In a Blown Mind

Posted on September 4, 2006 in Depression Mania Psychotropics Reflections Routine

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and cannot be made to say it.

By fiat, it appears that I am “out of the woods”. The drug has made me “happy” which is not synonymous with “cured”. Recent studies suggest that my depressive episode could last 134 to 165 days which means that those eight days, those eight days….

Pity that no one has set up a charity to take care of bipolars who missed their potential because of early failure to spot the disease.

Or maybe a reality tv show in which the contestants demonstrate that they have been denied their just due because of their illness and all the other shit that goes with it. I might show well in that.

“First place gets the prize of all the other contestants because there are just so many….” Who is more fucked up than someone else?

I am doing better as I sit here sucking a Carr’s Table Water Cracker, turning it around and around in my mouth so that I don’t violate my diabetic diet and regime by a crumpled forced feeding of flour-based carbohydrate. Just wet, suck, and turn before the ledge breaks off onto your tongue and you must eat it. Lead us not into digestion but deliver us from weevils.

The faintest crust falls over the precipice that is the lip and I eat it. To show my manhood, I throw the rest of the cracker away. Flip it like a frisbee into the garbage can. Oh involution is paradise enow, eh?

This is all a distraction to keep me awake an hour or two more. This new medication, Doxepin, keeps me sleeping until the grand old hour of 6 am. I am not a morning person. I do not wake at 6 am, scratch my testicles, and grimace into the mirror. We are all so gross at that hour. More stately is the arising of the late sleeper, no? Out of bed in a slow, elegant arc, straight into the shower, and then a leisurely breakfast. Doxepin’s strict accounting of hours, however, propels me into feigned sleep. Or is it? I keep my eyes closed until I am bored and then it is ten o’clock. Ah, then, to fill the time? Crossword puzzles. A book of jokes from which I can choose a wringer or two to memorize. (What do you get when you cross an elephant with a kangaroo? A lot of big holes all over Australia.)

It was so easy before my sojourn in the dark corners of the shadowbox. During my mania, I actually had to write things down and do them one at a time so that I would not attempt to do too many of them at one time. Now I am hard-pressed to think of a one.

Remember those lists of what to do when you are depressed, manic, etc.? I had Lynn read the list for depression. And now I find myself spending two hours every day just listening to Bach’s Branderburg Concertos. One through six plus his complete violin concertos which amount to one through one. That is a fat part of my day and I am amazed when, despite the Doxepin, I nap somewhere between numbers four and six, spinning down during that harpsichord bit that makes me dream of box springs.

We need a new mattress.

When I do this, I lay on my side and Boadicea comes to lay down my length, purring. I permit this because it is one of the few positions from which she never attempts to bite me. She merely lies there, slowly bringing an adjacent clump of the atmosphere into her chest and then letting go of it. The same thing I am doing beneath her. She weighs so little that I do not feel a thing as I expand my ribs.

Am I on point? I am all over the place. And let this be evidence that in a blown mind, there can be truly very little to say and so much of interest nonetheless. You can’t use drugs to be like this. You got to have it naturally.

Tell me something funny.