In August of 2006, I was unknowingly in the midst of a huge manic episode. At the peak of my mania, the night I crashed and burned, I ended up being locked up in jail (and it was a very crazy few hours in jail) by the LAPD after a fist-fight at a down-town Los Angeles hotel.

 

The police were callous, as well as unequipped to see that I was in the grip of a serious medical condition.

 

Because of my experience, I came to the conclusion that an organization as large as the LAPD is inherently too complex to perform its function "to protect and serve."

 

The night after I was released from jail I spent in a locked psychiatric ward, where, despite intense fatigue I wrote eighty odd pages of poems and essays, including one which attempted to capture my idea that nothing that is complex can ever be whole, and that in attempting to break me, the LAPD had inadvertently led me towards a greater sense of my own wholeness.

 

Since then I've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. which is been under complete control, as I write this (Jul 2008), for eighteen months.

 

The poem I wrote, called Broken Whole, is embarrassingly grandiose (since I was very manic when I wrote it); nonetheless it stands as a record of my state aof mind at the time.

 

Keith