This R.E.M. page, one of a bunch of them you will see on this site, is about that year, 1983, before I was diagnosed with BPD and after I had survived three terrible years on a ward called "The Behaviour Modification Unit". I believe "Dachau" or "Buchewald" would have been more appropriate titles for that den of horrors.

But, miraculously, I escaped somehow at the end of 1980 and for the next six years worked at Goodwill Industries, a sheltered workshop that hires emotionally, physically and mentally challenged individuals and pays them under the minimum wage but offers us at least an opporunity to have a job when nobody else will hire us.

Well, during 1983, I was working at one of Goodwill's Thrift Shops, doing cash register work and selling clothes, shoes, books and anything else donated by kind folk to keep us in business. When at a Ploughshares meeting,(I was violently opposed to nuclear war and had joined that organization that year to engage in civil disobedence) a friend there lent me his copy of Murmur", and from the first song, I was hooked. Somehow, Michael Stipe seemed to know what I was going through emotionally, being unable to find "real" work, suffering from an illness that had had so many wrong diagnoses, and just vacillating.

Thanks to Michael and "Murmur", I got through 1983 relatively unscathed, with no trips to the hospital. It was the only year since 1977 that i wasn't in and out at least every couple of months, and the only one since.

This ends Part One of my "R.E.M.-Inspired Chronicles".

This ends Part One of my "R.E.M.-inspired chronicles.