Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax

The clearing of the two-day long storm made a walk along the skyline beyond our condo complex seem like a good idea and it was. Drake was enthusiastic as he always is and I set myself a reasonable goal of a mile in along the Santiago Truck Trail to a gate and then back again. I felt good, so the temptation to take a side journey along a ridge running alongside and above the main track got the better of me. And this wasn’t a bad idea either. The slope to the top wasn’t bad. I wasn’t winded or dizzy when I arrived at the cairn whose cross had been burned out by the fire. The slope down the other side required a little careful footwork, but the one time I slipped I was able to catch a burnt branch of something or other to brake my fall. My dog loved it. He dashed ahead and then back again, checking the landscape to our right, listening as I called to him to stop or come back for one of the biscuits I held in my left hand.

Then we came to it. The trail narrowed or rather the hill narrowed. Where we had had an ample ten feet on either side of the track before, there were now only inches. I looked ahead. Drake stood on about twelve inches of ridge. I found my body starting to shake. Don’t look down were the first words and then I’m not going any farther. The wind wasn’t blowing very hard, but the ground was soaked. I could easily imagine the dirt — and that was all there was — giving way on either side. A hundred feet down on the left and a thousand on the right is my guess of my danger. So I did a pivot on the spot where I stood which was already too narrow — mark about two inches on either side. The fear shook my legs and I took the smallest steps until I was back on broader ground. Perhaps in manic days I might have traipsed along, but I had my wits about me. I went back the way I came, the distance of about a third of a mile of backtracking.

The slope that I slipped on proved hard. My head and chest pounded by the time I reached the top, so I sat on one of the stones circling the cairn. Doggy thought this the finest of adventures and stood close to me, eager to get moving again. I caught my breath and then took an easy slope down to the main trail. Lynn waited for us at the parking area. I didn’t want to discuss the precipice or my terror.

The pain in my upper arms from dragging a small backpack from the lowest walkable territory to the highest in the San Diego Wild Animal Park is just one of the streaks that put me in a low place these last few days: Mel Gibson’s face in those commercials for his latest action film is another. I grew up knowing a younger Mel Gibson, one who didn’t have a pair of deep lines falling to each side of his nose like a thin, misplaced Fu Manchu moustache. I’ve been surrounded by ancient visages here at Lawrence Welk Resort, faces that crinkle at a grin, fall from the cheekbones and collect like lava below the chin line. This is Old Age and I am going to be seeing more of it in the years to come. Despite my wishes for youth, I am deteriorating. The life long eruption is that is me is approaching extinction.

I’m too tired to wrestle with my keyboard over this. Good night.

Lynn and I are examining a large model railroad setup in the back of my father’s yard in the desert. I am trying to guess why one of the trains isn’t operating right. It turns out that it has two engines, one of which is painted like a box car. A flash flood nearly knocks me off my feet as I discover a tortoise crawling across the sand at my feet. Several baby turtles — no larger than my thumbnail — appear in the water. I spy a pair of chameleons and a couple of anoles clinging to the redwood fence. I catch them and place them in a herparium decorated with green leaves.

Saturday’s hike was easy though the way was steep — I didn’t feel the grade cutting me with my shoulder straps as it did yesterday. I knelt to catch my breath several times on the modest uphills and a couple of times on the downhill. Drake, my Boston Terrier, stayed close until we came into sight of my wife. When I came home, I felt my forehead and it was hot. No idea what caused this though I nearly blamed my own psyche for its manufacture.

That’s a tendency best curbed, a relic of the old assume-the-guilt. I know that something was genuinely wrong — how could I explain the ease of Saturday’s walk compared to yesterday’s? From whence came the weakness that I felt from lugging a ten pound pack that had grown lighter because I drank some of the water I’d packed the day before? This was not laziness as the voice of my last therapist in my head suggested. It was real and it brought me down. I wanted to walk bravely up the slopes of the Santiago Trail, but couldn’t. None of the explanations — exhaustion, lethargy, laxity — were congruent with my experience. I could only assume that I was sick, so I told my inner therapist to just shut up.

I really need to check my incoming links more often. This blog was mentioned as one of the Top Ten Bipolar Blogs of 2009 by psychcentral.com. I didn’t expect it because as my readers know I am all over the board content-wise — I see myself as a person with bipolar who happens to write a blog. Thanks for the honor and welcome to everyone who has found me through the link.

I’ll have new photos and new material in the days to come.

There was this house that faced Baseline in San Bernardino. One of those white gothics whose paint faded from all the years of baking in the California sun. It had a porch and on this porch sat an old man rocking in his chair, watching the traffic go by. This old man had a face that was both doughy and skeletal as was typical of a certain phase in the gaining of decrepitude. His frame suggested that he, like many of the retired of San Bernardino in that age, had been a railroad man. Most striking about him was the hole where his nose should have been. At some time, surgeons or accident had removed his schnozz down to the bone and left an opening into the convolutions of his pink sinuses. As children passed in their parents’ cars, he would lift his right hand and point to the cavity.

“See,” my mother used to say. “That is what happens when you pick your nose.”

The rain-bound weekend brought vile epiphanies. Little stories of my failures and my crimes, the times when I felt the blood boil. Old arguments and old confrontations blanked out my existence. My eyes would not see what was in front of me. The near-visions would be spawned by the slightest suggestions: a word in a book, an ad on a web page, a sentence in a conversation. They would cause me to shout out “Stop it! Stop it! I hate me!” And, I learned from my psychiatrist today, there is no pill I can take to end their reign of terror. These are flashbacks from many crimes and many horrors.

Crime is a relative term. I feel I must be punished for the stupid things I have said. Here I live in a world filled with charlatans who push their snake oil on the desperate, chief executives of insurance companies who skin their clients so they can give themselves salaries in the millions, and worse — but I feel that the cross is to be affixed to me. Then there is the rage — the demand of my spirit that those who hurt me in any way be punished. And behind that came the Final Guilt: that to feel angry was akin to an act of violence, the most abhorrent act I could possibly commit.

I do not have to be wholly the thrall of these emotions. I have learned to fight back and to affirm in myself that I have the right to fight back. When any of these overcome me I stop. Look. Look at the gray screen of the television set. The yellow-white flame bulbs of the chandelier. Boadicea with her nine grey stripes running down the back of her head. Drake lying in the blanket he expropriated from our bedroom. It is time to say to myself “Where are you? What time is it?” and face the reality that that which is haunting me is not here right now.

Some of my fellow bipolar sufferers don’t get this thing that happens. They suggest I get on anti-psychotics, but I am on these. I have had hallucinations and I have been paranoid. Neither is anything like the terrifying thoughts that cause me to stop where I am. You interact with a hallucination, treat it as part of the furniture. Flashbacks are a monster of their own and they can stop you cold.

To overcome them, I must reclaim my present. A member of one of my support groups suggested this: “Tell yourself that you are not as bad a person as you think you are.” I take comfort from that.

Good article that I read today: What’s wrong with positive thinking. Somebody finally said “Fuck you” to all those self-proclaimed experts who have only made me feel more depressed all these years — and backed it up with science.

I like the idea of a war tax. For years military expenditures have been a hidden cost, allowing our government to hide its overseas adventures. You may hear complaints about social spending but this is not our greatest expense. The military gobbles up more than anything else. It is at the root of our deficit.

When our country adds a war tax as it did in most of our wars, there is pressure to get the job done. There’s none of the loitering like we have seen in Afghanistan, fewer botched jobs like our failure to capture bin Laden several years ago. A war tax wakes up the taxpayer and makes her/him ask “How is the money being spent?” And “Is it worth it?”

Too bad they allow us to sleep.

I took Drake out for an off-day walk — one where we do not go a long distance but stay close to home. This one took us through the back condo complex where we live into the front one and back into the back through a patch of grass where we often stop so Drake can drop doggy bombs. Today a pair of owners with a bull terrier and a small German Shepherd were on the spot first. When they saw me coming, they shouted at their dogs, forcing the Shepherd into a submissive, prone position. The bull terrier — who was held by the woman — and Drake took offense to each other. Drake growled and the bull terrier charged to the limits of his short leash. My dog did the same.

“You don’t have to show him,” I said.”

“Oh yes I do!” Drake responded as he jumped to the end of his tether.

I pulled him away, speaking quietly, while the other owners yelled at their dogs.

As I drew away, I heard the woman saying “Did you hear that dog growling? That dog was growling.”

She had no clue of her part in the little drama — the yelling that excited all the dogs into a frenzy regardless of who started growling at who.

The order in which these sequences are lost to me: it could go either way. In the first, I am called with another to deal with the problem of a cockroach infestation in a pair of break rooms at a recreation center. I tell the people that boric acid is the solution. Sure enough, after I spread it around the edges, huge heaps of vermin — including large hairy spiders — die in the night. To demonstrate how effective the cure is, I apply more in about a week and only a few tiny roaches turn up. “You can do this every six months,” I say, but change the number to every six weeks and then every month.

In the other sequence, I win a scholarship to explore the history of a coastal area. My sponsor — who is supposed to show me around — takes me to the top of a cinder cone from which we can see a long stretch of the seaboard. Room is close, however, and I feel that I am being pushed down the steep sides. I ask the other scholarship winners to move over and see that there’s lots of room in the crater. Later my sponsor shows me a place to buy hamburgers — I tell him that I am on a diet and must choose my meal carefully. He leaves me in a dorm room, but the next day comes to show me the coast. I’ve littered the room with Legos, explaining that I have been working on some puzzles. He uses some to show me principles of faulting, then takes me where we can view some piny islands made of volcanic rock. I think how much this is like Maine.

National Novel Writing Month is nearly over. As of this entry, I have spewed 50081 words into my OpenOffice Writer. There’s more to be written. I doubt that it is publishable, but it has been a good discipline for bringing me out of sleep at the beginning of the day and back into it at the end.

I’ve proceeded with a few principles in mind:

• Even though this is a first draft, I try to do it right the first time. I accept that I won’t do it right, but at least I will have tried.
• Just churning out words is boring and soul-killing.
• To hell with “Don’t tell, show.” Tell has its place as does show. Mix it up. When you tell, tell it well.
• If you have an inspiration to go back and rewrite a passage and that inspiration is strong, go ahead and do it. My original start sucked. If I had stuck with it, I would have stopped the project. So I went back and rewrote it. The fire I generated carried me through to the end.
• It’s OK to make a mental note to delete and rewrite passages if you don’t then have a clue how to replace them.
• My present plan is to shelve the work for a little while before I go back for the necessary task of rewriting the piece. Maybe the reading will reveal to me that it’s unsalvageable or needs a major overhaul. I don’t think that the passion — or deadness — of the first creation is going to be a trustworthy guide.

I will do this again next year.