Amending the piece from 2007, May 26 of that year.

What happened was this.:

The plan on the part of the person heading up Jackson County's social workers was that we would, all 8 of us, be exposed to the wide variety of clients so we could try to see where we might be of most benefit to the system, where we might like to be of assistance to those in need of us.

Well, no one could have ever bent me into the kind of a being who could have done that job for more than 2 weeks, I guess, from this remove. In any event it didn't happen on the first try and I am nothing if not ready to give up immediately on a task doomed to abject failure gilded with complete frustration.

///// the training coordinator was the wife of a guy who was active (local to that town) in theatrical circles. This is a pointless aside. Which is neither here nor there to the fact that Bill and Lois dosed my pea soup with LSD.

I repeat, but just for emphasis, this: The pea soup that attended the sandwich they gave me during lunch which we had in Bill's kitchen, after which they showed me the computer set up he had in his basement, the pea soup was laced with LSD.

So, what happened was that once we got back to work that day which interestingly enough happened to be Friday the 13th; was this: What happened was that by one o'clock the world seemed to be rapidly changing much to my discomfort.

{(second pointless aside:(O'Clock, why is it that no one has to my knowledge, has ever thought to make-up a nice fictional Irish family name of O'Clock, I wonder.)}

On that particularly fateful day in my life, while I was sitting at my desk dividing the number of dollars in my social worker trainee salary ($7,000. / year) by the number of people on my potential case load, (I can't recall, now, the exact number but say it was 30 to 50 people.)

I arrived at the figure of how much each person might be awarded in lieu of my being paid my salary, given that they might award it to them directly rather than awarding it to an overworked person like me, without a calling in that particular direction but only a deep desire to follow the path of the artist I had unwittingly become in my studies. A pretty trippy notion, would you say? Well I would say,and the fact was that I was, I was, I really was, I was trippin my brains out. The only sensible thing I could think to do at that moment was to quit that place for good.

It was the last day of my second week on the job and I couldn't help myself, I needed very badly to get the hell out of there.

So I wobbled over to the department manager's office as he sat at his desk and, inside marveling that no one stared at my internal state, in as few words as I could muster I told him that I was not feeling well and needed his permission to leave. This he granted me.
I did leave on shakey legs, my vision becoming more like an odd movie every second. Shades of pastels washing the sunny Michigan light like some kind of watercolor was bleeding into my eyes distorting my view; forcing a kind of exaggerated concentration on the task of gathering myself and my effects together to make my escape, as everything began to swim slightly before me.
My car seemed to go of its own accord, the world seemed to fly past me as I drove from Jackson to Lansing, then East Lansing, Michigan and home.

I spent the next several minutes ( each of which that seemed like hours ) driving home, changing into my swim suit and lying in the hammock outside in the front of our house, within the visual protection of a thick hedge that surrounded our small front yard. The sun through my eyelids made patterns that were transfixing. I laid back and tried to remain calm.

My eldest son at the time was 13, my youngest was about to become 4 years of age in August a bit less than 6 weeks away. One was at school the other safely in the care of his paternal grandmother, I was 20 days short of my 29th birthday.

So, while going up on an extreme acid, (LSD takes about 30 minutes to begin to take effect, and during this time I was busy doing simple math tasks at my desk after lunch for no earthly practical reason I can fathom at this late date, other than to say that I was not so interested in being a social worker after having been introduced to a range of areas from which we were told we could declare a preference, my preference under the influence of LSD was that they just give my salary to the client list and leave me to go home and make art if I could magically manage to swing that sweet, unpractical dream.

That week-end was torturous. I had lost my mind and I had no idea how it had happened. I was terror struck.

I just recall that come Monday I called in and said I would not be back and that was that.

It was a very painful decision but it was one of the first choices that led to some kind of a cold empty world for me, I was feeling pressure to get a job by my husband and his family who wanted me help to bring in an income to support the household or to become somehow more well endowed than we were in our lives at the time. He was spending a steady amount on alcohol back then which was affecting his judgment and I was unaware of how negative an effect it was having on our relationship.

I only wanted to make art, that's all I knew, and I also knew we had two young men to raise, one rapidly growing through his teens and the other hot on his heels at less than a third of his age. My responsibilities weighed heavily on my shoulders, my husband,too, struggled against the demands of family life, he was an immature alcoholic 2 and a half years younger than myself who had no idea what he wanted out of life.









2007-05-26 8:24 PM
About Them Drugs; Slippery System Stuff

O.K. You're not going to believe this anyway but here are the facts:

It was June 15, 1969 and I had just graduated college in March of that year.

Some weeks or months previously I had applied for the Social Work Trainee 07 position with the State of Michigan Social Services Department. My scores were high enough to get me a job in Jackson, about 45 minutes south of home. My spouse did not want to carry the load of financing a home for myself and my two sons, he was more interested in Dinky Toys, Car races, reading for escape and growing up. I felt stuck and there seemed no way out of the burden my family had become in my aloneness against the world. I wanted a divorce, I wanted a man in my world and there was only a third child in my home, my mother was gradually being consumed by the cancer that took her eventually away from me, my only personal support was failing and I spent my days in as much denial of my own discomforts as would allow me to keep on keeping on.

The first week in my short social work career was busy with introductions to the staff and the new hires which numbered about 8 or ten. Then, during a break, Bill, the General Assistance guy who was the one who disbursed emergency funds for those in sudden need asked us during a morning coffee break if any of the bunch of us trainees had ever tried LSD.
A few volunteered that they had tripped on acid and I said no, and that I wasn't interested in trying it, ever. Later I will tell you about the extra credit experiment I had taken part in for a psych class in previous years. Long enough ago that I had forgotten it entirely, but for the fact that it had been where I had first heard about LSD.

He next asked us if any of us had any collections. I volunteered that my husband collected comic books and toy cars but that I didn't collect anything at all.

What an odd pair of questions to ask us. I couldn't figure out what he was up to at all. So I asked why he wanted to know if and what we might be collecting. He answered that when people collected stuff it was a mark of a certain kind of sophistication. Maybe he was just trying to stimulate conversation, I don't know.

In the middle of the second week Bill and another senior case worker, who called each other close friends, invited me to go to his home and have lunch. She was the person to whom I had been assigned for orientation to their agency. Her job was to give me an overview of the work loads available, to show me the different areas from which I was to get my case assignments.

She introduced me to the range of needful cases. We visited the elderly, non-support mothers, institutionalized individuals and there was some discussion of there being a great need for people who could work with abused children Many of these were being taken from their homes and placed in foster care.

We did go to his home for lunch that Friday. They showed me his computer set up which was located in his basement. The year was 1969, mind you. Not just everyone on the block had a computer in those days, it was a kind of specialization that was indeed quite rare among the general population.

I didn't mention, did I, that Bill was a short, very black, Afro-American man. His friend and my temporary supervisor, Lois, were an odd pair of ducks, and to this day it gives me the creeps to bring them to mind.

Lois was very soft-spoken with a breathlessness to her speech patterns that was very marked in intensity. She always sounded as if she had just run a mile, or that she had just hurried up a couple of flights of stairs. Her hair was very curly and red, which, of coarse, was paired with a billion freckles that covered her face and limbs.

More of this later.


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