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Thunderstorm Rainfall in New London
Leala Daigle

I love the rain. It helps me find the bones of people buried in shallow graves, and how it was never my intention to upset them.

"You can't tell your story"

"It may upset someone."

All these people with their hurt parts buried in shallow Graves.
And I am to blame for the bones.
The rain never apologizes, when it monsoons down in India, it just pours, it doesn't care if you are ready for it or not. And that's like me, unmerciful in my pouring as I watch my rain wash your shallow grave.
I will keep raining.
I will keep pouring.
I will keep telling my story.

And it's not until I am ready to be done,
that I will stop.
You cannot shout at the sky to force the Gods to stop my rain.
What business do you have laying in a shallow grave anyways?!
Blocking me from telling my story?
Years of pain,
Demons not slayed
Making you insane
Enough enough!
Shush now!

I need to hear the drum roll, on the metal top of the Mason jar I use to put birdseed in...
I need to hear the rain to tell my story.
Can't you see the beats are stanzas,
And I am sorry if you fear it,
But I will not stop.
I love the rain.

BIPOLAR in AMERICA: How I Got Banned From My Father’s Funeral
J.I.B.

To properly illustrate the point I hope to make here today, I have to tell you about my father, John K. Bush:

An orphan. A derelect. A drunk. A friend. A cockroach. A survivor. An un-medicated bipolar. A Veteran. A soldier of many wars, all inside his own mind and body. A fucker of many women. A failure as a father and husband (multiple times over). Banned from every bar in town (multiple times over). Jumped in every alley (multiple times over). He built a house for his second wife, and when she kicked him out, he came back, drunk, hammer in hand. He had come to rip the house apart, starting with the floorboards. His logic: You always leave a place the way you found it. Later, at the court hearing to determine whether he would maintain his parental rights over my half sister, he strangled her prospective adoptive father, before the judge, Jesus, his ex wife, his daughter and the bailiff. The outcome of the hearing was predictable.

Not long after that, I was conceived (reportedly in a Big Sandy SuperStore). My mother, a freshly 19 year old high school dropout, jobless, living with her mother (hence fucking at Big Sandy). My father, a 30 year old, couch hopping bass player, trying to put a rock band together, who’s rights as a father had already been stripped by the state, on account of his drunk, outlandish, and sometimes violent behavior (mentioned earlier).

John K. Bush drank to access every day of his life, from the time he was (by his estimation) 12 years old (or younger, he started at 10), and smoked up to 3 packs of Pall Malls a day. He stopped only after his 3rd (of at least 6) strokes, having lost his ability to speak with validity, or get out of bed without assistance. The take away - while losing his children wasn’t much fun, losing his ability to skillfully run his mouth (which he was remarkably good at) and wipe his own ass was the final straw. Then the 4th, 5th, and 6th stroke took place. There may have been more. The damage to his brain proved too extensive for medical science to measure without dissection. Somewhere between the 3rd and 4th stroke, he said what might have been the last (remotely) coherent words he ever spoke. He said them to me (imagine that). At first I thought they weren’t intelligible enough to put in this column, but I decided to give it a shot:

He said Son, I used to get the Johnny Deep treatment too. People used to hang on my every word. Then I shit the bed with your mom. I’m sorry I shit the bed with your mom. I’m sorry. I shit the bed.

Before the strokes, and despite his drunkenness, he was a passionate speaker, with a solid vocabulary, and a wit as sharp as the edge of a box-cutter. He deserved a better deathbed speech than that.

By the time the 6th (or 7th, who the fuck knows? They never dissected) stroke, he was a drooling husk, to put it nicely. When I asked the doctor what all was wrong with him, she looked at me as if the question exhausted her. As if I were a stupid person for asking, or at the very least, that the answer should be obvious (even the sounds he made oozed of sickness). She told me something I already knew, and had always known. Something the various adults in my life told me repeatedly as a child. They said it as if they were apologizing to me, on his behalf. They were his representatives. The doctor (his final representative) told me that my father was a deeply unhealthy man, and there was no help for him.

On top of his (at least) 6th strokes, he had a bum heart, bum lungs, dying kidneys, cancerous blood, bloody piss, and a liver as hard as a brick (the list continued). The sickness my mother, grandmother, and all of his friends had always told me about (and warned me I might inherit) had transcended his mind, and not only entered his body, but invaded it. Became it. Studies and statistics say this is far from unique, in fact, it’s the norm. If a mentally ill person doesn't perish at their own hands, via slitting their wrists, jumping off the bridge, or off a balcony, jumping in front of a trunk, setting themselves on fire in front of the V.A. or Social Security Office (a few methods John K. Bush had threatened to use in his lifetime), they often suffer physical symptoms related to or caused by their psychological issues, many of which lead to shortened life expectancy. And that’s before mentioning addiction (if you want to argue addiction and mental illness are two different topics, this column isn’t for you). Make no mistake, whatever actually killed my father, it was merely the bullet. Addiction and mental illness murdered this man. And maybe he was an accomplice. More witnesses than you could subpoena. More than you’d want to.


I won’t go into a long, predictable diatribe about nature versus nurture. What separates a healthy, well adjusted, neuro-typical adult, and people like me and John K. Bush (wild animals, backed into a corner). I will say, either way you look at it, nature or nurture, I was fucked on both fronts, and so was my father (and if you’re reading this column, there’s a solid chance you were too). I’ll also say this, regardless if it’s nature or nurture, if it’s learned behavior, or if I was fated to be a raving, pain filled maniac from birth, me and John K. Bush have/had a lot in common. Both of us are (or were) loud, expressive, unpredictable, impulsive, grandiose, unmannerly, disruptive. All to excess. All to a fault. And we come from a long line of men who behaved likewise. A long line of hard partying, whore mongering, loud mouthed men, who lived unhinged, and often, if not always, destructive lives. Sick men. As if sickness was part of the very blueprints of my entire bloodline. As if my family tree grew from a crack in the sidewalk, only to cut itself down. The end built into the beginning.


Like my father before me, I have lived a reckless life. A few standout examples include getting married to a women (19 years of age) I knew a grand total 23 days, and relocating to a new city with her (we were both unemployed), or getting into physical altercation with a bigoted preacher (armed with a camera and megaphone) on my college campus, nearly earning myself an assault charge, and a threat of dismissal from the Dean of SSU (it was live-streamed and I was undoubtedly the aggressor), or attracting enough attention in my local art scene to be investigated by the Portsmouth (Ohio) police (they suspected me of domestic terrorism, I was put on a federal watch list, labeled an easily radicalized person). And of course, as the title for this column suggests, I was banned from my fathers funeral. The following is my justification (I always have justification. I get that from my father):

The D.W. Swick Funeral Home in New Boston, Ohio (look them up, I don’t care) failed to file a Death Certificate, despite Ohio being the only state in the country to have a stream-lined, same-day Death certificate filing process. They also wouldn’t so much as open an email, containing his obituary, until they received a $3000 down payment. The thinkers of the world will tell you the nature of almost all tragedies is that the “hero” of the story could have avoided destruction, but didn’t. Personally, I don’t think I stood a fucking chance.

After about a dozen emails, where I insulted the funeral director's intelligence, competence, morality, professionalism, the ethics of his industry, a 10 minute phone conversation took place, between me and the director. Well, maybe it wasn’t a conversation. Maybe it was a shouting match. Maybe it was an armed conflict. I can’t remember how it started exactly, only that both parties wanted a fucking apology, and an earnest one. Neither party was going to be happy by the end of the call. It ended with me telling him to take his fucking money and do his fucking job, or pay someone else to do it for his “worthless, lazy ass”, followed by him telling me that it wasn’t about money “young man”, it’s about how I talk to people. I told him it was about money, and that his whole business model was built on shaking down widows for their social security checks. Then one of us told the other to go fuck himself. Then one of us threatened to call the cops if the other stepped foot on his property. You can do a little guess work on who was who.

I’m tempted to tell you, the point I’m trying to illustrate is there is no point to illustrate. That there is no sense or reason to any of this. Just action and reaction. That the end is built into the beginning. Nature/nurture, genetics/ learned behaviors, doesn’t matter, either way, “healthy” human adults, or sick men, or sick people, or wild, cornered animals, determined to attack. We are products of our environments. We behave according to our natures, or based on how we were taught to behave, or a (often deadly) combination. And in the end, even that distinction means nothing. Hurt people hurt people. We have less control of what we do, what we are or who we become, and how we act than we like to think we do. We are fated. Some of us are just pain filled animals, ready to attack. No running away from it. I’m tempted to say that, because it frees me from responsibility for my actions (and my father from his). It would be easy to look at the vast collection of my faults, failings and mistakes and say Well for fuck for sake, what do you expect. I am my fathers son, after all.

I won’t let myself off that easily.

My father could have cleaned up his act before he died (if you shit the bed, you clean your sheets). I can clean up my act too. I hope I do. Truth is, there is a point to illustrate. Us wild animals can wash and comb our hair, file our teeth down, put on pants. In fact, it’s our responsibility to. I want to take responsibility. I don’t want to sleep in my own shit.

Follow can follow him at J.I.B.