It was Terribly Funny
Posted on April 24, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Psych Wards Recent
This is, at last, part of the story of my 2005 hospitalization.
The nurses came looking for me, holding their second fingers and their thumbs as if they’d just snapped them. They beckoned me to follow and sat me down in an office just off the south corridor of the Behavioral Medicine Unit. I had walked by this niche plenty of times but I had never noticed the door nor conceived that there was a space there that could be filled.
Life had pressed the pause button. The tape froze, a snowstorm of static sprayed across the picture tube. I was energetic with franctic sparks that made me seek out the dirt in my fingernails, study the bare walls for images that only I could see. What would happen next in this theater of halls that looped and intersected in front of the glass nurse’s station? Up to now, everything the staff did had been transparent. But just a little while before other new patients had disappeared and rematerialized, the line between their lips flat. I did not see the real pattern or realize that I had a turn.
The psychiatrist who met me there, Doctor Speare, had kind eyes that could quiet you in the most incalescent mania. Nonetheless, I fidgeted agressively. Who was this stranger? When you went to the hospital, your doctor was supposed to see you, right? This guy acted as if he knew me like an aquarist might know a species of tropical fish. Flipping through the notes the nurses had written, he paused, looked up at me, and asked “Has anyone ever told you that you were bipolar?” I stopped, muttered the word, and then told him “No.” I had questions. Wasn’t I depressed? How could three different doctors before him not seen my psychosis? He explained that the anti-depressant I was on could push a person into a mixed state: that was why I had whirled into the vortex of a suicide attempt that had led me to commit myself.
When we were finished, I called Lynn. “They think I am bipolar,” I said. Our conversation was pieced together from my staggering desire to know the truth. We’d have to research this together, I inveighed. She promised to make some notes for my regular doctor. I hung up the phone, wandered over to one of the common rooms. So this was it. I was in the big time of mental illness now. Or so I had been for who knows how many years? I giggled. It was terribly funny.
Elfin forest
Posted on April 20, 2009 in Biomes Hiking Travels - So Cal
The coastal sage scrub community around the boardwalk seemed shorter than the forest that the signs promised. I had heard the [[chaparral]] called an elfin forest, which indeed it is, but I was unprepared for the Tolkienesque sight that awaited me among the marshes of southeast [[Morro Bay]].
Capturing the twisted chaos of trunks, branches and leaf litter was not easy and I don’t think I succeeded. These puzzles made out of oak need to be entered and loitered beneath.
Be sure to check out the rest of my photostream, especially this one.
“Conservative” Just Doesn’t Tell It Anymore
Posted on April 19, 2009 in Folly Watch Liberals & Progressives Parties Secularism Terminology
The current political climate, especially on the Right, necessitates a restructuring of our descriptive language. I feel guilty, for example, lumping [[Michael Steele]] and [[Arnold Schwartzeneggar]] with [[Rush Limbaugh]]. In the old Republican Party — that which existed before Reagan — we had Rockefeller Republicans (socially liberal but fiscally conservative), moderates, and [[John Birch Society|Birchers]]. Reagan did us the immense disservice of blurring those lines by demanding loyalty to himself and his particular set of ideals. After Reagan, the NeoConservatives who alleged that their brand of conservative politics had a heart arose. The party was likewise invaded by extremists of the Christian Right. By the end of Reagan’s term, most of the Rockefeller Republicans had fled to the Democratic Party and the moderates, represented mostly by [[Lincoln Chafee]] were on the run. (Chaffee was finally annihilated by the Republican National Committee in 2006.)
Two things have become more and more part of the brand of the Republicans: an extreme fascination with deregulation in favor of business and stock manipulation and demands for blind loyalty of the party regulars. But this has not eliminated differences among Republicans.
First, we have the neoconservatives who peddle a wordy philosophy that amounted to don’t tax but spend anyways. They promote a “free market” that give lots of breaks for big business and virtually no protection for small ones.
Second, we have the religious extremists who are perfectly happy to neglect the social gospel in favor of creationism and neopuritanism ((Which means no birth control, no abortion, and no sex education in the schools.)) . These found their faith on [[Bibliolatry]] and practice a [[cafeteria Christianity]] that focuses on twisting vague passages into vindications of hostility towards gays, opposition to abortion, and championing of the work ethic over classic Christian charity. A few of these hawk [[dominionism]], the idea that Christians should seize control of the government in preparation for the [[Rapture]].
Then there are conservatives who champion fiscal conservatism, but adhere to social liberalism. These Log Cabin Republicans simply don’t want to spend us into the red. This makes them opponents, at least on the surface, to the Fundamentalist takeover of the party.
Sometimes — when the classic Republicans drink the glass of courage — they speak out against the fourth group whose approach to political discourse might be called kneejerk — anything a Democrat — especially a liberal or progressive one — says or does is wrong. This group provides the primary participants in tea bag parties, calling for an end to high taxes under a president who makes a point to lower them for 95% of the population and complaining about the deficit after saying nothing under a president of their own party who eliminated a surplus and created a super-huge deficit of his own, spending much of it outside of the country.
The fifth and last group consists of extremists who embrace racism and nativism as a key tenet. They found churches such as [[Christian Identity]] and take up arms against illegal immigrants, bureaucrats, Jews, police officers, people of other races, and, occasionally, people who speak up against them.
All these get called conservatives. But does the ideology of Michael Steele and Arnold Schwartzeneggar really deserve to be classed with Rush Limbaugh and [[Sarah Palin]]? I think not. Only the third variety of conservative seems to be preserving anything. The rest deserve to be called by something else, to be drummed out of the ranks of true conservatives ((A group on Twitter that calls itself “#tcot’ or “True conservatives on Twitter” tends to align itself with groups one and four. This indicates the political potency of the word, but not their true leanings.)) .
Yet a now-limping coalition engineered by big business brings these together. There is a vested interest in preserving a semblance of unity for the sake of corporate power. The price that is paid is that good men devoted to true American ideals get dragged down by a word riddled with corporate sell-outs, theocrats, loudmouths, and Nazis. They do not deserve this.
Marine Layer
Posted on April 17, 2009 in Pulmonary Vacation Fall 2003 Weather
Days like this give me headaches. The temperature is up — into the eighties after being in the sixties for many weeks. The clouds have fled east. A stubborn, faint fog squats over the valley and the foothills, an abomination that the weather pundits call a [[marine layer]], a mist off the ocean that doesn’t go away — like [[sciatica]]. I call it [[smog]] and bet that air samples will show it to be bulging with greenhouse gases. Where are the winds that blow this stuff out to sea?
When Spanish sailors anchored off the beaches, they saw the smoke from hundreds of [[Tongva]] and [[Juaneno|Acagchemem]] campfires curling up and then stopping. The smoke just hung there, spreading beneath the [[Inversion_(meteorology)|inversion layer]]. No blue skies for [[Juan_Rodriguez_Cabrillo|Cabrillo]] or for [[Gaspar_de_Portol%C3%A0|Portola]] who followed him by land more than two centuries later. No blue skies for us today.
Workers in medical offices and cubicles ask a unilinear question: “is it warmer out as they promised it would be?”
Yes, I said to my endocrinologist’s assistant. “But it’s full of crud.”
“I don’t like warmer days,” I continued.
“You don’t?” she responded.
“No. They smash my brain.”
Being prepped for my bizarre utterances by the notation of bipolar in my chart, she took my blood pressure, checked my pulse, and asked me if I had taken my heart meds. The doctor went over my numbers with me, noting some were up, but others that had worried her the last time we met were now in range. My “good cholesterol” had fallen a bit.
“How do I raise that?” I asked.
“Exercise,” she said.
Exercise. Summer has charged in. Every day will have a blanket woven of the exhaust of millions of cars and trucks, small factories, and power plants. This will suffocate me as I harness up my little dog and do laps around the park. The long walks of winter are mostly over. I plot midnight strolls around the long circuit that takes me down one long hill and up another. How boring this could become unless an adventure presented it. I wonder: Does the marine layer sink into the ground at night, granting my lungs a respite? I’m going to have to chance the coughing that comes with the arrival of this diaphanous air mass. That “good cholesterol” is too low.
What do you do all night when you are in mania?
Posted on April 16, 2009 in Mania Skribit
I waste time. But not in the same way that I usually do it. I’m always up nights, twittering, reading, working on recent photos. My day ends somewhere between 3 and 4, at which point I go to bed, which alerts the cats to begin their trills of demand for food from my softhearted wife. I use a cocktail of Xanax, Benadryl, Doxepin, melatonin, and my nighttime anti-psychotics and mood-stabilizers to stall my brain into torpor. I sleep well and I sleep deep until about noon or one o’clock in the afternoon, an unconventional hour but one that I can manage thanks to my unemployment and insistence on afternoon appointments.
If I am manic, I forget to take the meds until a later hour and do not feel their slowing until after Lynn has gone to work at nine. I lay in bed, staring at the pockets inside the sheets, groping for rest. Mania purposes me to a different set of activities, First, reading is impossible. My eyes fly over the words, ignoring the middles of sentences and barely noticing the presence of paragraphs. I have missed whole scenes and whole characters when I am in this state. For this reason, as my condition advanced in the late twentieth century, I read less and less. Volumes I wanted to peruse stood on my shelf for years, unopened and stinking of dust. There was no accomplishment during this time except as resulted from my strange habit of digesting dictionaries.
Forget, too, the learning of languages and despair for the reworking of photos because I don’t have the interest required to take them in the first place. I loiter in chat rooms until talk of politics and the inspid, incessant chatter of bored minds rile me to perpetual wrath.
So, having no television, I turn to computer games, which I play on a laptop at the foot of our bed, occasionally waking my wife with my anger and despair at ever winning. Lynn gets a nervous look on her face whenever I turn my attentions to the entertainments aisle at Fry’s Electronics. Subliminally I know what it means: the restless, endlessly disturbed nights mosh in her head. My bouncing on the mattress and my screams at an imaginary routine that I call “the cheat circuit” ((The cheat circuit works in various ways. It ignores keyboard commands. It crashes when you are about to deliver the death blow to the computer-mounted forces. The timing of these events seems just too calculated for my accelerated mind to accept as mere chance.)) grieve her. She doesn’t like this for good reason. But I ignore her and buy the sugar-acid pleasure anyways.
Games do little for my ability to sleep. They lead to the long nights and short sleeps that I have previously described. Wars of conquest and the building of fabled towns interrupt my dreams and make for a shallow sleep. In a few short hours, I burst into consciousness and resume my fruitless, solitary liveliness.
This blogging was inspired by a question asked on Skribit. To take part, click on the suggestions tab on the right or scroll down to the Skribit window in the right hand column. You can also vote for your favorite suggestion.
Sea Lions — Morro Bay
Posted on April 13, 2009 in Creatures Photos Travels - So Cal
The unmistakable barking drew us ahead. I put madness to my walk, tossing my head to my left as Lynn did her best to drag and be dragged by Drake. Six of them loitered on a raft behind a sea food takeout window. Number Six dove into the water while the rest shuttered their eyes tightly against my flash.
Drake, whose fur rose at the scent of a German Shepherd, took little notice of these lugubrious pinnepeds anchored less than ten feet below his feet. “Barnyard animals,” he might have scoffed. “Mere livestock. Can we go now?” He puttered and pulled at his leash while I angled for a visual understanding of how this pack sprawled on its unsteady dock.
The memory machine
Posted on April 11, 2009 in Memory Writing Exercises
“The drugs have done a number on my brain.” That phrase would perplex my students. “What does it mean?” they’d ask me. The best I can do is summon up the image of a vast machine programmed to do certain routines. One causes you to remember a time when you father slapped you around until your head rang out in anger, humiliation, and heat. Two makes you laugh at the time you dumped a trashcan full of water on one of your pals. Three shouts at you for being so stupid about letting that bastard pick an argument with you over your major. And now you’re at Four, but Four is blank. Sweet-mystery-of-Four except it’s not so sweet, because Four isn’t answering your repeated calls for a response and, what’s worse, it refuses to tell you the way to Five where there might be an answer to the question.
I have found the workings of my brain to be most troublesome and mysterious. Why do I turn eights into threes and vice versa? Why I can’t find my glasses even though they rest on the bridge of my nose? To prepare myself for the anxiety, I panic: I beat myself about the [[medulla oblongata]], throw furniture in the crevices, and bang my [[cerebellum]] against the insides of my skull.
I read recently that when the brain can’t make cholesterol you can’t store and recall details. And one day last week I discovered that not only had I been misspelling that word, but also another which I now cannot recall. How long had this been going on? Did people notice and mark me an ignoramus? Was this a lifetime habit or had I started it only recently? Please, I beg Fate, please don’t make this a general thing. I couldn’t handle finding out that for the whole of my life when I thought I had been saying one thing I’d been saying another or worse gibberish. People could have been picking up their cell phones and just walking away as if I were a silence for ever so long.
This was written as an exercise in a writing support group.
Depression-colored glasses
Posted on April 11, 2009 in Depression Reflections Writing Exercises
I barely notice that the colors have dimmed. Perhaps my eyes have half-shut –making things gloomy through my eyebrows. The diners at their tables, the delivery men in their trucks diminish through a sepulchral wrap I shuffle without noticing whether people dash, strut, or tiptoe. They become lost in the murky light of my melancholy. I cannot tell the color of their coats or pants. Their dresses lack design. Their jewelry disappears.
Voices whisper or shout entirely too loudly. The jerks who frequent public places calling out their business for everyone to hear seem to find the table next to me. I sigh at their company, rub my hands together and, being in a fatalist mood I do nothing except finish my dim-tasting hamburger and leave without complaint to management. Or else I grumble, declare myself at odds with the world filled with idiots.
The idiot takes a different form when I am depressed. In my hyper-condition, he stupidly attacks my clearly superior motives and dreams. In depression, he finds me out, discovers my ignorance, and embarrasses me. I swallow my words, let my socks fall, and swim off like a manatee into my personal Slough of Despond. There’s no proving that I can solve a quadratic equation, translate a Latin participle, or hold out in a political argument. I chew on the hot air which suddenly fills my mouth. There’s no corner obscure enough for me, so I leave the room; letting others to joke about my morose presence. The idiot wins the day. There’s no bending him over the table edge, no blunting his wit with a manic dissection of his cluelessness. The pain comes from feeling that the idiot has managed to perpetrate an untruth or, worse, raised the doubt that it is I who knows nothing. I find a lonely, silent, unquiet place to release tears if they will come.
This was written as an exercise in a writing support group.
Talking mountain
Posted on April 8, 2009 in Hiking Photos
The phone rang but I was in the middle of the chaparral. A friend needed me. Through the communications facility at the top of this distant mountain she had found me. As I huffed and puffed up the unnamed dirt road, we threshed out her problems. The olive wool and spidery orange dodder trembled very slightly at my end of the conversation The brush kept her secrets as I spoke them.
On my way back, I slipped on loose rocks, bruising my elbow. If I had needed I could have used my phone to call for help. The only trouble was I walked the road with no name. How would I help them to find me?
Skribit — Suggest a Topic
Posted on April 6, 2009 in Site News
Please observe the right margin. Do you see the brown tab that says SUGGESTIONS? Go ahead and click on it. This is where you can suggest topics for me to write about.
Let your eye also descend the right column. Go past the Archives and the Categories. See it? Skribit Suggestions and then a box. There is another place where you can enter a topic and vote on the ones others have suggested.
I’m using this so that I can provide you with subject matter that might be of interest to you by answering your questions or invoking imagery you may find pleasing.
I like my topic suggestion poetic and brief. Here are some examples:
- Something you saw while driving
- Fleeing
- What you dream of when you are sick
- Badlands
If you don’t get the picture, go ahead and suggest something anyways. I’ll do my best, but topics like those above will elicit the most interesting results.
Black Star Revolution
Posted on April 5, 2009 in Hiking Video
It’s no fun yelling at your dog because he is about to stick his nose in a patch of poison oak. We’re not coming here together unless Lynn comes along and helps me manage him.
There are better trails without the moist bottom that poison oak thrives in.
