Summary of Part I: What the hell happened to Zion?

"A wise man learns by the mistakes of others, a fool by his own."
-Latin Proverb

It would be very easy to sum up all of the previous twelve chapters by simply saying "Zion went nuts, did a bunch of fantastically stupid things, ruined his life and then killed himself over it" and saying that wouldn't even be far from the truth. But I feel simply leaving things at that would be a major failure in one significant way: It would allow people to continue to spread misinformation about what truly happened to Zion. For that reason I provided these previous twelve chapters and this summary to make sure the entire world can have access to the truth and not be forced to subscribe to the party line that he was killed by a mental illness. Zion was not stabbed in the chest by some kind of psychological boogie man or gunned down in the street by a passing thought. Zion killed himself and he did so only after a series of easily preventable events wrecked his life. If we dismiss these events as the result of a mental disorder then we run the risk of allowing them to happen again.

First of all, I think it needs to be said that Zion had some very unusual religious and spiritual beliefs, particularly when it came to the subjects of magic or god. I won't pretend to understand what all of his opinions on this subject were but I will do my best to try to cover them in brief here. However Zion did not tell me very much on this subject. In the same way that he would not disclose his use of marijuana to someone unless he was convinced that they would accept it and would instead attempt to mislead those he assumed wouldn't be accepting of it, I think Zion reacted in a similar fashion when it came to sharing his opinions on magic and religion. He knew I had strong opinions of my own on this subject and for that reason was very cautious in what he would and wouldn't share with me. Officially he presented himself to be Jewish, but from the few conversations we had about religion I do not think that was what he truly believed in.

When it came to magic, I think he knew that most people who advertised themselves to have magic powers were just idiots trying to pretend they knew what they were talking about when they really didn't have a clue. When Zion and I were in school togeather it was the "in" thing at the time for goth kids to talk about a form of pagan witchcraft called "wicca" which is really just a bunch of bullshit. There was a clique of kids at our school who were into wicca and Zion and I regularly harassed them for it. One day this dumb girl named Julie brought "The Book of Shadows" to school with her and Zion stole it from her then made up some non-sense about how he used magic to make it disappear (it dissapeared into a dumpster if I recall corrently). On another occasion our class was at a park down the street from the school for some reason (not learning anything because it wasn't a very good school) and some kid named Terry Ivy was telling Zion that he had mental powers over people. Zion and I had already pre-arranged a prank to handle this situation. When Terry started bragging about his powers, Zion was going to snap his fingers. I was standing on top of a small hill about 15 feet away casually watching the conversation. When I saw Zion snap his fingers I suddenly let out a huge war cry and charged down the hill as fast as I could. Terry was so shocked that he made no attempt to get out of the way when I tackled him into next week. After the cataclysmic tackle, I stood up and pretended to be confused and acted like I didn't know how I had gotten from the top of the hill to where I was now. Terry was so angry that he clearly wanted to punch someone but didn't know if he wanted to punch me or Zion, so he finally just stomped off looking embarassed. Based on pranks like these I can only guess that Zion was well aware that most people who claim to have magic powers are actually just trying to be popular but don't seem to know they are just making themselves look foolish.

But even as Zion was helping to mock these foolish people who rightly deserved to be mocked I think he also had a lot of other friends who believed in magic or other unusual spritual belief systems. I can only assume that these people were more professional in their presentation of their beliefs and that Zion, being somewhat of a liberal, must have been accepting of these people and their beliefs. And I think that over time their opinions about magic may have begun to rub off on Zion and that he may have started to take an interest in it. Then Zion made what I feel was the biggest mistake of his life: He started dating the dark rainy miasma emo bitch drama queen Ari. I know for a fact that she beleived in magic because Zion told me so himself and even once showed me some of her extremely creepy "poetry" where she talked about how dark and awful the world was. This girl was into some really freaky stuff. Now, I don't think that alone is anything to panic over. A lot of teenagers go through a "pagan phase" when they are younger where they get all angsty and invest all their money into tarot cards, weegie boards, books of shadow and other such non-sense. But most eventually outgrow it as they get older and start to catch on to how silly it all is. Then they throw away their tarot cards, start going to church again and remember how much easier life is when you aren't trying to convince yourself how dark and miasmic everything is. Sadly though, Zion didn't live long enough to ever outgrow this phase after Ari and these other friends of his had dragged him into it.

And I think at this point it bears mention that I believe Ari was an abusive partner. That isn't to say that she was physically abusive, she didn't punch or kick Zion to the best of my knowledge. But she was emotionaly abusive. Ari was an exploiter. She used other people to serve her own needs and then discarded them. Being a rather attractive young woman she probably discovered early on in life that her sexuality was one way to accomplish this. You will recall in chapter eight when Zion said in an email that he found out Ari was dating three guys at once and starting fights between them just to boost her ego. She then dumped all three of them to go out with Brian Powers because she met him on a bus and he made up a story about being a "homie" of Zion's. This was the way Ari treated men. For her they were just a way to make her feel better about herself. I think this was also the way she treated Zion. When Zion was dating her and was attentive to her, she acted like a halfway sane person. But when Zion announced his intention to go to Amherst she flipped out, demanded he marry her and even made fake suicide attempts to get attention. This sort of drama behavior was clearly not helpful for Zion's situation.

Then there is Amherst. This is where the you-know-what really hit the fan. Zion was the kind of guy who always took on way more responsibility than he was able to handle. That was one of the things we always argued about because when he became guild leader I stressed the importance of devoting enough time to make the guild work but he was always convinced he could get away with spending only a few hours a week on the guild while he spent most of his time on other things he considered more important, like bowling. Yes, Bowling. In high school he was famous for inventing new extra-curricular activities and was then expected to use his own personal time to manage them. The one that annoyed me the most was bowling because it was a common excuse he used to not spend time on the guild because he was going to be at the bowling alley with the bowling club that he invented for no other reason than to brag that he ran it. I actually played a rather entertaining prank on his bowling club because of this but that is a story for another time. The point is that Zion was always obsessed with taking on responsibility but he took on so much that he never had time to do anything properly. He was always scrambling to do things at the last minute, putting things off because he simply didn't have time and for most of his life he slept only a few hours each night because he didn't even have time for sleep. College is a fairly huge responsibility all on its own but when a person like Zion goes off to college and then begins to try to operate the way he did in the past he ended up with WAY too much responsibility for any one person to ever hope to handle.

But that wasn't the end of it either. The situation heaped even more stress onto Zion after that. I covered all the various events that went horribly wrong for Zion in chapters six though nine. The obnoxious behavior of Ari probably tops the list, but there was the Brian Powers incident as well (also Ari's fault), the fencing club issues, his sister keeping him from getting the job he wanted, his parents accusing him of using cocaine (which I'm fairly certain wasn't the case) and who knows how many other problems he didn't even have time to mention. That sounds to me like a hell of a lot of stress for any one person to try to handle at once.

And that was the point that it all came crashing down. The incident with the campus police was really the beggining of the end. In chapter ten there were several important comments I asked you to make note of. Do you remember what they were? In three different versions of the story about what happened to Zion at Amherst, the time frame of two weeks was quoted as the start of Zion's abnormal behavior. The first was in Zion's original story which denied any unsual activity but he admitted to having insomnia for two weeks. The second was in Zion's "real" version of events where he claimed that his first contact with the Golden Dawn was two weeks prior to the incident with the campus police. The last was when Zion's ex-girlfirend Hannah confirmed the two week time peroid for the start of his abnormal behavior. Now, if two different people in three different versions of the incident described the same time peroid for the start of the unsual behavior then wouldn't it be safe to assume that part of all three stories is true? I believe that it is and I think using this two week time peroid we can determine that there was a specific place and time when Zion very suddenly changed from himself into a totally different person. Hannah expressed the opinion that this change was very sudden and I agree, also adding that it was apparently quite permanent as well. After that Zion was never quite the same person I knew from before.

Now, taking that information into account lets look at the "official" story for what happened to Zion. The so-called "experts" claim that Zion had Bi-Polar Disorder. Does that make any sense? No, it doesn't. Bi-Polar describes a person who suffers from constant ups and downs along with regular personality changes. I knew Zion very well for many years and I can tell you he did not have Bi-Polar disorder. He was a very colorful character but he did not have extreme ups and downs nor did his personality change on a regular basis. He pretty much picked one extreme and stuck to it. In addition these trendy new disorders that doctors love to label people with are supposedly conditions that victms are born with and have for most of their lives. But this doesn't describe Zion's situation either. What happened to Zion came on very suddenly and afterwords seemed to be permanent. Unless these doctors are now going to change their story and claim that Bi-polar is contagious disease which you can contract overnight like a cold then I think this evidence also points away from Bi-Polar being a possibility.

So, its my opinion that Zion didn't have Bi-polar disorder. I believe he had some type of nervous breakdown due to all the stress he was under. He did what he always did, he took on too much responsibility at once, had too many social problems and also had to put up with the bizzare behavior of his girlfriend Ari who was harassing him. One day he just couldn't take it anymore, his mind snapped under the pressure and he fell into a fantasy world to hide from it all. And because of all the "magic" mumbo jumbo that Ari and other "friends" of his had planted into his head, that was the fantasy he fell back on. At this point I'm sure there are many people who subscribe to psychology as if it were a religion who are reading this and would like to know why I'm more qualified than the doctors who treated Zion to issue a diagnosis like this. Well I give you one good reason: Those doctors didn't KNOW Zion. They weren't friends with him for YEARS like I was. They didn't talk to his friends and family. They didn't have the time and resources to invesitgate what happened to Zion before he was brought to them. All those doctors had to go on was the story the cops gave them when the police dragged in a beaten up teenage kid and said that he was crazy. On top of that you have to factor in that Zion was being held there aginst his will. He was a prisoner. And he was a habitual liar. Those doctors couldn't possibly have expected to get the truth from Zion. But that was all they had to go on. All they could do was talk to Zion and make a diagnosis based on whatever lies he told them. Under those conditions how could ANYONE be expected to make a proper diagnosis? I however did not have the same limitations as those doctors. I did know Zion for many years. I was a close friend of his. I had access to his friends and family. I was able to take the time to investigate what happened to him. I collected all the evidence I could find before I came to any conculsion. That evidence is provided here in the previous twelve chapters of this book and I'm ready to use it to back up my opinion. Can those doctors sitting in the top of their ivory towers say the same thing? Do you really beleive they are going to dust off whatever meager "files" they have stashed away on Zion to come down here and defend their actions? I hardly think so. They slapped a label on Zion the moment he was brought before them and moved onto the next person. Then they ceased to care.

And that brings me to the failure of the mental health system in this country. If I'm correct and Zion was really suffering from some form of nervous breakdown due the stress, then the "treatment" he needed was a vacation. Someone needed to put him on a plane bound for some tropical location, sit him down on the beach, stick a beer in his hand and the leave him there for a few days. Instead the "treatment" Zion received was to be beaten up by the Amherst campus police, get arrested, be dragged off to a mental hospital, held prisoner for a month and get pumped full of god only knows what kind of mind altering drugs because of a fake mental disorder he didn't suffer from. Who in their right mind could possibly believe that was going to HELP!? But that isn't even the worst of it. Not only did these actions not help Zion but its quite obvious they only served to make matters worse. By slapping the "crazy person" label on him the mental hospital actually wrecked Zion's social life. So they took someone who was already suffering from some form of nervous breakdown and then added depression to his list of problems. Zion valued his social life more than anything. I always felt he was a bit over obsessed with being popular but many teenagers are like that these days. But after he was released from the mental hospital a lot of his old friends wouldn't even talk to him anymore. Zion always felt that was because of the stigma aginst him because of his mental problems. I know that hurt him a lot and he felt betrayed by the people who had abandoned him.

But not even THAT was the end of it. After Zion's "old friends" abandoned him he made some new ones. And this is where the mental hospitals made things worse again. The "new friends" Zion made were people he met while he was in the mental hospitals. And I'll tell you what: This was a bad crowd to fall into if I have ever seen one. One of these "new friends" of his actually contacted me after his death to complain about some of my opinions. This person was using the name "Aislinn Bailey" and as that sounded like a real name I decided to do a google search for it. Turns out that "Aislinn Bailey" is the author of Pagan Witchcraft books among other bizzare things. Now, I don't actually believe the person who emailed me is the REAL Aislinn Bailey (although it is possible as she is quite young and does belong in a mental hospital) but rather I suspect it is simply someone with similar spiritual beliefs who is attempting to adopt some of whatever limited prestige the name may hold. Without a doubt this person along with many of Zion's other "new friends" had their own fantasy worlds which they believed in containing magic and fictional cults and who knows what other kind of non-sense. Rather than helping him to escape from his fantasy world, these people were actually re-enforcing Zion's belief in the fantasy and entrenching him ever deeper into it. And it was the mental hospital who had introduced Zion to these people so it was once again their fault that their interference had only served to make the situation even worse than it already was. This is actually quite similar to the way in which sending a criminal to prison only serves to connect them with other criminals. The mental hospital takes all these people prisoner only to release them in newly formed mobs of crazy people. Its like a training ground for all sorts of gangs of magic wielding nut jobs.

Then the death blow came when Ari decided that Zion was more trouble for her than he was worth to her and she started to distance herself from him. By this point Zion felt like she was the only thing he had left. All his old friends had betrayed him. His parents kept sending him to a mental hospital every time they saw him. His previous girl friend Hannah had gotten a restraining order aginst him. I'm sure Zion was even fairly pissed off at me because I refused to talk to him until he agreed to clean up his act. In his mind Ari was the last thing he had left. He had bet whatever sanity he had remaining on her. When she finally left him that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Zion felt that he had finally lost everything he vauled and had nothing left at all. That was when and why he made the decision to kill hismelf. It was not because of a mental disorder. In fact, the decision to kill hismelf may have been one of the very few decisions he had made in the last few years of his life for which he could actually quote a halfway sensible and logical reason for his decision. That isn't to say that I agree with his decision, only that I understand why he did it and I know it wasn't because of a mental disorder.

I think the lessons to be learned from Zion's death are actually two fold. First is that you should always avoid manipulative women like Ari who are only out to exploit you for their own emotional needs. After this experience I'm honestly not sure how romance is even supposed to work in a world where women like Ari are lurking around out there. But maybe the more important lesson is the second one and that is this: Our mental health system is a complete and udder failure. It helps no one and hurts many people often without anyone even knowing about the harm its causing. Psychology is nothing but a bunch of pop culture excuses to take drugs. Drugs don't solve real problems. Real action solves real problems. Sadly many people today are falling into the trap psychology presents because it appears to be the easy road. It may be many, many years before our world learns that the easy road offered by psychology only leads to ruin. Until then I can only suggest that if the men in white coats come for you that it would be in your best interest not to allow yourself to be taken alive.

Go to Part II: The Alchemists Clan