November 02, 2007

Not all grooves are good. There’s the kind of groove that surrounds George Clinton. There’s the kind of groove that you get into when life is swingin’ and poppin’. Those are good.

Then there’s the kind of groove that settles into your life like the ass-groove on Homer Simpson’s couch, or the groove worn by a rope into the crossbeam of a well-used gallows. Those are not good grooves.

Both kinds of groove share certain characteristics. They are repetitive. They’ve got rhythm. Unchecked, they can continue indefinitely. Which is fine if you’re getting down with the downbeat and swinging up and out with your creative capacities. That’s the kind of thing you’d want to last forever, and there are some people who manage that. It’s not so fine if the groove is the kind that wears holes in your soul, a repetition of abrasion that creates open wounds that never heal. That’s the kind of groove you want to stop.

The good kind of groove is productive, and the bad kind is reductive. You can see that in the analogies n’ metaphors I’ve chosen (‘cause I’m all clever and such): the bad groove imagery is that of wearing away over time, creating holes and depressions in things. A bad groove causes absence and lack. It is destructive.

So yeah, I’ve got a groove. It’s a furrow in my brain. And, like any well-worn path, choosing a new way is difficult. Water runs down a mountainside in much the same way, year after year. Once it’s found its channel, it deepens that channel. The only thing that causes it to find a new way is an overabundance of water, beyond the capacity of the existing channel. Then there’s a flood, a torrent, that tops the edges of the spillway and breaks free.

And I'm feeling my groove. It’s a slow subsonic note, a mentholation of my psyche, cold and a bit greasy. The fluid of my thoughts and emotions flows easily along the eroded path: doom, doom, doom…death and doom…everlasting, sourceless sorrow…doom and failure…. This flow is enhanced by the physicality of it: a limbic system in overdrive, the sensation of being stalked by a creature that wishes me ill, a red-eyed, creeping horror of blackened fangs and hoary claws, a ropy-muscled demon coiled to spring upon me. It’s a process of feedback as old as I am. I’m pretty sure I was born with it, as a propensity, and the circumstances of my early life served only to wear the furrow down into me, to create the pathway for the flow, and, once started, the flow deepened its own way.

It’s damnably tough to change such a groove. It often seems like there are no other grooves, not for me, anyway. I know that other people have good grooves, better grooves, because I see them in their grooviness, and I am envious. How do they do that? I wonder. They must not be like me at all.

Ow, we want the funk
Give up the funk
Ow, we need the funk
We gotta have that funk

Yeah, I’ve got to have that funk. So give it up. Anyone? Bueller?

See, the post title is a little misleading. I’ve got my groove back, and no mistake, but goddammit it’s the wrong groove! It’s like showing up at a P-Funk show and doing a Klezmer dance. I haven’t smashed said groove, haven’t smashed it at all. Farg.

According to the Mayo clinic, there are 10 signs n’ symptoms of depression, and the difference between “Major” and “Minor” is simply a matter of duration. I’ve got every one of them at the moment, and it’s lasted for longer than two weeks and so, damn it all, I’m in the muck again, despite tweaking my neurochemistry with the Official Drugs. I’ve recently upped the dosage—in consultation with my physician, of course—but the plain fact is that after the first couple of months, when it seemed that the old brainsoup was being properly spiced, my response flattened, and then declined, and that’s where I am now. Declined.

All of which means, as I approach the six month evaluation mark, that there’s a very real chance that these are not the Official Drugs for me. Unfortunately, I happened to pick the ones that have the fewest side effects of all the various pills and potions, and I am entirely unwilling to either add yet another medicine to my cocktail or sub one out for the other.

Why is that?

Well, I’ll tell you. [music swells] Stop that. [music fades] First off: there are many things of a nonpharmaceutical nature I could be doing, but am not, and I want to do them first before committing myself any further to the clinical trial-and-error that is mod’ren psychiatry. This includes: resumption of large doses of Omega-3 oils and resumption of the popping of vitamins, including additional B-complex supplements. Mind you, this is in addition to, not instead of, my existing medications. Also: I have contacted Hassan the Turk, and even now a date cake stuffed with opium suppositories is winging its way to me.

I wanted to snag Parliament’s Mothership Connection immediately upon arriving at my apartment yesterday, because “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” was in my head, and I need it in my ears, from whence it will migrate, mayhap, unto my booty.

It’s a curious thing…for someone who occasionally makes his own music, I tend not to listen to music very much. The recent death of my iPod hasn’t helped matters. I’ve had various DVDs playing on the Mac Mini, for the noise. But just hearing a slice of tha' funk in my head has somewhat brightened my mood, and I think what happens is that I get bored with my 8.7 days’ worth of music, because I can hear all of it in my head quite clearly, and so never need to arrange it so that it vibrates the air around my ears. This means that I need new and perhaps surprising music. So, seeing as how I’ve been on about the groove, it makes certain sense to seek out a new one, and funk certainly has that in it.

However: I have been totally stymied by iTunes (yet another addition to a small but growing list of annoyances that keeps me from being an Apple fanboi). First, the iTunes store forgot my original account entirely. No idea where it went. Poof! Making the noise that means "gone." So I made a new account, or, rather, resurrected the one I created when I bought my iPod in 2005, and hooked it into Paypal, all neat as you please. And every time I try to buy the funk, it tells me that I haven't used the account to purchase tunes before (Yes, I know that) and that I need to set up my payment options (Which I've done twice, thank you). Tech support's response was to not understand what my problem was, and ask for more information, which annoyed me further and caused me to drink a six-pack of Diet Coke and stay up all night, shivering with the aspartame sweats.

I hopped onto tech support chat with Verizon, so that I could recover the lost password for my DSL router, enable port forwarding on it, fire up Azureus, and acquire the funk by any means necessary.

So far, no luck with the port forwarding, and my, I do seem to have wandered a bit. Anyway, look at this:

And now it's really late, and I'm having that thing that happens where the gazes of my eyeballs wander around, each independent of the other, so that the only way I can actually see things is to close one or the other of them. I'm stretched out on the bed with season two of Blake's 7* playing on the laptop next to me, and I've got this laptop on my chest being all Ubuntufied and such, and I'm probably no closer to actually going to bed than I was at two AM, because I've got StumbleUpon.

That's right.

It's Friday night and I'm cross-eyed in bed with two computers, a fresh Linux distro, and a BBC science fiction series from the late'70s.

Because that's how hot I am.

*Two words: Jacqueline. Pearce. In addition to being the subject of many a pubescent geekboi's happiest fantasies, she also delivered one of the best villainess's lines of all time (in "Gambit," season two, episode 11): "He is a despicable animal. When the Federation finally cleans out this cesspit, I shall have that vulpine degenerate eviscerated. With a small and very blunt knife."