On May 26, it will have been one year since I pedaled away from Yorktown, Virginia and into the unknown. Just for kicks, allow me to list the events of my life during the past almost-year:

-Ended nine-year relationship
-Sold house
-Threw all worldly possessions in storage, became deliberately homeless, traveled mostly alone for four months and 2,000 miles in a state almost, but not quite, entirely like madness
-Quit drinking (mostly)
-Arrived in Santa Barbara, spent three months as a zombie-like basket case
-Started a writer's group
-Acquired new job and new apartment in the space of a week
-Made mad dash to New York to reacquire worldly possessions, drove back to California in 3 1/2 days of further madness
-Attempted to start another relationship towards the very end of my headlong plunge down a mental cliff

Those are, I think, the highlights. At 5:45AM on May 1, in the shower, no less, I ended my headlong plunge by crashing hard at the bottom of that cliff, a place of such abject despair, mourning, and pain that I'm not even going to bother wasting more words attempting to describe it. Some of you have been there in your own lives, and you'll know what I mean. Everyone else gets to theorize about the total lack of fun and brightly colored balloons that might be found in such a place.

I've never been there before. But while I was there, I recognized it for what it was, and saw how it was qualitatively different from the many similar places in which I have found myself in the past. I saw, with clarity, the long trajectory of my life: I was in that place not as a result of quite recent events, or the events of the past year, or even the past nine years. I have been falling towards that place because of events, processes, and behaviors that have been accumulating over the entirety of my life. On Tuesday morning, I finally arrived at my destination.

The uplifting thing about hitting bottom--really hitting bottom, and knowing it--is that there truly is nowhere else to go but up the cliff wall and out of the abyss. This morning, as I smoked my dawn cigarette and paced up the street, I watched bees flit around the deeply red, bottle brush blossoms of a tree I haven't yet been able to name. I became overwhelmed by a sense of space in my life, space that, until now, I think I had mistaken for isolation and emptiness. This heavy-chested perception changed from that of looking out into a vast, trackless desert into one of welcoming potential, accompanied by the realization of what it means to not have space in one's life, and how terribly overwhelming that must be. As far as walks for a smoke go, this one had a much larger portion of sudden understanding than usual.

There's been some recent discussion among friends about the purpose of blogs that the authors use as journals, revealing deeply personal content. Astonished Head has had a few iterations over the past five years: would-be political pundit blog, humor blog, web comic blog, always interspersed with bits and pieces of my own life. The site stats certainly tell the tale about what gets the most readership--when I had 1,500 readers a day, I was writing about politics and the incipient Iraq war. The more I wrote about me, the more the readership declined, which I don't mind so much. Politics is tiring, and I don't have the passion or the brainpower to keep it up.

Oscar said, "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." Yes: I am just arrogant enough to believe that there are a few people out there who are interested in watching the mental circus of a 35-year old writer as he struggles to wrangle his neurotransmitters into something that vaguely resembles a palatable soup. I am also well aware that there is a much larger portion of the web-going public who will read this as the self-indulgent ramblings of an unbalanced and not particularly inspired nitwit.

So be it. In recent years, memoirs have become fashionable best-sellers, and the grittier, the more devastating the details, the better they sold. I put posts like this, and the ones last week, squarely into that category. This is memoir on the fly, lacking polish or the overarching theme that can only be made visible through hindsight and editing. There are things that don't reach these pages, which I leave to the reader's imagination. At the same time--again, with hubris--I'm confident enough in my own ability to believe that, for a few readers at least, how I arrange the words here is reason enough to read.

There will probably be fewer posts like this in the coming weeks, as I'm working on plugging in to my new town, meeting new people, and having different experiences. But, as this is my house, there will always be room for the personal and the embarrassingly sincere. I will never disown anything I write here. I might say I was wrong, or insane when I wrote it, or possibly drunk. I have no problem with discounting my own foolish words, but I will never claim that such discounting means that I wasn't foolish. A Sartrean definition of bad faith is pretending that you were "someone else" when confronted with a past stupidity or misdeed.

I will always try, to the best of my ability, to write here in good faith.

Whether that's interesting or not is a separate issue entirely.

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It’s a good phrase. They come in, they go out. Not in gentle fashion, lately, which makes my head feel like one of those bright orange inflatable buoys that are tethered to the seabed a ways off shore, letting you know that you’ve swum out too far and really ought to turn back before you drift off to Malaysia. In my case, the buoy has come unmoored, gotten its lines tangled beneath the pier, and is continuously battered against the pylons by the movement of the water.

Yes, yes, I know I said there’d be fewer of these sorts of post in the coming weeks, but that was Sunday, and this is Tuesday, and sod off.

Over the weekend, I attended one of those peculiar gatherings of affluent and semi-affluent people (as though most of us here in America, in comparison to the rest of the world, are anything else) who have come together in one place for the express purpose of creating community and being real. This generally involves sitting around in a circle and passing some sort of object around, talking about things, and emoting.

Prior to yelling at you to get off my lawn, hitching up my belt, and going back inside to watch Matlock, I will tell you that in my day, we had a proper talking stick, and not a crafty little wooden angel, and we burned sage and sweetgrass, and fanned the smoke about with an eagle’s wing that was bestowed upon the guru-who-was-not-a-guru by a gen-yu-wine Native American shaman-type person. Where we summoned in the spirits of the four directions, this group read a few rules from a sheet of paper. We intuitively managed participation based on the needs of the moment and of the person speaking, gently signaling stick-passing time with a sweet little tap on a bronze Tibetan singing bowl. This weekend we had three minutes each and a digital timer, and when the infernal device made its beeping noises the keeper of said device silenced it by pushing buttons which also beeped, and then rang a small little jingly bell as though that might make up for the piezoelectric intrusion.

Lest I complete my slide into what might best be termed pagan snobbery, I must say that I’m all in favor of people getting together with people as often as possible, for whatever reasons they can come up with, and having genuine experiences with each other. It’s an important thing to do, and our culture is sorely lacking in communal ceremonies that don’t involve dressing nicely once a week and driving somewhere to sit in a building built for God.

That said: for a long while, I sat in circle every week, with a much smaller group of people, and I will always remember the intensity, the connection, and the power of intention that I felt there. Our circles usually took place in the evening, and opened with earnest convocations. There was smoke! And fire, if you weren’t careful with the sweetgrass braid. You just can’t match that experience while sitting in a sunny room with a wall of glass and a vaulted ceiling among 35 other people who are all waiting for the beep, even if you put a little Buddha statue and a candle in the center of the carpet.

Yes, everybody was real, and the laughing meditation that erupted at the end of the thing was a genuine joy to participate in and to watch. But at one point during the proceedings, I thought to myself, “There are over a billion people on this planet who don’t have access to potable water.”

It is so easy to get caught up in the problems between our own ears, and I write that as someone who is currently so wrapped up in his head that he can see the backs of his own eyeballs. In our First World bubble, this tendency is downright pernicious. I am learning, in a deeply personal, extraordinarily painful way, that part of the solution to my own problems is to focus outwards rather than inwards. This starts small: a writer’s group, Tango lessons, an acting class, a book club, taking risks by introducing myself to people and asking that they, in turn, introduce me to others.

Keep turning outwards, and gazing farther afield, and eventually you’ll see those billion people without water, and the two million children dead from that lack. And once you’ve seen them, there’s much about this country and its people that looks decadent, and petty, and small. The cowpoke from Texas with the daddy issues is not what’s wrong with this planet.

This is not something I’ve ever articulated on these pages before, but I believe that it’s this spoiled insularity that eventually caused me to recoil from the virulent anti-[insert your favorite politics here] extremism that so shamefully dominates our political discourse. It’s what made me drop politics from these pages, as I was writing in the service of something that I found, at some level, to be repugnant. This is not just because I was arguing for the necessity of slaughter. Simply participating in the debate in the popular fashion was enough to sap my strength of mind. In my defense: it’s really easy to write screeds when you’re drunk. But it’s also easy to quell your conscience.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to make some sort of declaration of intention about something-or-other and tie it in to the water theme in a clever way, but I’m not going to, because I’m barely in a state where I can make dinner for myself, let alone save the world. My focus, for the moment, remains necessarily narrow. It should be sufficient to say that something is happening to me. Something that has to do with space, and expansion, and the end of a long night spent in the small, dark closet of my self. I feel this now, in this moment, and so I’m writing about it, fully cognizant that tomorrow might be another day of dread, panic, and tears. Now is all I’ve got, these days…and, quite possibly, it might be all I’ll ever have.

So: I write and, having writ, move on.

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Why? Because there’s nothing left for me to do, that’s why. I’m in the stew! The gnarly, nasty, unskimmed stew with turnips and chunks of unidentifiable animal protein in it. But, as King Richard IV famously said, “We must eat the yellow wobbly parts.”

And, as my friend Katy somewhat less-famously said, I’m “in good company.” Lots of creative types have been…let’s call them mentally interesting. My challenge is to avoid sitting alone in my apartment being interesting in that way, because that leads to all kinds of unpleasant business involving endless loops of thought, quivering hands, pacing, too many cigarettes, and loud conversations with myself that I find more engaging than is generally considered healthy.

However, managing to be in the distracting company of others at all times is a difficult task, even if you’re not new in town and out of your gourd. So my task becomes the discovery of ways to avoid sailing off into the reddened skies of disastrous mentalities when I’m by myself.

One way, of course, is bloody obvious: write. Create. Take what I’ve got, throw it on the page. Build my word-based marionettes and move them through the worlds I create for them, worlds which are very much like this one, but tweaked, just a bit. Characters who are very much like me and the people I’ve encountered, but amplified, broadened, and dramatically enhanced. Situations that are familiar, but with increased tension, greater emotional impact, and a higher frequency of synchronous events. Take my situation, make it worse, toss it high into the air and watch it crash down at my feet, then pick through the wreckage and find a story to tell.

Which is kind of a shame, because I’ve got some spec-fic in my queue that I’d really like to finish, but it requires a certain storyteller’s voice that has fled from me for now, a voice that demands an entirely different technique, not to mention a better state of mind. I’ll get back to it when I can.

For now: there’s a gentleman by the name of Shelley Curtis who’s earned two stories of his own, so far. He looks quite a bit like me, but he’s older, smarter, and better-looking (of course). I’ve discovered that he can be cruel—which I’ll get to in a moment—that he’s probably more selfish than I am, and certainly more devoted to an aesthetic hedonism which may or may not be destructive. He’s an academic, and a controversial one at that, managing to piss off both sides of any debate he’s a part of. He lives in the New York of about 20 years from now. He is, in the identity nomenclature of the day, a “homosexually-identified bisexual,” although he does seem to be blurring the edges of that box quite a bit. I find him interesting, and as a character I attempted to use him in the way I described above.

But he surprised me. When I was finishing up his second story this week, he acted in a way which I did not expect: cruel and confused, harsh yet sympathetic, even guilty. It wasn’t the story I planned to write at all. I let his actions stand, and I’ll find out whether they serve the story at next Wednesday’s writers’ group crit.

I’ve read other writers discussing their techniques, and how they give their characters free rein on the page. That never made sense to me. It always seemed to be a kind of New Age affectation. After all, I’m the one writing the thing, and these people ought to do what I tell them. Shelley didn’t. He said things that I didn’t think he would say, and did things I didn’t think he would do. The puppet, it seems, managed to cut a few of his strings. Now, I know a bit more about him, which opens up further story possibilities.

All of which, upon further reflection, is remarkably functional. Yes, I’ve got a bad case of the Wackies. Yes, I feel subjugated by my neurobiology—particularly by my pesky amygdala, which is supposed to be regulating the chemicals that drive fear and anxiety, and by my prefrontal cortex, which is supposed to be keeping an eye on my amygdala. However: everything I am doing in my life right now is focused on eliminating the Wackies and gaining control of my neurochemistry. The plasticity of the brain is well-established in neurology, and one of the ways that it changes is through repeated exposure to stimuli. The wonderful thing about this property is that it works with positive as well as negative stimuli. Every time I write a paragraph instead of taking a drink, I’m changing some infinitesimal pathway in my brain. Every time I interact with someone instead of collapsing into a ball of hot nerves on the couch, I give my amygdala the equivalent of a smack on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

So: yes, I’ll embrace where I am right now. But only because that acknowledgment is the first step in getting the hell out of here.

Speaking of which: I'm off to see a play!

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And it's good that it's Kate. After a long spell of trading voicemails and missing each other, we finally connected via cellular on Friday, and I paced around the parking lot for 45 minutes while we traded stories of our respective wackinesses. We're quite a bit alike, Kate and I. When I laid out a list of all the red flags surrounding my recent tryst--which I ignored, utterly and willfully, because I was out of my tiny little mind--she burst into laughter. Which might not sound like a nice thing to do, but by god it was funny, in the way that only the real and true things in life are funny, and I laughed with her. It's wonderful to have a friend who's in on the joke. She gave me a quite flattering shout-out on May 10, so go to her site and read it and buy some CDs.

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I'm paying rather a lot of attention to my states of mind and body these days. It's a necessary form of self-involvement. I haven't actually had a full night's sleep in over a month...usually I snap awake at anywhere from 2:30 to 4:30 in the morning, with a big knot in my chest. From then on, if I'm lucky, I can doze. If I'm not lucky, I lie awake while my thoughts, like things alive, do their damndest to overtake me. A bit uncomfortable, that. Makes my mornings...what's the phrase? Oh yes: suck ass.

This sort of thing used to be easily remedied by the liberal application of Absolut. Now that I no longer take that particular medication, I'm left to my own devices. Just me and my brain, alone in the dark.

So, naturally, I joined a gym.

There's an extensive body of research detailing the positive effects of exercise on a depressive brainlump such as myself. Here's a bit of it, all scientifically lingoed and whatnot:

The preliminary general model described here is based on the assumptions that (a) some neurotransmitter cascade (primarily nonlinear) affects the whole brain in a lateralized fashion, and (b) with more prolonged exercise, more favorable receptor subtypes are recruited for all the neurotransmitters involved.

From our previous studies [1,43,44], we found that the deleterious behavioral effects of stress were less pronounced in the "exercised and stressed" animals, and the beneficial effects became more pronounced with time (more prolonged exercise), as indicated by the results of the behavioral tests.

An "exercised and stressed" animal is, typically, a lab rat in a tub of water. It's called "forced swimming." Oddly enough, a rat swimming for its life is less stressed by, say, being given unexpected electric shocks than a rat sitting in its cage being fat. Exercise does all sorts of good things for serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine levels. Exercise, when combined with antidepressant medication, is much more effective than medication alone.

Thus, and so! I walk a rapid 4 mile-per-hour pace on a treadmill for half an hour listening to my iPod and reading the subtitles on the TV screen in front of me. Then I go upstairs where the machines are and do another half hour of weight-style activities. Afterwards, for two or three hours...I feel normal.

It's quite remarkable, actually. For a long while, I was convinced that this particular mechanism was simply broken in my head. After all: I rode 2,000 miles, and felt like shit the whole time. After I arrived in Santa Barbara, I spent a week doing daily rides of 22 miles, capped off by a 50-mile ride on my birthday. Still felt like shit. So I gave up.

However: there is, apparently, something to be said for tweaking the neurons with a bit of bupropion. The mechanism is working. Only for a little while, but it's working. And, like a rat pressing the lever for his food pellet, I am highly motivated to continue. As in "getting up at 6AM to work out before going to the office" motivated. I'm usually up by then anyway, so instead of struggling with the usual Morning Craziness, I will go walk, and lift heavy things. I will continue to do this until my steadily-slimming corpus resembles statuary and my head is right with whatever neurological gods have seen fit to fuck with me for the past two decades. I hold fast to the promise: "the beneficial effects became more pronounced with time."

Oh yes. There will be a change. A fellow can only stand so much, you know?

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The degree to which (and the rapidity with which, to maintain the parallelism) my mood will shift. Those of you who haven’t experienced depression or anxiety outside the bounds of normality probably have little idea of what this might be like. Even if you know someone who has…the observation of the external can never equal the experience of the internal. It’s not the kind of thing one “snaps out of,” which is a bit unfortunate, as I’d really like to.

Imagine, for a moment, that your emotional life is in the hands of someone else, someone you've never met. Not someone malicious, but someone whose intentions and whims are entirely unknown to you. You will never know, from one morning to the next, whether you’ll be normal, happy, in despair, or in fear. Sometimes, your state will shift from hour to hour. You can be laughing on the way to lunch, and half an hour later inexplicably gripped by dread, on the verge of tears. You are not in control. There is no equilibrium for you, only the rushing pendulum swing of extremes.

It’s frightening at times. I mean, honestly: who wants to go through day after day tethered to an emotional bungee cord? To be dependent upon pharmaceuticals which may or may not be effective, just to function? When I drank, I at least had the reassuring sense of familiarity that came with knowing exactly what a 375ml bottle of vodka would do. It was dependable.

Something I realized—intellectually—during my cross-country trek was that as bad as I felt on any given day, it wouldn’t last forever. Couldn’t possibly last forever. Not knowing this is a major component of depression: the certainty that you’ll always be this way, that there is, in fact, no other way for you to be. That, in turn, segues nicely into anxiety.

I write this now from a kind of remove. The sensation of my emotional life being almost entirely out of my control can lend itself to a certain distance, if I take the opportunity to achieve it. That doesn’t lessen the impact of the sensations, but it does allow me to do things like sit here and write dispassionately about my state, an activity which is, at the last, helpful.

I’m not entirely sure what part of posting such writings here is helpful—there are, after all, only so many ways that one can say "Gosh! I'm really fucked up!"—but it seems to be. I know, with humility now, that there are many aspects of my experience that are far from unique. There is an entire psychopharmaceutical industry worth many billions of dollars that rests upon that reality, not to mention a cavalcade of recovery programs. Any popular vestige of artistic romance associated with a melancholic disposition has been buried beneath an avalanche of pills.

And yet…yet, there is a part of me that relishes these tides. There’s a reason Civil War soldiers were given strong drink before having their wounded limbs hacked off: alcohol is an anesthetic, a numbing agent that affects the heart and mind as well as the body. Paradoxically, it is also an amplifier of emotion (“I love you, man!”), and I have, in fact, deliberately used the stuff to produce just that effect in myself, in an effort to simply feel something. Anything. But those were transient experiences that fled with the sober dawn, and, eventually, alcohol no longer worked that way at all for me, becoming an agent of full, insensate darkness.

But now: I am awash in the debris-filled torrent of my emotional life, like a hapless backpacker in an arroyo swept along in a spring flood. I feel everything. Sometimes all at once. There was an article in last week’s New York Times Magazine (“The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis”) which described the peculiar corner of academic psychology that is concerned with the study of wisdom. Despite Plato’s best efforts, it remains nebulous concept at best. However, one passage in particular struck me:

The results suggest that older people on average are more even-keeled and resilient emotionally. “Younger people tend to be either positive or negative at any given point in their daily life,” [researcher] Carstensen says, “but older people are more likely to experience mixed emotions, happiness and a touch of sadness at the same time. Having mixed emotions helps to regulate emotional states better than extremes of emotion. There’s a lot of loss associated with aging, and humans are the only species that recognizes that time eventually runs out. That influences the motivation to savor the day-to-day experiences you have, it allows you to be more positive. Appreciating the fragility of life helps you savor it.” Fredda Blanchard-Fields of the Georgia Institute of Technology has produced a series of studies showing that the emotional equilibrium of older people allows them to negotiate solutions to interpersonal problems better than younger people. “She wouldn’t call it research on wisdom,” Carstensen says of Blanchard-Fields, “but I would.”

I lay no claim to wisdom (that would be foolish). But the idea of mixed emotional states as a better means of regulating emotion than the extremes I am currently experiencing has great appeal to me. To realize joy and sorrow simultaneously is a profound thing…and I’ve experienced it now and again over the past couple of months. Laughing through the tears. There’s no reason, really, why it has to be one or the other.

So, maybe that’s where I’m headed. Maybe not, I don’t really know. On my good days—in my good hours—I can see the way forward, and I still believe that I am, in fact, trudging forward.

Quite a journey, really. A pain in the ass, vertiginous, bash-myself-about-the-head-with-a-rock journey, but a journey nonetheless.

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...I had 900 words' worth of polished post ready to go, about (what else) my disastrous state of mind, and how swiftly such states change, and it even had a quote from a New York Times Sunday Magazine piece in it. Since then, my state has shifted again, and I realized that I really have no desire to inflict those words upon you.

Instead, I elected to tell you about its content, and write this brief blurb, and sit here laughing to myself about the absurdity of it all.

This is, you may assume, an improvement.

[Or, to put it another way: I decided to inflict it after all. That's it right there, below this post -IW]

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One of the more subtle aspects of a really good, full-on depression and anxiety festival is the degree of self-involvement that accompanies it. I say “subtle” because I have found that this involvement is a characteristic of the state that underlies all of its more overwhelming sensations and emotions, and this became apparent only when I was actually starting to climb back out of the hole. While I’m in it, everything around me becomes agonizingly focused through the lens of myself, as my mind and body conspire to produce wonderful bursts of panic and despair. When I began to claw my way upwards, I realized that the only way to do so was to pay even more attention to myself, because no matter what externalities may have triggered my state, the only things I can truly be responsible for are my own reactions and my own being. This difference is mainly one of awareness: in the hole, a high degree of self-involvement can remain hidden; on the way out of it, conscious attention must be paid to the self in order to direct the healing process.

I have a friend who, like me, has had a banner year, and life, it seems, just keeps piling more onto her. Like me, she is subject to depression and anxiety. I’ve known this about her since we met several months ago. And yet: not until this morning was I able to peer out from the depths of my own self, and realize the extent to which her own experience, right now, must be as harrowing and all-consuming as my own has been. The sudden empathy that I felt for her made my heart ache. This was not mere sympathy, which is somewhat shallow, based on a detached awareness of another’s pain. No…this was, for lack of a better term, a revelation. The removal of my self from consideration when regarding another allowed full apprehension of her turmoil and her grief, better comprehension of who she is as an individual, and, finally, some understanding of her hitherto inexplicable actions.

I don’t think I have experienced anything like it in my entire life, and I know that it is something to which I must hold fast.

For that, I am thankful today.

For the people in my life, past and present, I am thankful.

For my full heart, I am thankful.

For my tears, I am thankful.

For my laughter, I am thankful.

For my pain, and for my joy, I am thankful.

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I've been engaged in a deliberate effort to meet new friends, and reconnect with old ones.

Recently, I found my friend Lauren. I met her in 1992. That's fifteen years, people.

I last spoke to her in 2002, at her wedding. I was drunk at the time, which I knew, and also running a fever of 102 due to an ear infection, which I didn't know. Pea and I were still house hunting, and I was still in the throes of post 9/11 trauma. Then, in the way that sometimes happens, Lauren and I just sort of fell out of contact with each other.

A few weeks ago, through some sly Googling, I discovered the name of the school where she teaches, and I called to leave a message in the school secretary's voicemail box for her. Not knowing that it was Spring break--you tend to lose track of such things when you're not actually in school--I waited a week, and heard nothing. So I managed to find an e-mail address for her husband, and sent an e-mail to him. Finally, a couple of weeks back, she called, and left a voicemail on my cell. I cried when I heard it.

When we finally spoke, she told me one of those strange stories that always disturbs the skeptical me. She used to rely on the Caller ID memory on her telephone to keep track of phone numbers, until, one day, her husband replaced said phone. She went out and bought an actual address book, determined to remedy the situation. When she wrote my name in it, she wondered where I was, what I was doing, and just how it was that we had managed to lose track of each other. There was a time when a Google search for my name put me somewhere within the first page of results, but that hasn't been true for awhile now. She did manage to turn up a reference to a book of obscene (and mostly bad) poetry that I wrote back in 1993, but the address associated with it was, of course, useless. So, she decided that fate would determine whether we would ever be in contact again.

12 hours later, she walked into her school, and the school secretary asked her, "Do you know someone named Ian Wood?" Lauren told me the question needed to be repeated three times before she could respond.

That's real Trembling In The Force action, that is. We talked for two hours and--cliche though it is--it was as though we'd last spoken the week before, rather than five years ago.

Before I reconnected with Lauren, sometime back in January, I decided to look up another friend of mine from my summer theater days in 1995. Through some more clever Googling, I found out where Melissa worked, but only had a phone number for her. I didn't call. Three weeks later, she found me, via this website, and e-mailed. More Force-style action, and we've been in touch often since then.

These people--Lauren, Kate, Melissa, and Pea--these people save my life, over and over again. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big, important ways. I don't know what I've done to deserve them.

So: if you've got someone who used to be a close friend, who used to be part of your life, and who has since drifted away into geography and time...find that person. Talk to them. Do it now.

I'll wait.

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You know what?

All this mental illness crap is boring the piss out of me.

I need to find something else to do with my time.

Perhaps I shall build a small thermonuclear device, and call it Steven.

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It’s the Amazing Plastic Brain! Watch! As it backs away from poignancy and cascades into flippancy! Marvel! As affection transforms into vexation! Wonder! At its amazing capacity for self-deception! Ladies and gentleman, you will not see a better show at this carnival, at any price! Not the bearded lady. Not the tattooed man. No! Not even the twin Malaysian albino transvestite dwarf acrobats! My fine friends, this is the show of shows, this is the curtain behind which you will find the greatest entertainment value on these fairgrounds!

Unless, of course, you’ve got one just like it in your own head. In which case, you should probably just move on to the Ferris wheel, and maybe buy some cotton candy.

But seriously, folks!

I had to drive all the way to Target in Ventura to get the fissile material I needed to build Steven, but now I’ve got a happy little device with machined aluminum bits and dangerous flashing LED displays and neat bundles of wires that look intriguing.

Steven and I were having a discussion about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and—being myself and not someone else—I took a brief trip through the words, sentences, and paragraphs I’ve written over the past few years. Good heavens! What a story I have created for myself. Steven—being a bomb—doesn’t have a lot to say about himself. His story is simple: when it’s time, his little fissile core will do its fissile business and fuse the bits of deuterium and tritium in its center together, which will then get very hot, fast, and large, taking whatever’s around him with it. He doesn’t have much in the way of conflict about that, because it’s not in his nature. He’s a thermonuclear device. He blows up. He doesn’t need to drink himself into insensibility to handle that. In fact, he’s somewhat proud of the fact that someone as clever as Einstein had to think him up, and that he shares kindred processes with the stars themselves. He is, in short, stable, comfortable with who he is, and remarkably free of neurosis and anxiety.

I, unfortunately, am not a thermonuclear device.

Neither, I have come to understand, am I broken. This is terminology I adopted fairly recently, partly because I felt that way, and partly because I was around people who also considered themselves broken. It’s a fine metaphor, as such things go, but I find it limiting. It doesn't work for me. There is always the possibility of repair, of course. But the image I hold in my mind of brokenness is that of a lumbering machine, capable of a kind of shambling progress, but always hampered by the fact that large portions of its mechanical anatomy are shattered or just not working properly. Oh, it’ll eventually get where it’s going. But its progress will be slow and torturous. Any repairs that are effected will be temporary at best. It’s a machine that’s doomed to break down. Doomed!

So no, despite all the intimate depictions on these pages of exactly how it is that I don’t function properly, I’ve rejected the terminology of brokenness. I may be a work in progress, but that just means I’m not finished yet, not that I’m damaged. Part of the reason I’m able to say this is because even in the depths of despair, I have an acute sense of place in my life, and I have always been where I needed to be. Always.

Steven is reminding me that this can be hard on people around me, and that’s true. It’s difficult for someone to hear, “Well, I kind of needed to be drunk for five years, sorry about that, I’m better now, see you around.” In fact, it’s more than difficult. “Difficult” doesn’t even come close. I know that, especially these days. There is no question in my mind that I can be a real bastard to be around while I’m “exactly where I need to be.”

It’s tough to follow up a paragraph like that with a qualifier like “but” or “however” or “yet,” because it gives the impression that it’s all well and fine for me to carom about the place like a drunken bull in a china heart shop. It’s not, it’s really not, and I know that, too. At the same time (yes, I know that’s a “qualifier,” shut up) I wouldn’t be where I am now if I wasn’t where I was then. I truly wish that I could’ve figured out the things I’m figuring out now in some other way, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t.

Steven is prodding me to write about all about all the things I’m figuring out—he’s quite personable, for a weapon of mass destruction—but, really, this post has gone on for over 800 words already, and it will have to be enough to simply say that I can see joy. I’m not there yet, not quite, but I’m getting some on me, little droplets of it, blown by the wind from further up the trail.

Steven wants a sandwich.

Which is a queer thing for a thermonuclear bomb to want, but there you are.

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I've written about damn near everything on this site, whether I knew anything about it or not.

Except sex.

That's partly because, with the exception of the past year, I was in a monogamous, committed relationship for the entirety of this site's existence. Not that I couldn't have written about the subject, mind you, but...well, it's complicated, and out of deference to my former partner and to avoid the total Reader boredom that comes with an excess of authorial navel-gazing, I'll skip the gory bits. (Then again...it's not as though I haven't been diving deeply into my belly for the past month here...no, I'll skip it. You don't need to read it, and I don't need to write it.)

Returning to the subject at hand. As I mentioned recently, there's a slew of issues surrounding the publication of the highly personal on the very public web. This has never been an anonymous blog, and given what I've been writing about lately, there's certainly no reason to make it one now. There is also the small matter of being out. You can't be out and anonymous. The two are mutually exclusive. So yeah, that's me over there on the left in the purple shades. (I have better hair now, but you go to blog with the photo you have, not the photo you might want or wish to have.)

The discerning reader will have picked up hints (or brickbats) here and there about my proclivities, and while I've never made much of a deliberate attempt to hide them in my offline life, I've never made much of an attempt to interact with any sort of like-minded "community," either. Long time readers (both of you) will know that I've always had a problem with identity politics, and defining myself by what I do with my genitalia never seemed like the proper thing to do.

I've always had gay men in my life, mostly because my mother had gay friends. In fact, as the only child of a single mother, the only male available to teach me how to tie a necktie was my gay next-door neighbor. So there was never any question in my mind that yes, some people are gay, and that's a normal thing in the world.

Except...I'm not gay, which raises a slightly different set of issues. Here, let's roll some tape and let Margaret Mead say some stuff:

What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love. Today the recognition of bisexuality in oneself and in others is part of the whole mid-20th century movement to accord each individual, regardless of race, class, nationality, age or sex, the right to be a person who is unique and who has a social identity that is worthy of dignity and respect...Even a superficial look at other societies and some groups in our own society should be enough to convince us that a very large number of human beings, probably a majority, are bisexual in their potential capacity for love...We will fail to evolve in our understanding of human sexuality if we continue to see homosexuals merely as "heterosexuals-in-reverse," ignoring the vast diversity actually represented by society's many varied expressions of love between people.

That's from an article titled "Bisexuality: What's It All About?" that Mead wrote for Redbook back in 1975, when I was four.

Quite a lot has changed since then. The generation of gay men before me--if I can call those who are ten to fifteen years older than me a "generation"--truly came of age in the time of Anita Bryant, AIDS, and a very angry Larry Kramer. The generation after me had Will & Grace, Ellen DeGeneres, and gay marriage on ballots across the country. (Yes, it was defeated...but even the idea of such initiatives was still unthinkable when the trannies rioted at Stonewall in 1969.)

As for myself, I'm somewhere in the middle. I went to DC for my second Pride march in 1993, seven months after Colorado's voters narrowly passed Amendment 2, prohibiting any "special protections" for gays, lesbians, or bisexuals. The Colorado contingent marched with an avenue-wide banner that read, "COLORADO: GROUND ZERO," and I still remember my eyes welling at the sight of it. I didn't realize, at the time, just how right they were.

Later that day, as we rounded a bend, we passed the usual band of Phelps types, with their GOD HATES FAGS signs and their bile. There was one fellow who stood out from the rest, arm outstretched over the police barricade, pointing an accusing finger at us as we walked by. So I stopped, stepped out of the march, and pointed right back at him. We locked eyes for three or four minutes, until he looked away. I won.

I have been fortunate. With the exception of one other incident, which I'll tell you about later, that's the greatest instance of homophobia I've ever experienced, and I had the weight of tens of thousands behind me at the time. I was raised in an environment where homosexuality was an accepted part of life. I've never had the slightest hint of self-loathing or doubt about my varied desires. In that, my experience is radically different from that of many other gay and lesbian folks. I have no coming-out horror stories. I haven't lost anyone to AIDS. No one I know has been fag-bashed. There's an entire range of shared "gay" experiences that, well, I don't share.

Since about 1996, I have limited my exposure to the gay community. In truth, I have more fear of being called a confused fence-sitter than I do of being called a faggot, probably because I know I'm not one. I'm not a fence-sitter, either--they've only got two sides, after all--but for some reason, the idea of being out within the gay community carries more fear of rejection for me than the idea of being out in the straight community. Nevertheless, that's the direction I'm headed at the moment, in keeping with what has become my first rule of living: go where the fear is.

All of this raises much larger issues, not just about sex, but about love. Recent experiences have stretched my mind and heart to near-bursting, and I've learned much--some of it too late, alas--about my own capacity for love outside the bounds of the narrowly-defined spectra of what we're pleased to call relationships in this culture. The birthing pains for this knowledge were intense...entirely overwhelming, in fact. I held fast, with white knuckles and tearing fingernails, to old understandings and old agonies. There's a corollary to my first rule of living: don't make decisions out of fear. I didn't quite manage to pull that one off, and I do feel poorer for it, while paradoxically feeling enriched by my newly-expanded boundaries.

So far, I've had comparatively smooth sailing on the waters of "atypical" sexual identity, but I'm well aware that this is anomalous for many people like me. I'm going to be writing more about this particular subject and other subjects related to it in the future (aren't you just thrilled?). As for why I'm choosing to do so...well, why the hell not? It's pretty much the last frontier for this small unregarded yellow blog in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the IntraTubes. Perhaps it will prove helpful to someone, somewhere, who's ostensibly gay or straight, and in hiding.

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a brief pause
while the author
loses
his
mind

*poof*

there it went

pretty mind

floating away
on clouds
of officially sanctioned
mood altering
substances

fortunately
Benadryl®
is
over
the counter

takes the edge off
alleviates hives caused by a pint of Häagen-Dazs®
and it's pink
which is always nice
to have
in
your
head

everyone out of the goddamn pool
we've got a floater
in the shallow end
and the water wings
do
not
work

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In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates relates a story about the origin of Love supposedly told to him by the wise woman, Diotima. The gods had a great feast in celebration of the birth of Aphrodite, and among the guests was Resource, the son of Cunning. Uninvited and alone, Poverty (also called Lack or Want) hung around outside the gates. Drunk on nectar—for the gods had not yet created wine—Resource stumbled into a grove and fell asleep. In the peculiar way of Greek gods and personifications, Poverty lay with Resource as he slept, and the child thus conceived was Love.

Love, Diotima tells Socrates, takes after his mother in that he is in a constant state of need. He is shoeless and homeless, and sleeps on the bare ground or in doorways. He also takes after his father, in that he is always in pursuit of all that is beautiful and good; he is brave, high-strung, a master hunter and strategist. He is neither immortal nor mortal, and in one hour he can be flourishing and alive, the next dying, then revived again by the force of his father’s nature. But any abundance he gets is always ebbing away into want. He is driven by need, and has the skills to fill that need temporarily, but at no time is Love fulfilled or unfulfilled.

The point of this origin story was to illustrate the nature of the pursuit of wisdom, for, according to Plato, we do not truly desire what we have, but only what we lack. This lack is also reflected in the speech describing the origin of love that Aristophanes gave prior to Socrates's own: humans were originally created as creatures of four legs, four arms, and a two-faced head, then split apart at the whim of Zeus. Their component portions—man and woman—are forever trying to return to their original conjoined state.

Throughout the dialogue, love is couched in terms of need and lack. Plato intended to convey that love is the idea of good which lies at the root of all virtue and truth. What seems to have been transmitted to our culture is that love is the constant pursuit of a remedy for a bereft state. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Much the same, I think, can be said for our traditions of love.

The common and accepted expression of romantic love is as a pair, and, once paired, the individuals within it become a unit. Socially, the individuals are transformed from (for example) “George” and “Mary” into “George and Mary.” An entire array of cultural machinery moves into action, supporting this binary unit, their particular attachment to each other, and the exclusion of anyone else from that unit. Everything in our culture—religion, politics, movies, television, even advertisements—voices its support for the idea of love as a need that is met by one person.

This may seem an odd claim to make in this age of promiscuity and pornography. However, I think that the vast majority of people admit that there is a qualitative difference between a relationship that is based on physicality and one that is based on love. There are relationships that are “serious” and relationships that aren’t. Relationships that are “serious” involve love, those that aren’t do not. The boundaries between the two aren’t always clear…in fact, I would suggest that’s more often the case than not. This is one of the functions of the cultural mechanisms that surround those who have “coupled up:” to encourage them to stay coupled up and start families, even if they're not entirely sure they ought to.

This was all well and good when the Church ran society and the average lifespan was 37 years. “‘Till death do us part” was never far off, and it was certainly in society’s best interest to encourage the birth of children and the maintenance of family units that would best enable those children to reach adulthood. All very practical.

After a certain point in the development of Western culture, these practical needs began to recede into the background. But the concept of love as the fulfillment of an individual’s need still girds our ideas of what love relationships are supposed to be, and is expressed everywhere from Shakespeare to daytime soaps. Need, lack, and cunning strategies to fulfill that need. Pursuit and conquest. This country’s divorce rate alone suggests that this model of love has a high rate of failure, and of those who remain married, what percentage spend their time making each other miserable? Or staying together “for the children?” Or being unfaithful--emotionally, sexually, or both--with someone other than their supposed life partner? The number of binary “lifetime commitments” that actually live up to their promises of fulfillment, trust, and loyalty is, it seems, rather small.

I write this as someone who has quite recently run headlong into his own limitations and his own mountain of need. This is my experience, not yours, so if you’ve been happily married for two decades, congratulations to you. My point is simply this: that doesn’t work for everybody. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t work for quite a lot of people, but they keep trying anyway, because they are bound by societal conventions, their emotional limitations, their needs, or some combination of the three.

In my case, the realization of exactly what my issues were was, in fact, sparked by re-reading Plato’s Symposium. The repeated theme of love as a salve for need resonated with me in an unpleasantly discordant fashion…there was something that just felt “off” about the concept, particularly because I recognized its ubiquity in my own life. My needs seemed so great, and the notion of having them unmet so terrifying, that they overwhelmed the foundational elements of my character: honesty and openness. I’m really not speaking out of egotism, here (honest). These are qualities that I’ve identified in myself, that others have validated, and they’re important to me. Anything that shuts these defining aspects of my self down is, by my definition, a Bad Thing.

The good news is that the only thing that is actually capable of shutting those aspects down is within me: fear. Fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of humiliation, the list goes on. Every fear-based decision I have made in my life in general, and within intimate relationships in particular, has been a bad one. Instructive, of course. But bad. The internal conflicts thus created have driven me to drink, and worse. What I have come to realize is that avoidance of fear is not a need.

The defining characteristics of Love as described by Plato are simply these: he is never content, or discontent. He is never fulfilled, or unfulfilled. He is always seeking, then finding, then in need once more. That’s not love to me. That’s tragedy.

In Plato’s world, love was a seeking for the Good and the Beautiful. But these are Ideas, and are thus unobtainable. We may approach them. We may catch glimpses of them. But we will never reach them. Down here in the muck, our real needs are different. Empathy. Understanding. Acceptance. Intimacy, emotional and otherwise. The ideal—that of getting all of this from one person, always—strikes me, like the Good and the Beautiful, as similarly unobtainable. Is there any reason to place boundaries on who meets these needs, or how they do so, as long as this meeting takes place within a framework of trust and honesty among all concerned? Perhaps love should not be like Diotima’s Love, son of Poverty and Resource, shoeless, homeless, and sleeping in the dirt.

Perhaps love should be fearless, and unfettered.

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After I wrote and posted "Polyamorous Perverse?", I came across a whole slew of related material while poking around on the Big Big Web.

In particular, this article leapt out and said hi there: "Polyamory: What it is and what it isn't," by Derek McCullough and David S. Hall. It touches on many of the same points I did (without the Plato), but I swear I came up with those bits all on my own. Really!

Give it a read, if you're interested, and if you'd like to learn more, there are a few links and references at the end.

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I've been thinking, for some reason, that I started my journey on May 26. My archives tell me different, though. It was one year ago today that I left on my journey, pedaling away from the Yorktown Victory Monument in Virginia...away from Pea, our house, and the East coast, where I had lived for almost my entire life.

I'm a little dysthymic at the moment...a lot of up and down with this medication, although, to be fair, I've got a lot of up down without it, so it's somewhat difficult to determine the cause of my mood at any given moment. "One day at a time" really doesn't work for me, as my moods are measured in hours.

I've lost a lot over the past year. Some of it I needed to lose. Weight. Alcohol. The absurd belief that I could continue doing the same things I had been doing and somehow effect positive change in my life at the same time.

Other losses...well, "regret" doesn't quite cover it. There's Pea, of course. This is a woman who, during the four months I was on the road, gave up what should have been her "clean break" period at the end of our relationship to be on the phone with me nearly every day. She knew what I didn't: I was in no shape, mentally or physically, to be attempting what I was attempting. I was alone, hanging by a thread, and had no one. So she was there for me. Every. Day. She was my lifeline. I miss her. Not because of what she did for me, but because she's the kind of person who can do that sort of thing, if that makes any sense.

I want to be able to say, unequivocally, that I'm in a better place now than I was a year ago. Objectively, that's true enough. I've pulled off a whole set of major life changes. Subjectively...subjectively, these are difficult times for me. I might not be drinking, but I'm still well within that period of sobriety when everything that's been suppressed by that anesthetic is hopping about in my skull with frenetic abandon and generally having its way with me.

Had I not been on the road, there is a better than even chance that, if I had just moved back to the city, gotten an apartment, gotten a job...I would have killed myself. Not on purpose. It would have been some stupid accident. Too much alcohol, maybe with Xanax, just another routine attempt to numb myself out that happened to end in vomit and asphyxiation. Instead, via a stubborn, senseless sort of grace, I put myself in a situation which made that impossible.

So, I'm glad I'm alive. I'm glad I'm near the ocean, even though I haven't gone to see it in months. I'm glad I'm finally self-aware enough to recognize where I am in my life, do the work that I need to do, and avoid repeating the mistakes of my past.

Or, at least, avoid repeating them in exactly the same way.

Or...perhaps, if I do repeat them in the same way, making sure that they don't produce the same goddamn results.

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Something I wrote on Thursday didn't seem quite right to me.

More accurately, there's a lot in that post that needs further exploration, but for whatever reason, one portion in particular seemed to want more immediate attention than the others. Here, let me quote my own damn self:

“‘Till death do us part” was never far off, and it was certainly in society’s best interest to encourage the birth of children and the maintenance of family units that would best enable those children to reach adulthood. All very practical.

After a certain point in the development of Western culture, these practical needs began to recede into the background.

The question left begging here is exactly how it is that "enabling children to reach adulthood" is less of a practical need in modern Western culture.

It remains so, of course. In this 2006 NewScientist article ("Love unlimited: The polyamorists"), Dossie Easton, co-author of "The Ethical Slut", explains what I meant, and broaches the subject of this post:

"In middle-class urban cultures, people aren't marrying for survival any more. They can get divorced, and the kids won't starve. This means we're having marriages and relationships for very different reasons than our ancestors did. We're doing it for emotional gratification." Easton sees poly as a break from the "survival strategy" traditions that created both polygamy and monogamy. "Polyamory is a cultural outgrowth of serial monogamy, or having multiple partners without necessity," she says. "Once you're released from necessity, you can start doing all kinds of original thinking."

Putting this "original thinking" into the service of "emotional gratification," however, requires a level of radical honesty that is difficult to obtain, harder to maintain, and altogether rare. Some of the first-hand accounts I've come across--particularly those of secondaries, e.g., the third partner in a triad--demonstrate a level of insecurity and chaos that, at first blush, doesn't seem worth the trouble. Punkindunkin writes,

When I went to bed last night, I was fighting a mild case of melancholy. I was sick and tired of all the alone time, tired of the highly inadequate and frustratingly garbled phone calls that I endure, and tired of constantly waiting for the next time when I will be held. I didn’t think that the ‘lonelies’ were going to last thru the night and into my morning, but they caught me off guard and roared with a vengeance when I spent yet another few minutes on the phone this morning with poor reception threatening the call, my bad ears struggling to hear, and the announcement that plans for the weekend were changing. It is quickly turning into a bad day.

I read that and thought, "Hell, I can get that with one person." Then, from Ilada's Poly Page for Secondaries, I absorbed this:

Just in case you didn’t notice, I didn’t make any comparisons between monogamy and polyamory. I didn’t because there is no need. Some problems are just universal no matter the structure of your relationship.

So while we are trying to spin our minds to think of the positive, I think we should stop trying to demand absolute separation of monogamy and polyamory relationship dynamics.

There are some differences, some major ones, but all in all the constant us and them mentality sets all of us up to be exclusionary.

By polyamorists touting how different they are, how much they are breaking the mold, etc, we end up condoning that we are somehow defective not only in the minds of monogamists, but in the polyamorist mind as well.

This reminded me of the obvious "People are people" concept. It doesn't really matter whether you're in a binary, trinary, or some exotic flavor of septupletish relationship...in the end there's you, your head, and your heart, all relating to other humans. There's no question that the degree of complexity increases with more than one intimate partner. But as a fellow who occupies a somewhat broader portion of the sexual spectrum than is generally allotted, things are already more complex for me. If I were to return to a committed monogamous relationship (in, say, a decade, when I am no longer an ambulatory pile of well-dressed plutonium), that's still going to be the case. It's not the kind of thing that can go unmentioned. And when it gets mentioned, the questions will start. "Will I be enough for you? Can you be faithful?"

In the past, that answer has simply been "Yes." Anything else seemed too complicated and, more importantly, too frightening. Right now--to indulge in a flight of wildly speculative and highly unlikely fancy--the honest answer would be, "I don't know. Are you OK with that?" That's a big leap to ask someone to make, and the risk would be that whatever might potentially be happening would stop happening, right then and there. But if it did, integrity would remain, and that's the foundation for anything good, decent, and worthy, including friendship.

More to the point--and, furthermore, as a precondition for the thought experiment I'm conducting here--uncompromising integrity is essential for any form of commitment in a relationship, and without such commitment, polyamory in particular is impossible, as far as I'm concerned. This will only seem paradoxical if you're focusing on the idea of having multiple sexual partners as the defining characteristic of a polyamorous relationship. I'm sure that for some people, that's what it's mostly about, and if it works for them, great. But those within the poly community often take great pains to separate themselves from swinging community, and there's a very, very good reason for that.

The critical difference between the two communities depends entirely upon the definition of "love." If you're attending monthly wife-swapping gatherings (and why is it never "husband-swapping," anyway?) for the purposes of bringing a new toy and a different joy into your marriage, then what you've got going on there isn't love, at least not among all parties concerned. That's Serial Monogamy Pro (Service Pack 1). If hubby or wifey falls in love with a weekend paramour, there's going to be a problem. The "seriousness" of the relationship remains reserved for the binary couple.

That "seriousness" is a quality found in genuine love relationships, and is not necessarily dependent upon the duration of that relationship. It entails trust, loyalty, and negotiation. Within polyamorous relationships, there's an extra requirement so unique they had to make up a word for it. I prefer the British term, which is "frubbles." Americans call it "compersion," and the meaning is the same: it's the opposite of romantic jealousy...the happiness a person feels when his or her partner is happy with another partner.

That's a concept that hit me fairly well upside the head. A degree of empathetic love so profound that the happiness your partner finds in another partner makes you happy? Now that's serious. That's commitment. I was Googling a half-remembered quote defining love as "the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own," and discovered that Robert Heinlein said it. This isn't surprising, as it was his "Stranger In A Strange Land" that really kicked off this whole modern polyamory business in the first place. My copy has long since vanished, but there's a shiny new one on its way to me.

It is entirely rational to ask: why is it that concern for your partner's happiness should abruptly stop at the boundaries of your intimate binary interaction? Or, for that matter, your pants?

And: if it is not rational that such concern should be so bounded...how the hell do you pull that off?

I've got some ideas about that, which I shall inflict upon you anon. Nothing new, really, except that they'll be refracted through my own particular wordlens.

But here's a teaser: don't lie. Ever. Especially to yourself.

Wacky, huh?

More later.

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The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done."

-George Carlin

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I've spent quite a lot of time learning and thinking about neurochemistry. Finding out about neurocellular anatomy, the dynamics of inter- and intracellular signaling, and the particulars of neurotransmitter function has helped me to better understand what goes on in my own quirky skull. The science has illuminated many of the hitherto unknown processes that have driven my emotional life, and this knowledge has helped to minimize my fear.

My continuing research has yielded some quite practical results. For example, my discovery that pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) is a sympathomimetic amine that mimics the effects of adrenaline prompted me to stop taking the stuff for allergy relief, because its neurochemical activity was creating anxiety and other fight-or-flight nonsense.

This practice--research, and the application of that research to my life--has given me the ability to evaluate myself and my behavior objectively. I'm not always good at at it. In fact, I'm often spectacularly bad at it. But like all practices, you have to keep at it, and the longer you do, the better you get. Every so often, I'll come across a new concept that's a perfect mirror.

Most communities develop their own terminology to describe their unique characteristics, and the polyamory community is no different. Some of the terms, however, aren't necessarily unique to the practice of polyamory, and are more community slang than anything else. "NRE" is such a term, and stands for "new relationship energy." It's a concept that will be familiar to anyone who's been in any kind of romantic relationship: the sort of fuzzy, buoyant feeling that occurs when everything in the relationship is new, and you're finding out all sorts of wonderful things about each other, and everything's happy and full of cute plush animals with a minimum of rats. Also called "the pink fluffy stupids."

The unique element within a polyamorous relationship is that partners may experience NRE alongside older, more established relationships, where things have settled down a bit. How well such a relationship fares depends on how well the partners balance these two experiences. Watching your partner react this way towards someone else presents ample opportunity for jealousy, possessiveness, and insecurity to emerge.

However, NRE is not what caught my attention. Instead, a related concept sprang from the page: limerence. (I'm going to quote chunks of the Wikipedia entry, but I do recommend reading the whole thing.)

Limerence, as posited by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, is an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person (the limerent object). Limerence can often be what is meant when one expresses "having a crush" on someone else although limerence, unlike a crush, can last months, years or even a lifetime. It is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object towards the individual. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether or not the feelings are reciprocated.

[...]

Tennov differentiates between limerence and other emotions by asserting that:

• Love involves concern for the other person's welfare and feeling, while limerence does not require it, although it can be incorporated. The theory that love is a shared emotional bond between two people also prevents limerence being a case of actual love, as the affection may not always be reciprocated.
• Affection and fondness exist only as a disposition towards another person, irrespective of whether those feelings are reciprocated, whereas limerence demands return.
• Sex with the object is neither essential nor sufficient to an individual experiencing limerence, unlike one experiencing sexual attraction.
• Limerence is much longer-lived than feelings such as infatuation, romantic passion, and puppy love, enduring for months or even years.

[...]

Limerence has certain basic components:

• intrusive thinking about the limerent object
• acute longing for reciprocation
• some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerence through vivid imagining of action by the limerent object that means reciprocation
• fear of rejection and unsettling shyness in the limerent object's presence
• intensification through adversity
• acute sensitivity to any act, thought, or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent "reasonable" explanations for why neutral actions are a sign of hidden passion in the limerent object
• an aching in the chest or stomach when uncertainty is strong
• buoyancy (a feeling of walking on air) when reciprocation seems evident
• a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background
• a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in the limerent object and to avoid dwelling on the negative or render it into another positive attribute.

What really caught my attention was the following simple assertion: "Limerence is first and foremost a condition of cognitive obsession."

I'm no stranger to cognitive obsession. More to the point: I'm no stranger to limerence.

I wish Will Smith was here, so I could record him saying, "I mean...damn," and put up the .MP3 for you to hear.

One of the reasons I study neurochemistry and own a copy of the hated DSM-IV is that there is a certain satisfaction in discovering that I am not the only person in the world who feels or behaves a certain way. It can be disconcerting to recognize some of my own personality or behavioral traits in a textbook. But it is also comforting to realize that these "disorders," so-called, are as much a part of the human condition as love and death.

Thirty years after Dorothy Tennov published the results of her research, limerence is a word that still can't be found in most dictionaries. But there it is, in handy bullet points in a Wikipedia article: a delineation of an experience that I have had repeatedly in my life, distilled from a psychologist's interviews with 500 people.

And in the midst of it, that piquant phrase: cognitive obsession.

Limerence isn't love. It isn't infatuation, or lovesickness, or NRE, or pink fluffy stupids. It can turn into those things, but most often it's a condition. A confluence of psychology and neurochemistry that produces an intensely dramatic physical state which is overwhelming, even devastating. Like all such obsessions...it isn't real. There is no foundation to it outside the boundaries of our skulls.

I firmly believe that it's as possible to become addicted to the chemicals produced by our own brains as it is to chemicals that we introduce into our bodies. I think it's equally possible that there are many people, polyamorous and otherwise, who are drawn to situations that will produce the cascade of neurotransmitters which accompanies that fine old limerent feeling. Sure, the lows are really low, but the highs...man, the highs...

Knowledge is power. Having put a name to this thing, I can put it to rest.

Read more from the Eros and Identity Archive
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OK, so you're barreling along, dig? Making good time. Smooth. Everything is moving with you, getting out of your way when you need it to, giving a bit of glam and flash to your edges, a big assist from the Universe. With me? Right on.

Then: a big old pile of bricks on your head, man. Like an even hundredweight at least, maybe more. Splits your cranium wide open, and all that glam and flash flees into a storm drain.

So you're lying there, surrounded by broken pieces of red masonry, and this bird--real fly--walks up and sits down on the curb next to you, looking at your big mess and your bricks and your split head. And so you try to give her the old Hey Babe, you know, but you've got a piece of skull lodged in your speech center, so you give her the old Heyuh Flaboo Zuzzich? instead.

But this babe just smiles and says, "He was like that when I found him. Honest."

Universe ain't got no kindness at all, sometimes, no kindness at all.

Read more from the Verbiage Archive
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Ah. The coveted steady state. This is the mode of being towards which all psychopharmaceutical regimens aspire. Or some other phrase, maybe with a dangling preposition.

I've had a couple of good days recently--not that I've been having especially bad days, really,certainly nothing like last month, where a good day meant not fleeing the office in terror. This past Saturday was the first full-on, 12-hour plus stretch I've had of "feeling good" in about a year. Followed up, of course, by two days of crap. But then there were some days where the crap was balanced out by goodness that's had less mania than usual, which is also good.

Today was one of those. I blame the buspirone. It's the newest pharmaceutical mercenary I've sent into the lawless, tangled mess of axons and dendrites I am pleased to call my brain. Seems like it's hooked up with the bupropion, and together they're kicking some serious neurochemical ass.

Details are sketchy, and good information is hard to come by. There are multiple factions, all vying for power, and it's difficult to predict the eventual success or failure of the surge. Thuggish gangs are planting improvised catecholamine devices in calcium channels. Neurons that are cooperating with the reuptake occupation are being kidnapped and turning up dead, floating in the lateral vesicles. All the negative media coverage certainly isn't helping matters. WHY DOES THE MEDIA HATE MY HAPPINESS?

But we will stay the course.

Because if we give up, the neurotransmitters have won.

And we don't want that, now do we?

Read more from the Neuronal Soup Archive
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