.

Story after story keeps popping into my head but I think I’ve illustrated enough here. This is a part of my personality that I now know I was born with. My experiences go beyond daredevil nonsense though, and that is just one of the extremes that I had the penchant to explore.

I want to share my experiences traveling the world and exploring different cultures from as early as five years old.

I think one of the greatest things my family ever did was move outside of the United States to live in Asia and discover the planet. My father took an opportunity to succeed and support his family in a promotion that meant he had to leave the U.S. behind — and he packed up his family with it.

This was in 1995 and he was working for PictureTel which was working on (and succeeding at) video conferencing over the internet before the majority of people even had it. We moved to Hong Kong and our lives were never the same. It was the 1990s, which I think in the future will be remembered a lot like the roaring 1920s. What I mean by this is when we moved to Hong Kong PictureTel didn’t just set us up there and that’s where we stayed 100% of the time.

PictureTel regularly paid for my father to take his entire family with him across countries and continents.

Places like Australia, Bali, the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines (though we couldn’t leave the resort), & Thailand. All before I turned 9 years old. I think there’s a couple more in there I am missing, but just those blow my mind when I think about it.

With those three years in my early childhood alone I had seen and experienced more parts of the world and more cultures than most people will ever get to. This gave me a level of wisdom about acceptance and tolerance for those different than me that is now just inherent in me. I cannot understand not being accepting and tolerable of those different than you. When it comes to race, religion, rehabilitation, gender, sexual preference, personality disorder, mental illness, learning disability, birth defect, or beyond. If it is not affecting another person directly, negatively, I believe “Live and Let Live” to be a commandment of life we should live by.

It is my thirst for experience that gives me a lot of happiness in life.

It has also handed me plenty of strife. However, the biggest lesson I learned from reading “What the Buddha Taught” is that Life is Suffering. We cannot have the good without the bad. We cannot feel what truly makes this world and this life beautiful without understanding and experiencing what makes it dark and foreboding.

That doesn’t mean you need my experiences. Everyone’s are their own. But we do need to try and glean as much knowledge and wisdom about our experiences as we grow so we can continue to learn from them. All of them, not just the ones we like to remember to make ourselves feel better.

The ones we remember whether we want to or not.

I leave you by repeating this:

I believe we can often gain wisdom and learn more through life experience than anything else. And the more we experience the more we can gain empathy and be able to put ourselves in one’s shoes.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Photo by John Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 6 Comments

I Am A Successful College Dropout.

This is not an endorsement, far from it. This is a part of my story.

I went to college for all the wrong reasons.

I went because I thought it was what I was supposed to do. Doing what you think you are supposed to do when it comes to your far-reaching life choices is just not something I would recommend. At some point we need to be selfish. Being selfish is not inherently bad; everything in moderation, right? So there is a time and place to be selfish — and what you do with your life after graduating high school is one of those times and places.

My Dad had recently moved abroad again, my Grandfather had recently died,

and I recently discovered how much I enjoyed experimenting with the different experiences that excessive drug use could exhume from the mind.

School was never my forte. Don’t get me wrong, I love to learn. I will read and study endlessly about the things that interest me until my mind is full. The public school system just never did well at making me feel engaged or that a majority of what they were teaching me was going to apply to my every day life. At least, not in the way they were teaching me.

I have known for a long time that I was going to make something of myself, whatever that something is, and schooling wouldn’t be able to take much credit for it.

There is a school I give a lot of credit, September School in Boulder.

However that is a time for another part of my story.

Because I don’t like school, and because my parents did well by themselves (and saved for college since my birth), I decided I was going to take an all expenses paid vacation. The only place I wanted to go was a place that inspired just about every fiber of my being while I was there. Both good and bad.

I chose to go the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and study as an English major.

My Dad had recently moved abroad again, my Grandfather had recently died, and I recently discovered how much I enjoyed experimenting with the different experiences that excessive drug use could exhume from the mind.

What I wrote earlier is very important to this decision, as there was something about Honolulu that no television, brochure, visit, or news anchor had ever mentioned to me once in my 18 years on the planet.

Honolulu is a very dark and dirty place, one of the seediest underbellies in the nation. Waikiki itself at night particularly — and nobody talks about it.

This was the perfect storm for what became my mental break with reality, subsequent legal troubles, and battle with mental health.

You’re going to get tired of hearing this, but that is a story for another time. I’m a successful college dropout, remember?

If we skip forward by about 2 years I found a job interview to get into the ground floor of an eCommerce paintball site, literally. It was in this guy’s basement.

I have been offered every job I have interviewed for, and this was no different. Interviewing is probably the single most important part of securing a job. Nobody cares what your resume says if you can’t function like a professional adult and present yourself as a confident person who knows what they are doing.

If you aren’t confident in yourself, how can you expect your employer to be confident you can do your job?

I was ecstatic to receive this job with no benefits and starting at $10/hr. At the time I was working in retail at an educational toy store for $7.50/hr +.03% commission. That number is not a joke. The catalyst for this new job was them reducing my pay by $.50/hr and giving me a commission rate that would make me have to sell 5 times the store’s paltry daily take just to make that $.50/hr back in commission. The store’s mission was great, the management was out of touch and incompetent and I felt like a high school kid in a high school job.

Hustle Paintball was the exact place that I needed to springboard myself into the career that I have now. I was able to do everything from shipping and receiving to order management, marketing, video recording/editing/writing, and graphic design. Graphic design was something I was always doing growing up on forums. In my early teens (00s) I was moderating and game mastering private online Lineage 2 servers. I was taking free commissions from randoms to design them signatures with any kind of imagery I could find at that time. I even have a really old Photobucket account lying around with some of it in there.

Being the guy who designed logos, banners, websites, etc. Really gave me the experience I needed after almost 4 years to feel like that is what I wanted to do with myself professionally.

No more 3 hour phone calls with no sales, No more shipping, No more front-end retail anything.

Just graphic design. The idea was a little daunting, but why not? A challenge was necessary. I wanted to see if I could hack it. Hell, I wanted to see if anyone would actually hire some dude with a high school degree and some college experience as an English major — with the audacity to call himself a graphic designer.

So like previously, which I neglected to mention — I had my wife (then girlfriend) and my wonderful mother comb through Craigslist for another job listing for me. There are some things I cannot very well apply myself to, and this is one of those things. I am so appreciative that I had their help at that time.

Another interview, this time much more thorough and professional.

We didn’t even start face to face. It all began with an email response asking me if I could schedule a phone interview. This is where my process about this became very important, I feel, and I could even ask my current co-worker and former boss that hired me to find out.

I responded to the email as quickly as possible with my open (unemployed) schedule at that point, we set up a time and I was excited. I didn’t look forward to it too much or think about it too much, I feel like that can mess me up. So I set my mind on other things until it was time.

The phone call went without a hitch. I am an introvert that absolutely despises the phone, I really dislike talking on it. There’s something about it that really fucks with me mentally and I am still unable to concisely put it to words. So despite that, I am able to very much ignore it for however long is necessary and present myself as I am, as someone who “wants” to be on the phone.

Brandi, the interviewer, ended the phone call telling me she was going to send me a graphic prompt to compare with the other candidates and she needed to have it from me by the end of the weekend.

She had it within the hour.

This was very important to me. I wanted her to know that I can work very fast when necessary but still provide quality work. That must have made an impression because here I am working at The Motorcycle Company as the Lead Graphic Designer closing in on 5 years later.

TMC is a Harley-Davidson Dealership group that manages 6 dealerships across the nation.

High Octane Harley-Davidson in MA

Palm Beach Harley-Davidson in FL

Rawhide Harley-Davidson in KS

Avalanche Harley-Davidson in CO

Riverside Harley-Davidson in CA

Huntington Beach Harley-Davidson in CA.

When I was hired by TMC they had just picked up their 3rd dealership (Avalanche) and were just starting to put together their dealership group because they knew it was only going to get bigger and harder to manage.

So again, I lucked into a situation at the very ground floor that gave me the opportunity to grow and succeed with the company.

I guess, the moral of this part of my story is that it is possible to be a successful college dropout. It just takes a hell of a lot of desire, starting low, working your way up by continuing to look for a better opportunity when it is time — and a dash of luck.

Make sure you learn to interview too. Legitimately, take an interviewing class. I took one in my senior year in high school and the lessons I learned were invaluable to me.

Don’t go to college just because you feel like you should based on societal, familial, or peer pressures.

If you are not ready, you are seriously not ready. It may just set you back a few years in other ways if you go when it isn’t time.

I don’t know if I will ever go back to school. I do know that I will be ready when I do.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 16 Comments

Waking Up Bipolar.

“I am not bipolar, no matter how many doctors have attempted to diagnose me with it.”

– Myself, February 12th, 2009.

I am going to use this as a bit of a writing prompt for how things change over time. How a person can grow up and come to realize that just believing in something hard enough, isn’t going to make it true. This is a part of my story.

I am not bipolar. That was a fact.

The thing is, I am bipolar. I just wouldn’t or couldn’t admit it to myself due to a sense of pride, or something larger. A feeling that after my mental break with reality that I could still be a normal person. It was just a one time thing, I could pick myself up and go on going on in life like everything was normal.

And I did, and it was — except for that it wasn’t.

After completing out-patient and probationary treatment I didn’t take anything or talk to anyone for my bipolar for years. I kept at my job and my relationships with my then girlfriend (now wife) and family continuing to find opportunity after opportunity to find work and succeed. To an onlooker from the outside looking in, I’m sure everything was normal. I’ve gotten good at that — normal.

It’s inside though. It’s the roller coaster of two very associative emotions that constantly feed into each other in the worst of ways. I do not have typical bipolar, you see. I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression. I still have moments of mania, but it isn’t as frequent or as unmanageable as BP1. This is an extremely important distinction. Typically, with a lot of the anger I would regularly feel — I had just gotten used to hiding it from the rest of the world, or, at least not giving in to it outwardly. This would result in absolute eruptions about the smallest of things. In fact, I had two nicknames growing up, one “Meat”, which sticks to this day and came around purely because I don’t consider a meal a meal without it. The other however is less endearing, “Angry Man”.

I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression.

Angry Man came around when all stamping of every little micro-frustration just couldn’t be stamped down any more. I would erupt at something as small as someone asking me to pick up my things. I can’t think of a great example right now, because usually in those moments I could only see red and I no longer am able to think or control myself before I speak or act. It got me in trouble plenty of times.

My depression is not as strong as some other people, thankfully. It’s fairly easy for me to “ignore” in a way without medication. I used to like to describe myself in two ways. I had two emotions to share: ambivalence, or anger. The ambivalence is my depression. I just didn’t care, and don’t care about life and myself sometimes. Like it doesn’t matter.

But then, things all came crashing to a head one day.

I can’t remember the exact day precisely, but I know it was about two to two-and-a-half years ago. It was about 3:00 in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. Then a thought crossed my mind that hadn’t in quite some time.

“I should just kill myself. I know I have the balls to follow through, why the fuck not?”

This was, if I am remembering correctly, after a night where Megan and I did not get along very well. I believe there was something trivial she did that set me off and then we preceded to escalate on each other. This is a low point in my life because I think I came very close to hitting her that night.

So that exchange, coupled with my inherent nihilism and depression fueled by anger gave me the thought. Why not? There’s plenty of reasons why not that I don’t need to get into here, and what’s nice is I had plenty running through my head just after I asked myself that question. However that is a very serious question to ask oneself, for that to be a serious thought after nearly hitting my wife? I knew something was wrong with me.

So I went into the bedroom to wake Megan up and tell her I was concerned about myself.

Talking about my concern turned into “I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”, but it wasn’t that clear. It was a different kind of eruption that I’m really not all that used to. An absolute deluge of tears and blubbering facial contortion while huddled in the fetal position grasping at my wife like lost child.

It was that night I realized that maybe my ambivalence was also me just stamping down my depression as well, and that was the first of what could be some very bad eruptions ending in the worst kind that affects everyone who loves us.

The next morning I looked into my health insurance and found a psychologist with good reviews nearby. I found someone who I felt based purely on a few lines of text and other superficial nonsense could mesh with me — so I went for it. I mentioned my suicidal thoughts and made an appointment as soon as possible.

When I got to see him we hit the ground running on those thoughts to find out the why, and evolved from there. In just a few sessions we did in fact settle on bipolar which I had been previously diagnosed with. However he was the very first to mention bipolar 2, cite its differences, and how they are relevant to my behavior in every day life.

“I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”

My psychologist who I am still seeing about 4 times a year then referred me to my psychiatrist who worked with me on the long journey over a year through about 5 pills to find the exact one that would work for me. This is an adventure to say the least, and I will say that my prior drug history allowed me to have a very quick grasp on how different medications affected me. It also gave me a very clear idea of exactly the type of pill I wanted.

I wanted something that I could not feel or tell was in my system whatsoever. Couldn’t even tell a change in my behavior at all, but I wanted everyone else around me to be able to tell. And I found it, Trileptal, Oxcarbazepine, my magical Yin-Yang pill.

Magical is entirely the wrong word and right word at the same time.

Pills are not a magical fix for everything, or even anything. They aren’t magical and especially when it comes to mental health they are a tool in a wide breadth of tools within the box for someone to use. They do not and will not ever fix everything entirely, but they should if used correctly help make it easier for the person to function and be aware of themselves. I was even lucky in that I knew what I wanted and it only took me about 5 pills to get there. I just hope it doesn’t ever stop working.

Pills though are magical in that I often am truly far more in tune with my body and mind and am balanced to boot. Balance is something I have always really had difficulty with, and I always will. The balance that Oxcarbazepine has helped me be able to find along with family support has really made me feel like I am finally in a space where living in tandem with and being open about my bipolar is a healthy thing.

I just need our country and the world to understand that mental illness isn’t a disease that keeps us from being human, or functional, or caring. If there was less of a stigma maybe people would get more help.  I believe there is a vast majority of people out there with mental illness struggling because they are afraid of how they will be perceived. I can assure you it is much more freeing and healthy to just accept it and try to find a way to work with it.

This turned out to be much longer than I was originally intending, but it is an important subject to me.

I believe everyone should talk to a therapist, they don’t even need to be a psychologist.

We as imperfect human beings need an unbiased third party to just dump all our head trash that we don’t want to burden anyone else with. It’s unhealthy to keep those things inside — they can develop into worse problems if not taken care of.

So to bring this back around to the beginning, I went from being staunch about not being bipolar to coming to and understanding years later that it is okay to be so. If you need help, get it. Sometimes even if you don’t believe you need it.

National Suicide Help Line: Call 1-800-273-8255

Please call someone, anyone if you are having suicidal thoughts. Sometimes just talking to someone can make all the difference in the world.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms

Shrinking Doubts.

This was written April 18th, 2009. I’m not entirely sure what decision I was writing about here, but I know it was one that I took that changed my life forever. It probably had to do with my budding relationship at the time as I used to use that for inspiration.

Shrinking Doubts.

So I teeter here,
at the edge of an endless cliff.

Toes, dangling ever so dangerously off the edge.
Every day, the place I stand dwindles down,
crumb by crumb.
Bringing the imminent plunge nearer by the minute.

I could leap in blind faith…
But it’s apprehension, uncertainty, and fear, that stills my fall.
Unfortunately,
it will only last so long.
Eventually, my fortress will crumble.

And the descent I would face?

Well, fate holds all the cards at that point.

©2009 Trevor Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 3 Comments

What’s Fair?

Written February 19th, 2009. This was not long after my mental break with reality and subsequent legal difficulties. Again, powerful for me to see where my head was at that time. It seems I was determined to learn from my mistakes and I am very happy that I did.

What’s Fair?

I’ve been told life isn’t fair.

Events have passed that seemingly?
Prove this theory with unbridled flair.
But,
I’ve also been told that suffering is a fraction of the path.
It’s overcoming these hurdles,
that sows greener grass.

Every waking moment reaps:
Torment
Agony
Fright
Wrath
All over what goes bump the night.

Hopefully?
The future I see when my eyelids shut,
stays a nightmare.

Losing one’s mind is not as fun as some think.
When I hear “Jinglebells”
It wanders to that incessant clink.

When reality is spun to creativity’s dimension.

Friends become foes,
words become sentences,
places… worlds.

When reality is spun to creativity’s dementia.

Living in fear it could all repeat now and between,
the night dreams became reality
and reality?
A dream.
Tormented forever.

And I’m only nineteen.

©2009 — Trevor Elms
Featured photo taken by Trevor Elms ©2009.