Michael Kimber is the author behind the blog, Colony-of-Losers.com where he discusses issues from job hunting to quarter life crisis, to mental illness. Check out his site here and our interview with Michael here.

“Dad, Derek is not like that. Hello!”

In my opinion if someone says hello it shouldn’t be a statement or a sarcastic comment.  As this sort of behavior only brings to mind the Clueless and doesn’t belong in my favorite coffee shop in Toronto. The twenty-year-old girl yelling at her father clearly disagrees.

Minutes pass and I tune her out.  I picture her as Violet in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, slowly turning into a rather rotund blueberry. In my imagination I kick her bouncy ball body off the walls of the coffee shop and everyone cheers.

Unfortunately the reality of the situation is a bit different. She yells at her parents for a few more minutes and then goes back to typing on her expensive laptop. The real world lacks the justice of Willy Wonka’s factory and no poetic Oompa Loompahs to dispense it.

Things should get better. They don’t.

This time a group of four female university students are discussing their desire to make a harm reduction website about substance abuse and how they might convey a feminist message while doing so.  They are doing this for a school project and have found a stumbling block in their burgeoning awareness campaign.

“Should we bring a poster with a marijuana leaf to the presentation?”  asks a twenty year old girl  who looks like Hayley Mills from the original Parent Trap. For those of you who don’t get the reference she looks like apple pie was a person.

“It is a website to help people with substance abuse,” says the girl sitting next to Hayley Mills.  She doesn’t look like a former child celebrity. She looks like a future librarian.  I can already see the nag lines forming in her cheeks, as if she were already getting ready to yell at students for disturbing the children who are actually reading.  “Do you think we should bring weed?”

I don’t know what the other two girls look like as they are sitting outside my line of vision and to get a proper look at them would involve craning my neck and exposing my interest in their conversation.

“I feel uncomfortable telling people not to smoke weed. I smoke weed!” says one of the two faceless girls. Her voice sort of sounds like a combination of a soul singer and a baby chick.  Deep for a woman but with a little chirp at the end of all her sentence like she wants you to see that she only punctuates her comments with exclamation points. “Blaze a jay, don’t use heroin.”

“Good point,” laughs Ms. Parent Trap.

“Is it?” I whisper to myself a little too loudly. Shit I have to stop doing that. Mumble something that makes it just seem like you are a weirdo who talks to himself. “Fucking Harper.”

“So should we bring the poster or not?”

“They are 14-18,” says the librarian. “I think we should focus on the issues.”

“I’d prefer to bring a rainbow,” says Hayley Mills. “Let the LGBT youth know we have their backs.”

“Good idea.”

“And what if they ask us about weed?” asks the chirper.

“We tell them the truth. It’s a plant and isn’t any more harmful than alcohol,” replies Hayley Mills. “It’s natural.”

I have probably smoked ten thousand joints in my life and wouldn’t say I’m particularly educated concerting drug abuse counseling for at risk youth. I can tell you that many of my friends in university prescribed marijuana for the common cold and that my doctor told me that being a pothead is terrible for anxiety.

A good friend of mine knows a great deal more. My friend Mick Ford, a recovering drug addict(Raoul from Cure Chapter#18) told me that the most difficult drug to quit was marijuana and smoking a harmless jay was often the trigger for him to go looking for more dangerous highs.

“We are going to tear apart CAMH,” says Ms. Parent Trap.  “It isn’t working.”

CAMH=Centre for Addiction and Mental Health for people not living in Ontario.

“They’ll think we are so fucked up. Just because we aren’t anti-party.”

“You can’t advocate abstinence,” says Ms. Parent Trap.

You are going to be pro-party in a room of recovering child drug addicts? When asked about the girl’s pro party policy Mick Ford had this to say. “I think that would be insensitive and dangerous, irresponsible, and block headed.”

Now they get to the nitty gritty of their awareness campaign.  Do they start a blog or do they start a Facebook group and invite kids to discuss it with them on Facebook?

“We need to face this problem with Facebook.”

Seriously. I’m not making this shit up.

They go over the terms for the FaceBook group they are starting for a few moments to find the least offensive language to describe their mission statement. They are eager to qualify the discussion as anti-homophobic, anti-economic discrimination and feminist and as totally open to all points of view.   They then argue for five minutes as to how they should describe the at risk youth.  They want to be inclusive so it goes something like this: This is a program seeking to promote awareness for male, female and trans at risk teenagers.  After deciding that trans shouldn’t be separated from male and female because a trans person could identify as male or female, they decide to go with at risk youth.

When the librarian goes to order a sandwich and café latte, her three friends comment that she smells and that it wouldn’t hurt her to use soap every once in a while. I realize how little I actually know about feminism.

“I don’t want to attack CAMH that much,” says the librarian when she returns from placing her order.

“They treat drug addicts like mental patients,” says Ms. Parent trap, pale blue eyes full of fury. “They don’t need a psychiatrist to prescribe them meds. They aren’t depressed. They are addicted.”

Treating drug addicts like mental patients?  According to my friend who works as a drug counselor most drug addictions can be traced back to untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And hey…what’s so bad about being a mental patient, Hayley?

“I’m going to work on the mission statement. It’s worth two points so I’m going to say two paragraphs?”

“Sounds about right.”

Beautiful. What if your perfect plea to drug addicted teenagers doesn’t fit in two paragraphs?

“I’m going to critique the shit out of CAMH,” says Ms. Parent Trap. “Abstinence doesn’t work. They aren’t there to be our parents, they are here to help us.”

Them. They are there to help drug addicts.

“Should I critique the CAMH website or the brochure?” asks the librarian.

“The brochure. Shorter.”

“I think I’m going to be pretty harsh.”

It may or may not be clear why I’ve decided to eavesdrop on this conversation rather than ignore it.  You might think I mentioned it because of their insulting tone when they discussed mental patients and once more Michael Kimber is championing his favorite cause.

Nope.

This is about me.  And only me.

Recently I posted a conversation I overheard in Starbucks where a man used the word gestalt, avante-garde and explained the imagistic sense behind his poetry during a single minute of conversation whilst wildly gesticulating.  My stenographic notes on his private conversation made some people laugh and other people question why I would bother to mock this absolute stranger. It was also pointed out that I’ve become somewhat of a spokesperson for self acceptance and being yourself in public. This guy was clearly just being himself.  Why the hypocrisy?

My initial reaction was fuck off.

I want people to accept themselves.  That doesn’t mean become some perfect version of themselves. Sometimes people really annoy me and I’m a writer so I figure I’m allowed to share my annoyance with the world if I believe they will find it amusing. Some also mentioned that I’m one of the public faces of mental illness in Canada and people may think all people with mental illness are assholes.

Seriously? It was one Facebook status update.  And if someone is ignorant enough to believe that I’m emblematic of 6,000,0000 people dealing with mood disorders in Canada every year then…well you should really talk to more people. I’m not everyone. Ask around.   And I’ve never really been representative of any group I take part in. And I was much nicer when I was fucked up if that helps anything. It took recovery to give me the strength to be a jerk.  When I was depressed I wanted to be perfect and thought every bad thought I had about other people was going to make God hate me even more.

So this isn’t about politics or mental health, this is about me. Why the fuck am I always so angry?   Often in songs people mention haters.  Sometimes I think I might be one of these people. Scanning the comment section on Rachel Black’s song Friday shows that my problem is not particularly unique.  People discussed the possibility of getting a time machine and using it to kill her family before she was born so as to never have had to hear her song.

I don’t want to become a person who leaves death threats on YouTube. I want to be a nice guy. Or at least a nicer guy.

I started thinking about what would happen if Starbucks guy read my Facebook post. How he’d feel and how unfair it was of me to write a piece on someone I don’t know in the slightest bit. Taking a tiny slice of his character and putting him on trial. I felt bad.

So I have decided to start a new recurring segment on the blog called Complicated Compassion.  In this section I will record events that irritate me and try to make an effort to understand the people that do so.

The first phase of trying to understand these girls is taking into the account that they are 20 years old and their blog is a school project.  At 20 years old I discovered a new theory of the universe each time I smoked a joint with friends. At 20 everyone was an idealist, just far enough away from high school to feel independent, just far enough away from graduation to feel like they know what they are going to do with the rest of their life.  They haven’t had enough life experience to have the opportunity to become a hypocrite. The world isn’t fucked up because it’s complicated but because corporations are destroying it and adults are stuck in their patterns. When your opinion is so easy to change, you feel like the world should be the same.

I remember drinking deep of God and Buddhism, of existentialism and Nietzche and letting these new exciting ideas get me baked out of my mind with possibilities. I suspect I was as intolerable as any other King’s philosophy student.  I didn’t see it that way. I remember trying to disprove NeoPlatonism as a useful concept to one of the foremost teachers in the field without having finished the assigned reading. Stupid? Yeah. But fuck it… I was 20 years old.

I’m 26 and have found newer and more exciting ways of being a moron. My specific brand of idiocy involves being annoyed at other people’s ignorance, forgetting that the only way to become a writer is to write 10,000 hours of bullshit and to become a grown up you have to spend a lot of years saying a lot of stupid shit that you are pretty certain is world changing and important and will eventually embarrass your older and somewhat wiser self.

Now I’m 26 and I’m still trying to change the world and often don’t understand the system I’m trying to change. I sent a letter to all members of Parliament urging them to provide more money to provide proper counselling to people suffering from mental illness. It took my friend Tim Nash explaining to me that the mental health system is governed provincially to realize that I should do a little more research into politics before trying to change the system.

The girls(young women) want to make sure that people become conscious of their choice of language so as to not discriminate against people based on gender, race and economic class.  I used to think political correctness was just a way to feel better about realities you don’t want to deal with.

Then I became personally affected by the unconscious use of language. I started to notice how many times people use the word crazy in a day. If you’ve talked with someone today odds are you said the word crazy and probably used it wrong. While most people aren’t using this term to talk about mental illness, it shows how mental illness is seen in the subconscious of society.

It’s similar to noticing how often our generation uses the word like. You ever started hating a person as you counted the number of times they used like in one conversation?  How easy it is to blot out every other statement if you just take a moment to hear like slip in and out like of conversation like Alicia Silverstone quietly having a seizure in your friend’s mouth.

Only it isn’t like that I am hearing but crazy. In one day I heard thirty people use it. And then I think of the people who train themselves to hear like every time it’s said. Depressed people who are psychologically predisposed to thinking the world hates them.

What they believe people think about them as a result.  And then I imagine a woman listening to men talking about sluts and bitches, whores and bimbos and wonder what little girls must think society believes about women when they grow up.  How important it is to be awake to the subconscious nightmare visions that run rampant through our language.  And it occurs to me what a difference we could make if we spoke with meaning.

I’m not saying they are speaking with anything approaching meaning or have a real awareness of what they are saying. I mean seriously they are talking about bringing a pot flag with them to a meeting with teenage drug addicts.

But they are 20 and no one stays that young. Maybe in a few years we might have some things to talk about.

I’m going to go do a loving kindness meditation and hunt out some compassion. I want to love myself and part of that is learning to love dipshits like this.

Namaste jerks.