Month: June 2010
Flaming Fog and a Red Sports Car
Posted on June 25, 2010 in Anxiety Campaign 2006 Encounters Hiking Loneliness Weather
Yesterday was as momentous as being wedged against a smooth, unshatterable pane of glass: forever in the sight of the world but engaging with none of it. Went out to find the stars using Google Sky Map. For the second night in a row, however, a crazy, burning thatch-roof of orange-tinted fog prevented me from seeing Vega.
The mist had cleared by late afternoon when I took Drake hiking. On our way back from the Point, I saw two men standing in the fire road. They walked down the hill as soon as they saw me, leading me by a couple of hundred yards. They could not get to their red sports car and drive away fast enough. I took stock of a meadow strewm with pale cream Weed’s Mariposa tulips and stop counting the hurts.
Alone in Bad Company
Posted on June 25, 2010 in Depression Journals & Notebooks
The worst diseases are the invisible ones. They are like a drawer that you can’t close and can’t see the reason why it won’t close. You can shove against it with all your might, but the pressure gets you nowhere or makes things worse. The state of my little finger is like this and, when it comes, so is my depression.
Last week, I felt especially out of sorts in my mood. I wrote:
I’m at that point in life where no one sees the promise in me anymore. Those accolades faded as I grew older and was derailed by my illness. I can’t see my future amounting to what it could have been. There’s the old, damaged dream of not being a millionaire by age 30 and then there is the loss of a vocation — the sense of a career stalled by madness. Those who might have been your respectful peers ignore you. You become the embarassing relative, the odd man married to the friend of the family.
Among others who don’t and won’t understand, you retreat into corners to look at magazines or take your place on the couch watching a game to which you give no attention when you are alone. In your own time and space, you sit with demons skilled in mockery. Between doctor’s appointments, you count emptinesses.
[[Ambrose Bierce]] defined alone as “in bad company.” This is you.
But only as long as the dread-fall lasts.
The Demons Visit
Posted on June 19, 2010 in Anxiety Guilt PTSD Reflections
Tonight, my demons have come to visit. These are the people who saw that I wasn’t as smart as I pretended to be. I lay out service in the chasm that is my mind, invite them to sit down, ask them to tell me why they are here, but they won’t talk to me.
A Brief Comment on the Oval Office Speech
Posted on June 16, 2010 in Civic Responsibility Environment
Because I want to counter the persistently unbalanced criticism of Obama’s acts as president, it is easy for me not to speak my true mind.
Plugged in, Tuned Out
Posted on June 16, 2010 in Encounters Hiking
Are they on the trail or are they just using it as a treadmill?
Dream
Posted on June 15, 2010 in Dreams
I’m staying at a tall, glass-tower hotel. Something wicked is happening here. The black glass part of the hotel rests upon a stained, white concrete base that is maybe five stories high. By getting into the wrong elevator, I learn that there are secret doings here. A hotel worker smiles at me as he comes in. There’s a pit there where they put guests to draw their energy out and do the laundry by kicking their feet. I rush around the hotel, doing my best to save people but the hotel staff will not help because they have immunity. I find myself huddled in a guest room with other guests and a frightened staffer who fears he will be taken. The harvesters come down the hallway, culling those they want to serve in their lake of clear goo.
Manic Introversion
Posted on June 15, 2010 in Hope and Joy Mania
The excesses of impulse that characterize most manias do not apply to me most of the time I am in episode. Thoughts stream through my head. Incredible schemes surge across the two hemispheres of my brain. I keep these to myself, sure that if others see them they would prevent me from realizing my dreams. I know that I mad but I am curious to see where it will take me. It exalts. It enthralls. It feels better than any narcotic I have been prescribed and superior to alcohol and marijuana. I call this secret state of mind my manic introversion.
Corrolary to this is this principle: the fewer people I feel accountable toward, the better I feel. I don’t feel the pressure of Brahma with his many faces — a nexus of truths and lies calculated to protect my vulnerability.
The lying isn’t sociopathic but an impulse to conceal that I am dashing off set, hiding from the inquisitions of those around me. Trusted people can make me admit it, even when the mania rages. It’s best to hide during my episodes so I don’t have to be Brahma the polymorphous deva of creation or the madly dancing Shiva, Lord of the Beasts — just a man.
The Urge to Pick the Skin
Posted on June 14, 2010 in Body Language OCD
The urge to pick the skin off my fingers overwhelmed me a couple of weeks ago. The two spots I prefer had lost their scars, but these are back now. I had gnawed through the skin to the muscle on the left index finger ((This has nothing to do with the numbness in that hand)) after I had my tooth pulled and renewed the blemish on my right index finger while chewing on the corners of my mouth.
I believe it was the pain following my oral surgery that compelled me to chew and pick. Then I kept at it because it relieved some of the anxiety.
Now I am resisting picking the fingers once more though the skin is getting dry around the vacancies that once were the sores. These are so subtle that only I notice them: only when I write about them are they magnified so as to betray a pathology.
Lithium and A Big Head
Posted on June 9, 2010 in Mania Psychotropics
Descriptions of mania done by the performance artists we all turn into when the waves of emotion overwhelm us can include hands going to our temples with the cry “It feels like my head is going to explode!” Theatricality reveals truth if we observe what researchers have discovered in the course of revealing why lithium works to bring us down:
Inflammation in the brain, like other parts of the body, is an important process to help the brain combat infection or injury. However, excess or unwanted inflammation can damage sensitive brain cells, which can contribute to psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder or degenerative diseases like Alzheimers.
It’s believed that lithium helps treat bipolar disorder by reducing brain inflammation during the manic phase, thus alleviating some of the symptoms….rats given a six-week lithium treatment had reduced levels of arachidonic acid and its products, which can contribute to inflammation.
In addition, they also demonstrated, for the first time, that lithium treatment increased levels of a metabolite called 17-OH-DHA in response to inflammation. 17-OH-DHA is formed from the omega-3 fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and is the precursor to a wide range of anti-inflammatory compounds known as docosanoids
I doubt that I ever told any professional about the sense of puffiness or bloating that I felt when I was manic. My head felt like a balloon. My emotions drafted up on winds of madness. Pressure in the temples and at the back of the skull marked the episodes, pressure that was without pain. I did not experience head aches, but I often wondered if there was a tumor growing. Would the sutures of my skull hold against this force? There was always a sense of living just before a great pop. I had to get thoughts realized, I had to display the great zepellin of my imagination before it was too late. That Hindenburg of consciousness was always aware that there would come a precipitous meeting with the docking tower, a ruin of my mind in depression.
If I am not imagining this, then I have discovered for myself an important, physical sign of mania.
Now Mobile-Friendly
Posted on June 3, 2010 in Site News
I have just installed mobile-service for this web-site. If you view it with your i phone or your droid, it looks different
Dream
Posted on June 2, 2010 in Dentition Dreams
After cruising the streets of Salt Lake City, I find myself in a dentist’s chair. The dentist reviews the care I’ve received from six different professionals. He focuses especially on one, whose treatments I found especially palliative. A graphic illustrates what I think was done to my mouth — the good spread clear across the palate touching all corners. Then he shows me that it was only a single tooth. The light that was that tooth disappears. I tremble so hard at the thought it was all in vain that I wake up.
