Crap. Just when I think I might be able to produce something that might be somewhat relevant and meaningful to the larger world Out There, my concentration flees, a thoughtful kerchief tossed into the tree branches by anxious winds. My ladder isn't high enough, so I have to sit on the grass looking up at it fluttering out of reach, and eventually it gets torn free by a good gust and sails off over the fence, probably to end up in the creek, getting all muddied and useless.
These pharmaceuticals better do whatever chemical dance they're supposed to do on my head pretty damn quick, here. Looking back through my archives I've found stuff that was--if I do say so myself--insightful, cogent, and worthwhile. But over the past year, the quality and quantity of my output has declined in direct proportion to the steady disintegration of my mood and the elevation of my manic anxiety.
This is not so much a lament of Oh how I have failed you, dear Reader! as much as it is a howl of What the hell has happened to my brain?! Folks who are not subject to chemical depression and anxiety--the sort that is detached from the circumstances of life, existing as a thing unto itsef--often have difficulty understanding that sentiment. Everyone gets depressed or anxious at some point in their lives, and the tendency to say "Just snap out of it!" is understandable, grounded as it is in a particular personal experience.
But the sort of moods that are more dependent upon an excess or defficiency of this or that neurotransmitter are more of an affliction than a passing funk, resembling in their action Galen's humours. I am full to the brim with earthy black bile, shot through with streaks of hot-tempered choler and peppered with panicked blood.
With the first hint of the calming perspective offered by SSRIs, mood stabilizers and benzodiazepenes, I can look back through my life and see this pattern repeating over and over again: unable to get off the couch in Philadelphia, barely able to sign my name to rent checks that someone else had to fill out for me; the burst of mania that drove me to quit my job and sent me to a ridgetop on the Appalachian trail with two gallons of water and a bag of nuts. Endless self-medication: wine, vodka, pot, acid, X, each medicine eventually failing to achieve the desired calming or numbing results, leaving me with fewer and fewer options. The pattern is there, and always has been, but it's difficult to see from within.
Now, like millions upon millions of other Americans, I have a diagnosis from the DSM-IV, approved by the American Psychiatric Association, and a course of drug therapy that auspiciously began with a collection of samples that the psychiatrist happened to have in his desk drawer. It's new! he said, to which I replied, Then it doesn't have much of a track record, does it? And it didn't, so a week later I was worse off than I was before I stepped into his office, and now I have another pill, and we'll see what that one does.
But that's how it works: the Patient Information sheets that come with the pills all say, "Although the exact mechanism of the action of [insert chemical name here] in humans is unknown, it is believed to be related to... " And then you get the pharmaceutical company's best guesses, with maybe some tales about rats or monkeys and a long list of side effects with varying degrees of goriness which you probably won't get but if you do, don't say we didn't warn you.
And so, no, I don't have anything substantive to say about the elections, or Iraq, or anything else that's important beyond the confines of my own bony head, because right now it's not working quite right, and my job is to get it working properly, not so I can regale you with the Clever Spew that I will then be able to produce, but so I can get on with my damn life and do the things I feel like I need to be doing with it.
Of course, that doesn't preclude outpourings of manic nonsense, so if you're into that sort of thing, hang about.
Time for another wafer.
Mmmm... melty.
