Oh, and for those of you who are currently in the throes of uncontrollable anxiety, and don't mind pharmaceuticals that sound like they're manufactured elsewhere in the galaxy, I recommend dear old alprazolam, also called Xanax.

Hail! I am Alprazolam from Planet Xanax! Submit to my sleepiness-ray!

Xanax is a benzodiazapine. So don't wash it down with a six-pack or anything. And remember: you're not cured. You're tranquilized. To my mind, that's a bit more temporary and less...well, freaky...than taking a long-term anti-depressant brain-chemical "Ya, it verks but vee don't know vhy, exactly" kind of pill.

Of course, they don't know why Xanax works either. But still.

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Great heaving sacks of boredom have been upended onto my flipped-out head. Tiny mites of anxiety hop on my desk. I swat them; they are replaced by infinitesimal amoebas of terror, which is an improvement, but not by much, because if ingested they cause the amoebiasis of despair. I'll wash my hands often today, and think anti-microbial thoughts of the future.

What I need is to be assaulted by a crack-happy squirrel so I's can bust out wid my Glock and pop a cap in its rodential ass. That's what I need. That, and this coffee that I'm drinking here. That's all I need. And some SSRIs, but that's it. You betcha.

Steward! Bring me my Valium and a carton of Luckies. And be quick about it!

*click*

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I've taken a lot of drugs in my time, for varied purposes that are probably equal parts entertainment, enlightenment-seeking, and self-medication. While certain drugs will probably always retain their entertainment value, it was during a nitrous-oxide binge awhile back that I arrived at the definitive answer regarding the whole "drugs as a path to enlightenment" thing.

Nitrous, for those who don�t know, is laughing gas. When administered at the dentist's office it's given as a mixture with oxygen. When administered in someone's living room or at a rave, it usually comes in small silver cylinders commonly referred to as "whippets" and normally used to charge up whipped-cream dispensers (although, in my opinion, there is no possible way that the manufacturers of these chargers, such as ISI and Easy-Whip, can seriously believe that America is a nation of fresh whipped-cream and artistic dessert fiends--I'm sure their sales volume is 75% inhaled, 25% whipped). The charger is cracked and inhaled via a balloon or some other device, and the inhaler experiences about 60 seconds of whacked-out stonedness. Then the inhaler needs another one, and another, behavior which lends the gas the well-earned sobriquet "Hippy Crack." People usually mix it with other drugs to temporarily charge up whatever experience they're having. By itself, the gas is dissociative, an auditory hallucinogen, and sometimes produces intense A-ha! experiences.

An A-ha! experience is what I call a drug-induced pseudo-enlightenment experience, the stereotypically trippy Have you ever really looked at your hands, man? sort of thing. My favorite story about such an experience was told by a 60s psychedelic pioneer whose name escapes me at the moment--he had spent the night smoking a large quantity of high-quality marijuana and hashish, and at one point before collapsing into bed had written down his Big Revelation That Would Explain Everything. When he got up the next morning, he eagerly read what he had written the night before: Feet go into shoes!

At any rate, during my aforementioned nitrous binge, I had one of those experiences--the creeping, certain sense that I was just about to Understand It All. Then the nitrous wore off, so I cracked another cylinder and held the gas in my lungs for longer. The sensation came again: so close! So close to the Big Big Knowledge! Then I had to exhale, and the gas wore off. So I went after it again, each time being exhorted to hold my breath longer...wait for it...almost there! The exhortations themselves took on the appearance of a skinny, wizened Indian guru on a mountaintop somewhere. He gleefully beckoned me closer and closer, until suddenly it dawned on me: if I continued attempting to get the Big Big Knowledge in this manner, I was going to hold my breath until I passed out, and then I would fall onto the floor. Then I really did get it, and burst out laughing as I exhaled and the rings of anoxia darkness around the edges of my vision began to brighten.

What did I get? That all of the Timothy Learys, and Ram Dasses, and Stephen Gaskins of the world were full of shit. The ultimate knowledge that I was so certain I could get, if only I could deprive my brain of fresh oxygen for just...a...few...more...seconds!...was, in fact, death. That's what I was edging closer towards, sitting there with my pile of empty little silver bulbs. Nitrous Oxide was no different than pot, or LSD, or mushrooms, or ether or even butane (in my much younger and much stupider days). It all led the same place, and as soon as I understood that, the zany little Indian guru guy cackled with delight and disappeared.

As I said, I've done a lot of drugs. Many, many, many hits of LSD, which taught me a lot about the workings of my own psychology, what it feels like to be a lunatic, and what it means to be "looked after" by the universe at large. I learned the same sorts of things from mushrooms, but with indigestion. Mescaline, the synthesized version of the naturally occurring phenethylamine found in various plants such as peyote, taught me how to find anything funny by making me giggle. A lot. Bales of pot taught me about psychological addiction: when I realized that all the weed was doing for me was giving me anxiety attacks and the munchies, I stopped doing it. The occasional bout of pill-popping, usually Oxycodone or Codeine, which falls squarely into the aforementioned "entertainment" category, as does the gloppy gram of fresh opium I enjoyed on the beach at Zipolite in Oaxaca. I do like the opiates. They're warm and dreamy and soft. But I've stayed away from heroin and morphine because I�m smart enough to know that I'm dumb enough to get hooked. I tried cocaine once, but didn't really see the point. There was also a bit of ether long ago, which was everything that Hunter S. Thompson said it was. There was salvia, which is akin to being ground between the giant machined gears of reality and not at all instructive, except as a brutal reminder of the lesson I learned from Nitrous Oxide. Most recently there was Ecstasy, taken only because I happened to come across a gram of pure crystalline MDMA. Like the opiates, MDMA was an excellent entertainment value, but even that wasn't really worth the personal difficulties resultant therefrom. Then there's the most common and troublesome drug, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, your friend and mine: alcohol. That's the Great Self-Medication. I learned the same lesson from alcohol that I learned from pot...mostly. It's still a problem now and again, but I'm pleased as punch to report that I have learned the lesson that the Cocaine-Addicted Electrified Rat has failed to learn: if it feels bad, stop it. This is because I am a good and smart monkey, much smarter than the rat. Usually.

But mostly, what I learned from doing drugs was how to do them. You must understand, also, that I started doing drugs at the age of three. More precisely, I was given drugs at the age of three: Dexedrine, also known as dextroamphetamine, which was what they gave hard to manage children such as myself before they came out with my favorite chemical straightjacket, methylphenidate hydrochloride, also called Ritalin. I took a bunch of that, too, well past that point in adolescence where it's really embarrassing when the school nurse shows up in class with your daily pill in a little paper cup because you've skipped out on it.

The point of all of that backstory is that I knew, from a very young age, that small, harmless-looking bits of material, when ingested, could alter my perceptions, my moods, and the way I thought about things. The common misconception is that Ritalin returns kids to some sort of "normal" state, that it just erases hyperactivity or ADHD or whatever it is that Ciba-Geigy is calling their marketing strategy these days, and makes kids into happy little attentive campers. That may be true for some, but it wasn't for me, so I became acquainted with what it meant to zone out quite early in my life. This is not intended as an excuse for my drug use, or to shift the blame for that behavior to my parents, but instead is offered simply as a reasonable explanation for my somewhat fearless experimentation and my comfort with varying sorts of substance-induced altered states of consciousness. It may also account for that unfortunate incident with the nutmeg.

The primary difference between my childhood drug use and my later exploits was always, I maintained, a matter of choice. When I was a child, I was drugged. When I was (ostensibly) an adult, I was drugging. One was passive, one was active, and the latter was more fun and, to me, much more acceptable. As I grew older and less convinced of my own maturity, I came to realize that by and large this active drugging behavior was symptomatic of underlying psychological difficulties, and I began to deal with those. Over the past six or seven years, the drugs, one by one, have lost their utility. Alcohol, as I mentioned, lingers on, but in nowhere near the quantities required for true self-medication.

Last year, after a bunch of murderers flew a pair of airplanes into some buildings and knocked them down near where I work, I decided to decrease my stress levels by buying a house. That didn't work out very well, so--overcoming my instinctive aversion to The Man's Drugs--I sought modern pharmacological help. Paxil for the brain, and lovely Xanax for the anxiety. I read up on SSRIs, and on benzodiazepines. I discovered that Xanax was considered highly addictive, and having had some experience with the drug during an earlier bout of psychological mayhem I could see why. It's got a wonderfully calming effect. So: having gotten my coveted 'scrip for Xanax from my doctor, I carefully managed my dosage and how long I stayed on the stuff, rarely more than .5 mg a day, and by the end of my second bottle I gracefully tapered off from .25 mg to .16 mg, and then to nothing. Very smooth, no muss, no fuss, no withdrawal. By then the Paxil had sort of kicked in, so my anxiety had lessened somewhat. It was the Xanax, however, that enabled me to navigate the house-buying-mortgage-getting gauntlet without busting out my assault weapons and my scopes and picking a nice high clock tower to camp out in.

As I mentioned before, I avoided the harder opiates because of the addiction potential. I managed my Xanax carefully. These are things that doing drugs taught me about. Now, almost a year after starting on Paxil, I've moved out of New York. I've got a groovy little house in a nice part of the world. It's time to lose the pharmaceutical crutch and get on with my life. Shouldn't be too hard, right? I knew that there was the possibility of withdrawal problems, as with all SSRIs. That made sense...it does, after all, muck about with serotonin, one of the workhorse chemicals of the brain and body, and it's only reasonable that you should taper off gradually to give the body time to adjust. My doctor hadn't mentioned anything about it, and, after all, I had stopped smoking simply by losing interest in cigarettes. No sweat.

As it turns out, despite having carefully managed to avoid doing drugs that might result in physiological withdrawal, despite having dropped nicotine--supposedly more addictive than cocaine--like a bad habit, somehow, I still seem to have ended up on a drug that will, in all probability, cause withdrawal symptoms when I try to quit it. After years of consumer agitation, several lawsuits, and total denial, Glaxo SmithKline has revised the Paxil labeling to include "dizziness, sensory disturbances (e.g., paresthesias such as electric shock sensations), agitation, anxiety, nausea and sweating" as possible results of ending the use of the medication. Of course, other places list the potential consequences as "intense insomnia, extraordinarily vivid dreams [both of which I've had within the last 48 hours], severe mood swings, especially heightened irritability/anger [ditto], profuse sweating, especially at night, [yup]," and so on, and so forth. If you dig through the 32 pages of documentation Glaxo SmithKlein offers on its website, you�ll also discover that all of these reactions "may have no causal relationship to the drug" and are "generally self-limiting." Yay! I was getting worried there for a minute. I'm sure that the fact that Paxil made Glaxo SmithKline $12.1 billion last year means that their science is suitably professional and unbiased.

If I had the energy, I'd be incredibly pissed off. After experimenting with all sorts licit and illicit substances and learning the important lessons about drug abuse and personal growth, after weaning myself off each one as it became problematic, after dropping cigarettes without batting an eye...once again, it's The Man's Drug that fucks me over.

Mr. Jean-Pierre Garnier can kiss my sweating, paresthetic, extraordinarily vivid ass.

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Man, do I feel like a sack o' crap today. Three cheers for Glaxo SmithKline: Hip-hip...fuck off! Hip-hip...fuck off! Hip-hip...fuck off!

But seriously, folks...

I don't want to make a mistake similar to the one made by various herbal fiends and homeopathic soft-heads that I have known: I had a headache and I took this foul-smelling Chinese powder and my headache went away so I know that this foul-smelling Chinese really works! In my case, it would be the mistake of attributing the definitive cause of my sack o' crapness to the halving of my daily SSRI dosage. Could be causal, could be coincidental. If I start feeling like I've got electric shocks running through my brain, then I'll be a bit more certain: that's never happened to me before, so I'll feel more confident when assigning Paxil as its cause. As it stands now, I'm not feeling anything that I haven't felt before, so the Causal Jury's still out, arguing in the jury room while Sam Waterson paces outside and looks worried.

At any rate, I think the Total Neuronal Package is improving somewhat, because I'm actually contemplating working on some bits that would require effort, meaning research and thinking and suchlike. That's something I simply haven't felt like doing all this month, and most of last month, and the site has been suffering for it. This I choose to attribute to the general malaise that always aflicts me this time of year. Not quite Seasonal Affective Disorder...I think it has more to do with the social confluence of all of these here Holidays, what with their happy expectations and forced interactions and so forth.

Whatever the cause, I'm glad to see the return of slight urges to pick up big fat tomes and start putting together Real Bits. Soon, I feel, I will be spewing my own special brand of Religiocultural Minutiae out into the Infoscape! Just you watch.

Now: I am going to watch some mob-related television programs that I have stolen from HBO, and I will feel good about it. You can't stop me.

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Well now. That wasn't so hard. Awhile back I wrote of the turrible turrible things that were going to happen to me once I kicked the evil Paxil habit. After a few weeks of reducing dosages, and arcing them back up when the gee-willie-weeblies got too intense, I finally said the hell with it and stopped cold. That was over two weeks ago.

This morning while listening to the Cocteau Twins' Victorialand through my Sennheisers on the train, I realized what the Paxil had done to me, in addition to making me less of a PTSD lunatic. Because the 7:54 train is always nearly full, I grab any window seat I can get. This morning, my seat on the train faced backwards, so I was able to look out and see where we had been, unscrolling past the window. The train itself cuts through low wooded hills, following a wide, ice-banked stream for much of the early part of the journey. There is still much snow on the ground, and so the forests have that stark, high-contrast wilderness look, black wet bark against cold white. If I narrowed my eyes a little, and let my mind drift along with Liz Fraser's melodies, I could project myself from the train, just a bit. Suddenly, I would very nearly grasp what it would be like to be out there, near that tree, or over there, flat on my back in the snow of that field, looking up at the sky. Then the train would roll onward and the fleeting sensation would be gone. I kept this up until forest and stream gave way to town and then to city. Then I didn't want to be anywhere but where I was, warm and being moved along.

I used to do that sort of thing often, and when I felt the familiar deep rushing my chest--sort of like the first hints of MDMA coming on--I realized that Paxil had put the big pharmaceutical kabosh on my ability to be sent by music. To give over to melody, and drift along all tingly and finely-lightened. I don't think it's a coincidence that I sat down at my K2500 this weekend (see left) and recorded about thirty seconds or so of 80s Cheese Factory. That's what I'm calling the tune, anyway. It's been a very long time since I've recorded anything at all, and this weekend I managed to record something of my own that sent me, just a little, to the places I travelled this morning on the train.

The downside--as Pea will attest--is that more than a bit of the Ugly Angry Man has returned. My temper has shortened, it's a struggle to maintain equilibrium when something goes awry, and I don't always win. But now I can feel the surges coming on, and I'm aware of them in a way that I wasn't before I took the Paxil. That's what it's supposed to be for: to provide a break, a respite from whatever patterns of depression or obsession are overwhelming you. I'm still not particularly good at beating back the swells of impatience or anger that continue to crop up, but that's still a far cry from how it was before, when I'd just let them wash over me and would float along with them until I got deposited, battered and bedraggled, on some regretful shore where nobody was happy, ever. Now I can beat the shit out of an old dryer with a hammer, go upstairs, crank up my own version of Müller's Bavokirche organ, and blast away until I am satisfied and my ears are ringing.

In the future, there will be less demolishing of old appliances, and more loud music, I am thinking. Right now, there is fascination: from a small pill, perspective. They should list that under side effects, right after dizziness, tremor, and sweating.

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I saw Allen Ginsberg read at CBGB's gallery near the end of his life. I remember two things about the evening: Allen chanting don'tsmoke don'tsmoke don'tsmoke--the Officiaal Dope! to some atonal electric guitar accompaniment, and an earnest, anachronistic yahoo clumsily lighting a joint onstage in quaint defiance of something-or-other.

Ginsberg's been dead for a few years now, but that weird gnomish chant of his has stuck with me. The Official Dope. Folks smoke the unOfficial Dope for all kinds of reasons: to mellow out, to free up the mind, to get the giggles or to cope. Throughout our history humans have continually looked for ways to tweak the perceptive goo 'twixt our ears, for reasons as diverse as the people doing the tweaking. Despite the gloriously ineffective attempts by certain sectors of our government to change human nature through punishment and forfeiture, we'll probably go right on tweaking. And there, it seems, hangs a tale.

I've mentioned my drug experience before. Miss Barrymore has nothing on me: I was doing speed at three. Dexedrine, actually, which was what they gave Hard To Manage children before they came up with methylphenidate HCL, better known as Ritalin. There were a host of reasons for my tranquilizing, but they all boil down to a newly divorced, working single mother with a very active child.

Whatever the empirically observed behavioral effects of these drugs were, there were subjective effects as well. It's not as though I got my little pill, and then turned into a Good Little Boy. No, I was on a drug. There were sensory effects as a result of the physiological action of the drug. I couldn't tell you today exactly what they were, but I know that they occurred, because that is the nature of such things. It would be naïve to think that the demonstrable behavioral effects of such drugs have no corollary effects whatsoever upon the thinking and the sensory experience of a child.

And so, from a very young age, I became familiar with an altered state of consciousness. I spent a large portion of my twenties seeking ever-more extreme forms of this altered state, for complex psychological reasons with which I still wrestle. Not knowing what an unclouded childhood felt like, perhaps I sought ever-thickening clouds as a means of somehow returning to that childhood. Perhaps the childhood clouds were safe, somehow...I really don't know. What I do know is that my adult drug use is the great paradox of my life: I deliberately sought out drugs despite the negative experience of my childhood tranquilizing.

That being said, there is now broad societal acceptance of drugs that are, for all intents and purposes, Official Dope. SSRIs and their various cousins are not taken to get high, but they are taken for many of the same basic reasons as drugs that cause intoxication. They are taken to solve problems of the mind that seem otherwise insoluble. They are taken to lift depression and sharpen focus. They are taken to soothe nerves and calm erratic thinking. And, sometimes, they are taken to make the intolerable tolerable.

After September 11, I was consumed by an overwhelming need to leave the city of New York. I've never liked the city, and my reasons for living here were entirely economic: it's where the jobs are. I've been working in the city since 1995, and subsequent moves have brought me closer and closer to my places of employment, until at last I moved to Queens in late 1998. But I had no love for the place, no roots there. When the buildings came down, the resulting thrum! of panic and paranoia was more than I could stand.

And so, in the midst of buying a house (number three on Life's Most Godawfully Stressful Events, after divorce and death of a spouse, I think), I got myself a 'scrip for Xanax and Paxil. The little pills enabled me to successfully navigate the purchasing of a house and the move from the city without going ballistic or drinking myself into a stupor every weekend. (At least, I'm assuming it was the little pills...there have been studies exploring the role of the placebo effect in antidepressant treatment.)

Despite fears to the contrary, when it was time to kick the Paxil I did so with little trouble.

Now, there are two kinds of depression, I think. The first kind is primarily circumstantial: it's the sort of thing that happens when, say, a blimp crashes into your house and kills everyone in it plus the dog while you're out getting a pizza and a six-pack. That'll bum you out, for sure. The brain is a marvelously plastic thing, and such trauma will have lasting impact. The second kind is intrinsic: neurochemical melancholia that has little to do with the actual state of your life, and everything to do with whether the right chemicals are getting to the right places at the right times in your brain. This is the sort of thing that's hard to get a handle on. It's inexplicable.

I've found that those who have experienced circumstantial depression do not have quite the same grasp of the intrinsic depression. The psychological solutions to the two conditions are not, I think, the same, even though the psychiatric prescriptions may be identical. The first sort of depression has demonstrable cause. The second sort is like a force of nature, a neurological wind that capriciously blows well or ill in ways barely understood by science.

My mother is depressive. So is my father. My mother's brother has a heavy touch of it as well; just how much I can't say because they are estranged. My father's father was an alcoholic, and my mother's father turned to drink after his wife was killed in a car wreck.

My point is that if subtle physiological structures and compositions are as inheritable as noses, eyes, and ears--and there is no reason to doubt that they are--then chances are I have been bequeathed the veil of melancholy by my parents, and theirs. Add to that my brain's response to being bathed in amphetamine-related compounds during critical post-natal phases of its development, and the chances for neurochemical loopiness increase accordingly. This includes not just depression, but its cousin, anxiety.

Therefore, in circumstances of real trauma, instability is a foregone conclusion. This is why I was puzzled by my recent loopiness. Sure, the job was grating on me. But the pay's good. There's the house, with its nascent wildflower gardens, its trees and its irritating wildlife. I've got a fat friendly cat. A Pea who loves me despite my periodic bouts of batshitness. There are all sorts of good stuff in my life, plus a decided lack of explosions to boot, and yet there I was, paralyzed with anxiety and eyeball-deep in fight-or-flight chemicals. It crept up on me slowly, but there came a day when I realized that if I needed to do something about it.

So, I--the creator of the Miserable Ovoid Creature--cracked open the old Paxil bottle and started up again.

It's been about two weeks, and the effects--or the effects that I attribute to the chemical, anyway--kicked in after six days or so. Anxiety lessened. Less shouting in the car at assheads in other cars. In other words, my overall edginess lessened. Since this is my second round with Paxil, I can pay attention to the subtleties of its action, as only an experienced perceptive goo-tweaker can. So, when I write "Less shouting in the car at assheads in other cars," it's not the mere absence of yelling at idiots that I'm on about. It's the absence of the inclination to do so. When I'm under serious stress (externally or internally induced), I have a hair-trigger rage that erupts over trivialities. I remember one instance After September 11 where I was damn near incoherent when the new shifters I was putting on Pea's bicycle weren't co-operating with me. We're talking chest-filling, cold-rushing, eye-clouding fury, here. And it snapped on in an instant.

The Paxil short circuits that, somehow. Not with a numbing haze, or a flattened affect where nothing upsets me and nothing is worth caring about. It's a very focused, particular kind of action, and I think it is an indication of the future of the Official Dope: as we learn more about the boggling complexities of human neurochemistry, we will develop more precisely target chemicals that will be delivered into the brain's physical structure with pinpoint accuracy. I think that this century's LSD is just around the corner...sooner or later, someone somewhere is going to come up with a concoction that does amazing things. Perhaps it will stimulate the parietal lobe's God-sense, giving the user an epiphanic, life-changing sense of the numinous for days at a time. Or it might stimulate the processes of memory and cogitation, allowing for such rapid-fire thinking that it will actually change your dietary requirements as the brain demands more of its own, specific fuels.

Given the human propensity for perceptual twiddling, there is little chance that the next Acid, once discovered, will stay confined to a lab. I'm a perfect example of the expression of this propensity in our culture: when down and freaked out, when at the end of my psychic rope, I reached for a bottle of Official Dope, instead of a joint. It's a temporary usage...I'll taper back off in another week or so. But it's still a dope-like usage: just need to get my head together, man.

That's the direction this culture is driving us all. Faced with the ever-increasing incidence of "depression" and other psychiatrically-constructed maladies that can be summed up as "feeling like shit," the pharmaceutical institutions are responding by supplying the products demanded by society. If we can't have our grass and our coke and our X, give us something else. Folks who would never smoke a joint or get drunk are being given an officially sanctioned method for easing their psychic discomfort and overcoming the unnatural pressures of our lightspeed culture, because they have demanded that method, to the tune of around $14 billion a year. Eventually, there will be three sorts of people in this culture: those who get by with no chemical assistance; those who get by with sanctioned chemical assistance; and those who get by with unsanctioned chemical assistance. I suspect that the first group will, eventually, be the minority.

As for me, I choose to avoid the label of hypocrite by "embracing my contradictions," while at the same time recognizing that my grasp of a legal pill isn't any different from my grasp of a bong, if it's the result of the same impulses and the same discomfort. In each instance, I'm left with the same question: why do I need it?

And can I get along without it?

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So, of course, within days of writing this, what should show up at my door in the guise of a housewarming gift?

The. Devil's. Drink.

A big blue bottle of Bombay, in fact.

So, of course, much debauchery ensued, and the demon likker got ahold of me good. I don't remember much about Saturday, but I think there was a social gathering involved. Of course there was a social gathering involved. That's how the Devil's Drink works. As far as I know no lampshades were donned. But I have dim memories of a goat and some kind of dance involving palm kernel oil.

The other wonderful thing about the Drink is its lovely interactions with SSRIs of various stripes. Instant return of prior symptoms. Fabulous! So all day today I was beset with my old friend, anxiety.

All of which is my own fault, of course. All talk of deeemons and devils aside, my compulsions are psychological, hatched in the complex webs of my own battered psyche and, were I a better man, I would resist them with Victorian vigor...which is to say, my drunkenness would be a private affair, except for maybe in the brothels I'd visit every other weekend. In addition, I'd have syphilis and a snuff habit.

But never mind that! Tomorrow is another day, full of more opportunities to succumb to mental mischief.

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The girlfriend of an old friend of mine (or, perhaps more accurately, given his nature, "the person into whom he was inserting his penis on a regular basis,") once expressed her dislike for me by spluttering to him, "He's always saying, 'I wanted to do this or that, but I couldn't because of my brain.'"

She probably took me more seriously than I took myself, but she did have a point. I've long felt subject to the unpredictable tides of the neurochemical sea behind my eyeballs. My mood and anxiety level often have little to do with my surroundings or my situation in life. I can be enjoying a bracing near-panic attack at my desk in the midst of job success, prosperity, good health and a shiny new bicycle. It hardly ever works the other way...I'm never cheerful in the face of total adversity; the most I can muster is a kind of neurotic Zen-style indifference that I pay for later with bouts of obsessive anxiety and cheap wine.

Some people are firm believers in psychology: for them, it is always the mind, rather than the neurons, that determines their outlook on life and dictates their response to adversity. I believe, in turn, that many of those folks enjoy nice, relatively stable neurochemistries, and can thus easily make that claim. I also believe that some of those psychological evangelists (see, Phil, Dr.) are, in private, raging balls of cortisol-driven excess. Yet another portion of those folks are idealists who desperately want to believe that they can overcome their depressions and manias with a thorough application of Proper Thinking, and attribute their plunges into chemical canyons to a failure of will. I suspect that everyone else making that claim is secretly and happily medicated.

Mind is a process, not a thing, and that process is driven by the physicality of the neurological medium. Medical case histories by the thousands bear this out: alter or destroy the brain, and you alter or destroy the mind.

To wit: one Phineas P. Gage, who in 1848 received a tamping iron thro' the head. A tamping iron (for those unfamiliar with mid-19th century railroad construction techniques), is a metal rod 3 feet seven inches long, 1 1/4 inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a point about 1/4 in diameter at the tip. To remove rocks that were in the path of construction, holes were drilled at their base and filled with gunpowder. A fuse was added, and then sand was packed in on top using the tamping iron. Gage apparently struck an errant spark, and the tamping iron blew ninety feet through the air, after first passing through his skull.

According to a local Vermont newspaper account of the incident, "The iron entered on the side of his face, shattering the upper jaw, and passing back of the left eye, and out the top of the head." It destroyed significant portions of the ventromedial areas of his prefrontal cortex.

After the accident, Gage sat up, signed off his timesheet, and walked home to wait for a doctor. His primary care physician, Dr. Harlow, subsequently reported that

"He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom)… capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned… Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew his as shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation."

Basically, a three-foot iron rod through the brain turned Mr. Gage into something of a jackass.

Where did the nice Mr. Gage go? Was he, somehow, trapped inside, unable to express himself? Was the reception of his soul's transmissions now crippled by the faulty radio of his brain?

Nope. The nice Mr. Gage was his brain. The asshole Mr. Gage was, now, his broken brain.

Prior to becoming King Of The Worrrld, James Cameron directed The Abyss, which was sort of like Close Encounters of the Third Kind only underwater and without Steven Spielberg. The plot involves the deep-sea recovery of a sunken nuclear submarine and the subsequent encounter with an intelligent aquatic species, but the plot isn't the important bit. The important bit is a certain sound effect. At the beginning of the movie, an underwater UFO causes the submarine's systems to fail, and it bounces off a cliff face and begins its long, slow fall to the ocean floor. All during this scene, as the camera flits from the sweat-beaded faces of the crew to exterior shots of the ship plunging inexorably downwards, there was this sound. It was an engine-genre sound, thrumming, declining in pitch, and it represented death for everyone aboard. It chilled me: it was the sound of certain, but not rapid, doom, a steady and unstoppable decline to crushing pressure and cessation of life.

I've "heard" other sounds that seem to have significance byond mere perception and, sensibly, they are probably just another irrational tic from my quirked-out brain. Sometimes, though, when it seems like who I am has ground to a halt, and I'm staring stupidly at the wall or the monitor, I can hear that sound, descending, falling, into black, cold, crushing silence.

If I had any real confidence in my own rationality--as opposed to the bluster that most people assume makes up for the empty tautology that forms the foundation of their entire intellectual life--I'd be able to dismiss this peculiar pseudo-audio phenomenon. But I don't, not really, and I can't.

It's possible that while I developed from an itty-bitty zygote into the trillion-celled ambulatory sack of water and proteins I am today, a few key processes were interrupted or altered, so that the uptake of this or that neurotransmitter is too inhibited or augmented to allow me the relative stability enjoyed by so many other folks. It's possible that the psychological evangelists are right, and that there are unexamined conflicts deep within my personality process that express themselves in tight bursts of anxiety or sloping depressions and upright manias. It's even remotely possible that, in some n-dimension, the perfect expression of my self, my soul, gazes sadly out into this world through the thickly blurred lens of my ill-made cortex, forever thwarted until the next go 'round.

At the moment I haven't got the wit to argue the merits of any of those possibilities...but the effect, whatever its cause, is the same.

Pleh.

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So... hand tremors and a sort of full-arm twitch thing are only bad if they happen in front of other people, right?

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How do you know... when it has fled? When the healthy mind has disintegrated enough, so that appearances may be kept up when absolutely necessary, but only just... not even a veneer... more like a mask of thinnest delicate glass, painted with lifelike tones and fixed into place by means of a cunning hinge of brass wire, so that movement presents itself when appropriate? The... slightest tap, and the whole thing shatters into invisible razor splinters that work their way into the feet long after the first, second, and third sweepings of the floor.

Dissecting the psyche is fine for some... a passtime, an expensive hobby... the basis of a career. It is fashionable to be neurotic, and the mechanical pills that are the first resort of the modern worried well lend to most a superior functioning of the type that is rewarded by society. The difference in the hipness of remedies! "I'm on Zoloft" sounds so much more slick and modern than "I've had electroconvulsive therapy," doesn't it? Truly, what an age. What an age.

But there is no finer dope, I think, than the seeping fluids of the natural mind... from whence come requiems, sonnets, and bastard rhyme. Or is there? I certainly don't know, because I seem to be stuck with a Victorian brain: fragile, sensitive, subject to ill-humors and the fainting twitches. I have a most unfashionable brain.

I seek to cram artificial pleasure into an anhedonic skull. Results are predictable: loss of self-satisfaction, absence of trust, misanthropy, addiction and sterility. And fruit flies. Can't forget them: breeding in the sink drains which remain uncleaned for too long due to general malaise and amotivational tendencies.

There! Did you see that, there, just then? I mean, fruit flies. That's the sort of thing that's right up there with precious bodily fluids and other fractured nonsense.

No matter, no mind, read about it all in the papers soon enough, or, not even, because the papers are passé, are they not? Read the pixels, instead: MAN FREES CIRCUS ELEPHANTS, SHOOTS ACROBATS, CLOWN, SELF. It'll be a five-minute splash of life!

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May I just say that I am extremely grateful for my bicuculline-sensitive GABA receptors, my Calcium ionophores, and pretty much the entire allosteric modulation process.

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And so (which is one of those beginning gear-grinders that you're supposed to edit out, like "I suppose that" or "Have you every wondered about" or "The other day I stuck my best Giesser Chef knife into the dog, and I've got no idea why"), I've run into that conundrum peculiar to the online diarist: how much is too much? What does my audience, such as it is, come here for? I know many that used to come here for my most trenchant political dribblings have wandered away as my output has declined in both quality and quantity, a decline spurred on by my ever-increasing misanthropism, which is in turn backed up with a healthy dose of anxiety and incipient agoraphobia. It's so much easier to loathe people when your mental wiring prevents you from leaving the house, isn't it? Ah, yes.

In any event--look, more gear-teeth ground into wordy metal filings!--a certain amount of my... integrity, for lack of a better word, has recently dissolved into a haze of melting clonazepam wafers, duloxetine hydrochloride, escitalopram oxalate, and lamotrigine. What fun! I, creator of the Miserable Ovoid Creature, have become one myself, and am not-quite-gleefully tweaking my neurochemistry with a number of Officially Sanctioned chemical agents. Not much different than what I spent my twenties doing, only now I'm seeking more targetted results, and there's medical supervision, and better packaging. Oh, look! The little man on the Lexapro package is happy! Of course he is. He's happy because he has properly rearranged his little brain until he can cope with life enough to build a successful career as the logo on the Lexapro box. Good for him. Good show!

Feh. Time to go watch Farscape.

That is all.

Shoo!

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THIS IS MY ONE THOUSANDTH POST. I'm really very excited. Look! I blinked. That is how excited I am. The orangutan on my desk is not nearly as overflowing with anticipation as I, the opposably-thumbed author of this, the one thousandth post, am, right now, at this moment.

I must say that clonazepam wafers are much more fun than their non-melting benzo brother, alprazolam. The "wafers" are actually light little pill-shaped gizmos that feel like a bit of packing material, but when you put them on your tongue--bloorp!--they vanish into a small slick of quickly dissolving thin paste that leaves a slight numb spot.

Then my blessed GABA(A) receptors do their stuff and I don't so much float off into space as stay exactly where I am, with very little inclination to, say, flee the building as quickly as possible for reasons that are entirely unspecified but which are of exterme urgency.

And that, as is said, is not a bad thing.

Ah! Precious organ, three pound lump o'dendrites! Do enjoy your new chemical foodstuffs. 'Cause you'll be on this diet for awhile.

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That's right, ladies and gentlemen, for a limited time YOU TOO can impress your friends and confound your enemies with the Astonished Head Protestor Kit! Comes with unisex alternative-style clothing, a selection of clever signage (you supply your own stick), and an assortment of hip protest accessories including anti-establishment buttons, temporary tattoos, and "radical" facial hair (facial hair not shown). Only $29.95!

Or, if you want, you can just paint your entire body blue like a Pict and run naked down the National Mall screaming Buuush! Oiiiilll! Hitler!!! Lies!!! Just as effective at a tenth of the cost.

Then again, the fruitbats in my ever-more-thinly-haired belfry are particularly restive today, which leads to peculiar warbling and the strange sense that I really ought to be, you know, doing something, but I can't, having shackled myself to certain medications which may or may not be causing an already-tweaked adrenaline and cortisol matrix to redouble its efforts and send me shouting out onto what passes for the lawn.

Waiter! There is a mustache, in my soup!

Eh. I've had worse. But not many. This is right up there with the Naked Poet Under A Blanket On The Couch During A Party act I pulled when I was 23, without the party, the blanket, or the nakedness. Such acts really do require an audience, you know. Not much point in being naked and afflicted all by your lonesome.

Now: naked and afflicted on the lawn, that's something else. That happened a couple of weekends ago; fortunately, it was dark out and no one noticed. Or unfortunately, depending on your mindset.

So I shall wobble not particularly bravely forth, ever curious as to the precise depths I will plumb during this period of broken-headedness, lo! I shall wait with eager anticipation and twitching fingers, and a crate of benzodiazepenes, which are, I have found, extremely handy to have around in times such as these.

I mean, if it's a choice between quivering on the couch under a blanket and tearing up the street in my boxers shooting out streetlights, I think the couch is a much better option. Very rarely do the police get involved when you're just sitting on the couch.

Unless, of course, you've done something wicked earlier in the day and are recuperating on the couch, and they've tracked you down, but I've found that's really more about the prior wickedness than the couch-sitting per se.

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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.

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Apparently the fragility of the contents of my cranium is matched only by my acute frustration that unlike, say, the master Phil Dick, I am unable to harness my wacked-out neurons and produce marketable product. Of course, the redoubtable Mr. Dick popped many red pills, stayed up for days at a time, and died of a burst head at the age of 54. No matter! I, whose Head remains Astonished, will no doubt triumph in some fiscally rewarding fashion. Or not. That depends, I suppose, on the output of my products.

Of which I have, at the moment, but one, that being the sheer unencumbered force of my personhood. Pardon me for a moment while I do a little soft shoe to demonstrate said force.

There. This is theater of the mind, people. Think Sammy Davis without the googly glass eye. And white. Without a career, or famous friends.

In fact, forget all that and move on... to this!

That's right ladies and gentlemen and indeterminates, now you too can participate in the massive clinical trial that is modern psychiatry!

Just nip on down to your neighborhood licensed Psychiatrist's Chamber and ask for one of the new, modern wonder-pills that will turn you into Tony Robbins if you'd only give them a try. Chances are he'll have a drawerful of free samples and can send you home with a big bag of assorted pills. Try one for a week or two, and if it doesn't work, try another! Your neurons just love new experiences, especially when they affect serotonergic neurotransmission.

There's a standard Cartoon Moment which usually follows being struck upside the head, wherein the smitten animated character shakes his head rapidly from side to side with a sort of gbl-gbl-gbl-gbl noise, and his frying-pan or boulder-flattened head is returned to its proper shape. That's pretty much me all the time now.

Glb-gbl-gbl! Oh yes. Only, the repeated shaking just seems to stretch my head out into ever more fantatic balloon animal shapes, and not the weird six-dicked monstrosity that the clown at your sixth birthday party tried to tell you was a giraffe but which you just knew was for Naughty Purposes, no. We're talking big sky-smears of stained glass that fill the entire room, here. Not at all suitable for board meetings, or showing up at the office, or having intelligible conversations with the checkout lady at 11:30 PM whilst purchasing a Cadbury Fruit & Nut Bar, a dozen cans of Reddi-Wip, and some cordovan shoe polish. Oh no.

See, you think you've read it all, but I give it to you now: Mental Disintegration, blogged live! Check back to see how far it goes, watch amazed as the Astonished Head implodes before your very eyeballs.

Mmm... eyeballs.

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This morning, I dreamed that I wandered through some semi-industrial area of Queens, seeking the auto-body shop that had kept my white Geo Storm in storage since sometime in the early '90s. When I got there, the auto-body shop had been replaced by some sort of Discovery Channel-worthy custom hot-rod shop (or nearly so--my dreamself thought some of the workmanship was a bit shoddy). I asked the bearded and beer-gutted proprietor if he remembered the white Geo Storm he had stored for me all those years ago, and there was this sort of "Whoops!" moment when he told me that they had gotten rid of it while back, seeing as how I couldn't be located and all. But, he said, they'd be willing to give me another car of equivalent value, and he was sure they could scare somthing up.

So, I spent the rest of the dream trying to establish whether a '91 Geo Storm with under 30,000 miles on it was equivalent to some whacked-out racing modified Ford Pinto with no interior upholstery, or a Monte Carlo with 200,000 miles on it, or some other "car-guy's car."

All of which is in direct contradiction with reality. I sold the Storm in 1994 to a friend of my then-girlfriend for $3000, and took the money, along with the then-girlfriend, to Mexico. The purchaser totalled the Storm shortly thereafter.

I dream--you decide.

If there's a more certain way to drive down traffic, I haven't found it. Just start keeping an online dream journal and detailing your medicated anxieties, and readers will flock from you like locusts before a sandstorm.

Speaking of which: throughout all of this, my God-sense--that peculiar numinous sensation I get on windy days and other portentous occasions--has completely fled. Ain't that a bitch?

So, in the mercilessly dramatic throes of sourceless chest-clutching anxiety (which, if you've never experienced it, is akin to being freaked out one morning for no apparent reason whatsoever while making toast, and then staying that way for the rest of the day), I am going to slip on the swell new Planet Bike Gemini bike gloves that arrived moments ago and go for a ride.

The leaves here are just on the other side of peaking, and we've discovered a nice route that takes us along the valley floor and then up near the ridge, so we can view the farm-like vistas and painterly autumn hues as we work our hearts and legs.

It's pretty much the only thing I've been able to do for about two weeks straight now, which, while good for my body, isn't exactly fully funtional behavior.

I wish I knew what to do with my suspicion that the problem here lies not with me, but with the current definition of "functional."

---

ON THE OTHER HAND...

I feel perfectly functional after riding 17 miles through a fall-cloaked valley in the late afternoon sunlight, then eating a slab of fine roast beef with fresh tomato and onion wrapped in a tortilla while listening to a slew of Bach's concerti for harpsichord at high volume.

Can't beat that with an anxiolytic.

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Had one of those days that starts off with the Big Big Panic because the alarm button on the old-fashioned analog alarm clock that nevertheless beeps wasn't quite all the way up which led to running around and a lack of tooth-brushing but trains were caught work was done money was earned and now shirts must be washed and bicycles must be ridden into the country dark to quell the mania that turns the head into a balloon with a big smiley face on it and I suppose that means the medication is working but for all I know it could be God squeezing a blood vessel in my brain waiting to see what happens when I crash into a ditch because my eyes have gone all sparkle-popped and I can't move my feet anymore but he'd already know what would happen because of that whole omnipotency thing he's got going on.

I'm just saying.

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Another most peculiar dream last night. I've written before about my dream "map," the sense of orientation my dream-self often possesses. Since starting the Lexapro, the overall tone and sensibility of my dreams has been "off the map." They have an unfamiliar character, a strange cast to them, and I am unable to orient my dream self within them. I can only attribute this to the chemical workings of the SSRI. It seems reasonable that a chemical with such broad neurological effects in waking life would also affect the sleeping life.

In my dream, I had taken advantage of the five days' worth of inpatient psychiatric care provided by my insurance, and checked myself into a psychiatric ward. I was in a plain, institutional-looking room, wearing plain, institutional-looking "clothes"--pajamas, really. In one wall of the room was a sliding window, such as you might find in the reception area of a doctor's office.

It was locked, but there was a screwdriver-type tool on the window's ledge, and I was able to open the lock, slide the window back, and grab a big ring of keys on the receptionist's desk on the other side. My dream self knew that these were the "keys to the hospital," so to speak. They were of all sizes and shapes, and one of them was tagged "Pharmacy." I really wanted that key: I could only imagine what was in there. All my favorite synthetic opiates, Vicodin, the works. I knew that such seeking was symptomatic of addiction, but no matter... I was going to get that key, get into the pharmacological storeroom, and figure out some way to break open the narcotics cabinet when I got there (all the Good Stuff, you see, is generally kept under its own lock and key).

But I never quite made it that far. I ended up closing and relocking the window, then opening it again, never managing to actually get the key and set off on my mission. But even when I noticed that there were four or five cameras in the room, watching me fixedly, I kept at it. Opening the window, grabbing the key-ring, putting it back, closing it, opening it again. Then I heard the bustle of staff returning from lunch, and I left the room to wander the halls.

As it turned out, there was a bank in the front of the hospital. One of the halls just opened up into it, and there was nubbly bank-style carpeting, and desks with comfy chairs for financial consultations, and ropes on brass stands to control the lines for the tellers. So there I was in my pajamas, knowing that everyone knew that I must have wandered in from the psychiatric ward.

I think I may have headed back to make some more tries for the Pharmacy key, but the tail end of the dream has dissolved in waking memory.

Now, I tend not to analyze my dreams too deeply. I believe that their function is in their occurrence: just by having them, my mind is doing what it needs to be doing to maintain itself. But I find it fascinating that the SSRI is affecting the methods that my sleeping mind uses to do that work. The symbology has a different feel to it, my sense of myself as a dream individual is different, and the emotional resolution that I bring with me from sleep into wakefulness has changed. I don't know whether the process has become more effective or not, I just know that it's changed.

Of course, this bit of introspection could all just be from the 99+ degree fever I'm running right now. Looks like my rainy night ride a few days back was a bit much for a body that's not quite used to getting all of the exercise it's now getting. So today, when the weather was gorgeous for riding, I've been camped out on the couch with the cats, the television, and various aromatic teas. Pea is about halfway through her whirlwind tour of Italy, so I've got the house to myself, which is good in some ways, lonely in others, and a detriment to housekeeping.

Hopefully, I will be recovered enough to get up at 6AM on Tuesday to speed to the mall, grab my reserved copy of Halo 2, and spend the day blowing things up using the Big Television Downstairs That I'm Only Allowed To Play Videogames On When Pea Is Not Around.

Late night fevered thoughts, but on Sunday, when no one's watching, so it's safe.

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Oh, so now you want to know why I haven't got much to say? You damnable people, with your incessant demands and your Ritz crackers.

It's this accursed escitalopram oxalate, I think. Or maybe not. Who knows? It is all part of the crapshoot that is the modern psychiatrist's secret amusement and the worried well person's bane. An extra 10mg of the SSRI coupled with cessation of the lamotrigine has resulted in an acute case of the very, very sleepies. That's a technical term.

Then again, this lethargy could be because I just had two days of decent bike riding after a week's worth of mucous-laden immobility.

This afternoon, a slight nap turned into a sweaty sack-out with a cat topping, after which I installed the new gas dryer (the unexpected death by gunshot of the previous appliance was a shock to us all). Now it's 8:30 in the bloody evening and I haven't gotten much done, which means that tomorrow I shall have to labor a bit on my birthday.

Such is the life of a modern self-employed roustabout, I suppose.

Urgh. Too much chocolate--some of the spoils of Italy, now making me feel all thickly liquid and coldly molten.

In general: my overall state is not conducive to blogging, except for spurts like this, which will no doubt prove invaluable to my eventual biographers but are trying for the average reader.

There. That should keep my public at bay... for now.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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What a histamine-coated, mucous-laden, Benadryl-sucking day.

Benadryl got its start as a psychiatric drug. Back in the 50s and 60s, good old over-the-counter diphenhydramine, in addition to being used as an antihistamine that blocks H1 histamine receptors in the brain and elsewhere, was prescribed for its atropine-like effects on acetylcholine receptors. It was also used as a hypnotic, like Xanax or other benzodiazepines, and is a mild serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Research on the chemical construction of Benadryl and other antihistamines derived from it eventually led to the development of Haldol, Thorazine, and, later, Prozac and the other fashionably modern happy pills. These days, it's still used for side effect control in patients who are taking antipsychotic medication--in can alleviate neuroleptic-induced tremors and other symptoms.

So, that bottle of little generic pink allergy pills is great-great-grandfather to the bottle of expensive white Lexapro tablets that sits next to it, a bit of pharmacological history in my medicine cabinet.

Be that as it may... food-induced nasal devastation necessitated the ingestion of about 50mg of the stuff, which knocked me out for over four hours. That was pleasant... collapsed on the couch with a big fat cat snoring on my chest, I snoozed in a hypnotic fugue. It's the same sort of thing I once chased after when I drank, only without the shouting and staggering and passing out. Sometimes, a little zoning is what's needed, a temporary dip in the waters of the Lethe.

Unfortunately, I've discovered that Benadryl "resets" my other meds a bit, so that I revert to an anxious state for the next 24 to 48 hours. I've not seen anything about this in the literature, but that's the nature of today's psychiatric pharmacopeia. Much of the experimentation is done by the patients.

So now I'm a bit woozy, a bit befuddled, a tad anxious, all at the same time. Marvelous, what you can do with your brain these days.

Nothing a bag of miniature Oreos can't fix, though, so I'm off to find some.

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Occasionally, I discover somthing that, in retrospect, is so blazingly obvious that I really ought to be taken around back and lightly shot, to teach me a lesson.

I have been plagued for quite awhile now with what I call "sourceless anxiety." A tightness in the chest, coupled with a feeling of incipient dread. It also makes me grumpy and snappy and generally annoying to be around. It's the mood that makes me want to get drunk, to drown it in a nice bucket of depressant.

I have also been plagued with snot - braining allergies, for a similar length of time. Big runny nose, machine - gun sneezes, watery eyes, and a generally bashed - in - the - face feeling. Not at all pleasant.

My remedy for this mucoid state has often been what I call "the red pills:" pseudoephedrine hydrochloride. When I was a kid, it was available as a prescription called Actified, and now you can get it over the counter as Sudafed. It's available as a cheap generic, and is a major component of any one of a dozen multi - symptom cold, cough, and allergy remedies.

Now, when my allergies really get going, I can scarf six of those little red pills a day - - that's 360 milligrams of pseudoephedrine HCL - - and my allergies can stay "going" for weeks at a time. For awhile this spring, my allergies were refreshingly absent. Then, last week, after a sudden bout of nasal insanity and a couple of days' worth of pill - popping, I had a really bad day, mentally. Snappish, grim, anxious... just a lousy, miserable bugger I was, and Pea caught the brunt of it. Suddenly, it occurred to me to wonder: was my favored chemical allergy remedy to blame?

My allergies quieted down for a couple of days, then splattered back into action over the weekend. This morning on the train, I dry - swallowed a couple of red pills to head off a case of exploding face. And all day today: the anxiety, the creeping dread, just below the surface.

So, I decided to take a closer look at my little red friends.

It turns out that pseudoephedrine is part of a class of chemicals that includes noradrenaline, metaraminol, adrenaline, ephedrine, and dopamine, all of which act within the body's adrenergic system... the same system that regulates things like panic, anxiety, and the fight - or - flight response. It includes the organs and nerves in which catecholamines are the neurotransmitters, as well as all the nerve cells for which epinephrine and norepinephrine (and more broadly, other monoamines, dopamine, and serotonin) are the transmitter substances. Catecholamines are involved in a number of conditions, including hyperactivity and (strangely) albinism, and monoamines are implicated in just about every psychiatric condition they've got a pill for. Like my old nemesis methylphenidate, pseudoephedrine is a sympathomimetic amine that mimics the effects of adrenaline.

In simpler terms: in addition to unstuffing my hated nose, Sudafed works within the same neurotransmitter network that I am currently trying to control by scarfing 20 milligrams of escitalopram oxalate every day at 3:00 PM.

OK... maybe that wasn't so simple. How about this: I think I've been poisoning myself for years, and I feel like a fucking idiot.

Not just poisoning my body. I've been poisoning my mind.

This is all highly unscientific, of course, but there's enough smoke for me to suspect a neurochemical fire. When I look back on my pharmaceutical history, I see years spent under the influence of artificial chemicals that work within the same biochemical pathways that regulate my mood: Dexedrine as a toddler for hyperactivity, then Ritalin for same; Dimetapp for allergies, then Actifed for same... all of these chemicals, floating in my brainsoup, going about their mood - altering business. Even over - the - counter Benadryl has its uses as a psychiatric drug, and research into its serotonergic effects led directly to the development of Prozac and all of the other modern SSRIs.

I think I'm much more sensitive to these chemicals than I previously realized. I wonder, now, how many of the millions of mentally medicated are actually being adversely affected by the various chemicals that pass for healing remedies these days. What proportion of the anxious population is simply overmedicated, not by prescription, but by the pills and potions available at any drugstore for a few dollars, promising relief from the sniffles, allergies, and colds? And, beyond that: how much modern depression is the result of blood sugar levels skewed by gallons of soda, stacks of sweet snacks, and barrels of fried carbohydrates?

Fortunately, for me, there is a more natural solution to my allergy problem: the ancient Chinese 'shroom, Reishi. I've got a kilogram of the stuff, ready to be made into tea. I used to drink it regularly, but I've let it slide this season. It's more effort: water to boil, and a cup of earthy brown liquid to mix with orange juice once or twice a day.

Reishi isn't instant relief. But it's a 5,000 year old remedy, and I know that after a few days, it usually works.

Also: it doesn't make me insane, which is a plus.

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So I'm done with the on - site portion of my day (yes, I still need work; I'm just on a bitty 40 - hour gig that ends next Wednesday), and I'm sitting on the train in Hoboken.

My Inspiron 700m is all charged up, and I'm using my Kyocera KPC650 the way 'twas meant to be used: with no Verizon - imposed dormancy. See, they're afraid I'll use my laptop to steal movies and BANKRUPT HOLLYWOOD or set up a pirate warez website that uses a bajillion gigabits of bandwidth, so they force the EVDO card to go into dormant mode every few minutes. After reading a website or doing some other task, I try to move on to another site or maybe FTP some files around, and I can't actually get connected to the service for 5 - 10 seconds while the card wakes up... which means that the websites time out, or the FTP client throws a hissy fit.

Read the rest...

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There's a poster in this train car that's tangentially related to yesterday's post. It's a full - frame photo of a little girl's face, in black and white, wearing a tweed hat and a quirky expression. Maybe she won't "just grow out of it," the poster reads. Maybe it's a neurological disorder. Maybe it's TS.

The poster is an ad for the Tourette's Syndrome Helpline. Mere seconds after I read the poster, the man sitting behind me got a call on his cell - I could hear him because there was a momentary silence while my laptop buffered the audio stream from NPR.

The side of the conversation I could hear went like this:

Hello?

No, you're not.

You're sick, sweetie. You have a neurological disorder.

No, I'm not kidding.

I'm being honest with you.

Do you have the TV on?

Turn the TV on to Channel 7. Watch the news and try to relax.

I'm on the train right now. Everything's OK. I'll be home soon.

You're OK. I'm sorry you're not having a good day.

I love you, OK? Bye - bye.

It was an eerie moment of voyeuristic synchronicity. I had just read the poster, and was thinking about it. At first, I thought the man was joking with her - that he had read the poster, too.

But he wasn't. His tone, patient and soothing, belonged to someone who deals with such phone calls frequently. At home, he has a wife or daughter, someone who has a condition that makes her lose her grip on reality. She was frightened, and called him on his cellphone for reassurance and reorientation. It's the exact opposite of what I was talking about yesterday: true mental illness, a failure to grasp and operate within the basic structure of reality, a failure so complete that even awareness of that failure is fleeting or nonexistent.

Such an odd series of moments as it unfolded. First, passing interest, just because I happened to be able to hear the man: he's got a child at home, sick. Then, the strangeness: he's joking with her, grabbing that phrase off the poster. Then, the realization: it's no joke. Whoever is on the other end of that phone is in need, and this man, sitting behind me on the train, is her lifeline.

Now, I'm sitting in my car in the train parking lot, having o\put the laptop away and gotten off the train. I passed by the man's seat as I exited.

He looked tired.

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Some days, I wake up and I'm already a mess. Sometime in late morning I had a dream that I had won some kind of Shopping Spree prize, so I was wheeling a shopping cart around in a store that sold all kinds of interesting objects...including Kuzweil keyboards (which is how you know it's a dream; I grabbed a 72-key and an 88-key), camping equipment, and consumer electronics. However, I was thwarted in my attempt to score a Humongo flat-screen plasma TV because, as the TV Guy pointed out by showing me the newspaper ad, Humongo flat-screen plasma TVs were not part of the Shopping Spree prize. Which, I thought, was just as well, because I would have to put the big TV in storage when I left on my trip anyway.

Apparently, I was living in some sort of housemate-style situation, and some of said mates had also won the Shopping Spree prize, so I was trying to direct them to the back of the store where giant foosball tables and weird arcade-style videogames could be had...things for the "common area," I guess.

Then, I woke up, in dire need of caffeine or some other stimulant. I am much more nervous and jumpy and full of dread before I have my coffee than I am afterwards, which is a sure sign that my supplies of naturally-produced amphetamine are on the wane.

It's now the inter-holiday period, that week when I can rationalize doing nothing work-related because nothing really gets done this week anyway, now does it? But it's an ineffective rationalization, so I will sit here and stew in nervous neurochemical juices because of my peculiar psychology. I used to drink to squelch such moods, but that was writing checks against my Mood account which would eventually bounce, leaving me a twitching mass of guilty neuroses on the floor, moaning for Jello. I'm on more of a cash-only basis now, in direct contrast to my actual finances.

Now, it's time for more coffee, and maybe if I can swing it a bit of animation work for a dinky contract that really ought to be paying more, but it's sort of a favor, which was dumb on my part.

Yes...yes, more coffee, from my Titanium French Press Of The Gods!

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In my head, that is. Through careful application of too much caffeine and just enough alcohol, I have managed to spin myself into something resembling a rapid cycle. This, as you might imagine, is not good.

It didn't take much...just a couple of weeks of daily caffeine overdose, coupled with a beer in the evenings, all folded into a generally stressful situation (selling house, ending relationship, hitting road). It serves, once again, to illustrate how delicate my particular brand of consciousness seems to be, and how quickly I forget lessons that I've already learned. I'm still pissed that the obstetrician lost the User Guide that my brain came with; it would've saved me a lot of trouble over the years.

The first clue arrived as I was walking down the hallway in the office yesterday, feeling super euphorically good. Then a little voice said, Uh, dude? An hour ago you felt like shit. Think about that for a minute. Which I did, and that small step back allowed me to see the pattern that's been unfolding and cycling over the past week or so. Up and down, up and down. The thing about such mood mashups is that the good parts tend to make you forget about the bad parts, so that it's difficult to nail down what's actually going on.

Not to worry: I'll pull out of it, once again staggering back towards a vague semblance of normalcy.

This is why it is vital that I make my pedal-powered journey. Having each day consist of getting from place to place, locating food, and finding shelter will provide the stimulus and distraction that sitting in a new apartment watching TV with the cat would not. No chance to dwell on things for too long, no opportunities to sink into the recliner and justify an entire six-pack instead of a beer or two.

It's Pedaling For Sanity (Or A Reasonable Facsimile Thereof)! Yeah, boyeee!

And other assorted exclamations of enthusiasm, delivered with a sincerity not quit felt, but which nonetheless are genuine to the extent allowed by current neurochemical and psychological circumstances. Your mileage may vary.

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As always, I feel I should restate Position #213, namely, that the DSM IV - the Psychiatrist's Holy Book, as received by the Prophet Spitzer, from which all diagnoses flow - is an obsessively Aristotelian attempt to codify the human condition by defining aberrance. It is part of an overarching philosophy which rests upon the idea that happiness - seemingly defined as "functioning in society in a way which minimizes internal conflict and anxiety" - can best be achieved by readjusting the vagaries of neurochemistry with manufactured chemicals. The perfect expression of this system, the most efficient combination of this book with the psychopharmacopia it supports, will be a numbered diagnosis for every patient's complaint with a corresponding course of chemical treatment, fitting into a matrix approved by medical insurance companies.

Like Aristotle's exhaustive classifications, this brand of human nature management only goes so far before it begins to beg the questions it purports to answer. The conclusion is always implicit in the premise: if you are ill, your behaviors fit into a particular diagnostic grid in this book...and vice-versa.

It is the ever-expanding scope of that diagnostic grid which concerns me; according to the DSM-IV, I'm "ill." Sick. Not functioning properly. Et cetera. The diagnostic category I supposedly fit into is Atypical Bipolar II. The "atypical" part is a diagnostic shoehorn - I had gotten fed up with my anxiety symptoms, and went to see a psychatrist. If you go to see a psychiatrist, that's what they do: diagnose. If you don't fit the criteria, they'll bend the criteria.

But I'm not "mentally ill," in the very real sense that I am not malfunctioning, I am not debilitated, I am not dysfunctional. What I am is highly susceptible to the extremes of emotional experience that are common to every human being on the planet. I readily achieve states that differ only in extremity and cause from those known to others: lately, for example, the ring of the phone sometimes squirts a jolt of adrenaline into my blood, and my heart thumps as though I've just been startled by a jungle beast. At other times, the most mundane items instantiate exquisite pathos: a too-simple meal of a cheese and pickle sandwich, the sight of someone dining alone in a restaurant.

I believe that everyone, either consciously or unconsciously, makes a decision about what will guide their experience of reality. They will either be subject to the social consensus in its totality, or they will take what they value from that consensus and discard the rest. There are many who should take the latter course but do not. I think that drives more anxiety in this culture than anything else.

In any event: going cold-turkey off of the caffeinated Cup Of Death (and playing through a most excellent video game) has greatly improved my head. I can still feel the fragility, there...tip too much in either direction, and off I go again. It will be interesting to see how I respond to the radical change of daily life I've got planned for myself.

Speaking of which: if it's as nice outside as it looks, I may just have to go for a trike ride...

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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 declin