Sanity

Sanity in the midst of madness is a bore. At least mine is. Don't get the wrong impression. I'm not bored, I'm relieved. But I cannot write interesting little essays out of whole cloth like I used to. For that you have to be out and about and out and about is part of my problem.

I've just had 3 good days, which means I have almost nothing to write about. I spent a morning's hard work on Sunday cutting down rampant grass in the small garden with the Buddha statue in it by the air conditioners and the utility meters on the outside of my fourplex [it's been a cool, wet summer here], as well as filling large flowerpots with bags of potting soil for my companion on oxygen to plant in while sitting in her walker. Big deal. Three years ago I might have been able to stretch that to three ruminating paragraphs. But no longer.

Yesterday, I went to the hardware store, the UPS mail box, the Office Supply Store, the grocery store, and Walgreen's. Too much. Getting up this morning was poisoned by the faintest new traces of a depressive cycle--the layer of voiceover dreaming was just very slightly off-color.

Unlike last week, however, when I was down to $6+ in my bank account before my SS check for August, I have OTC Ibuprofen back in my med mix.

Episode

This week has been a major depressive episode. I had to hide from the world. Sunday had been one of the rare manic days when I felt pretty good--nothing had made me angry [a usual trigger], I was not compelled to go out where the world would start boiling over when I can't find the knob to turn of the burner, and I had a fixemup project or two that I could turn to.

So I started work making a barbecue grill/emergency stove out of a "3 pound" coffee can. Some components were already in place. I made that by Wednesday and the depression got deeper. There's a point when I wake up, even from a nap, when I'm hitting rock bottom. As I dose in and out of it, I simply don't want to wake up at all, ever.

No Space, No Place, But Madness

As I write this, I have a picture in my mind's eye, a picture that is becoming too vivid. The world slightly to my left of center as I stare forward has been torn down with a vertical ragged edge that leaves the white deckle of the inner paper, and the two halves are put back together again slightly off skew.

There are worms in my brain tonight, so I'm going to bed and will pick this post up anon.

So now it is later and I am no longer seeing such things. I'm merely bitter that, once again, as I have for 40 years, I've said the wrong thing and pissed someone off.

Sigh.

Too many pieces of my world have slipped away. Too many people too busy somewhere else. And without work, solitude is the blues.

No People. No Work. No Shit.

How Many Words?

The following is a compendium of my thoughts on writing four years ago. It is a baseline check on what I still retain:

The Anchoress has gotten very angry about a rude and obscene t-shirt directed at the Pope. He certainly doesn't deserve such treatment, and her anger is quite understandable. Of course, she has her own inimitable take on what the whole business really means:

Mornings Are The Worst

And today's was exceptionally bad. They start with an ugly, conflict ridden, dream, whose details I never remember, retaining only the face of the particular acquaintance I was arguing with.

Then I wake up to the gagging of the c-pap mask and the fact that the sinuses on one side of my head have closed. I turn on the opposite side, which will normally cause gravity to unblock them. If I'm still awake, when both sides of my head are open, I'll return to my back and usually fall asleep for a while longer. If I fall asleep on my side, I'll wake up to find that the sinuses on the other side of my head have blocked and I'll have to start the entire process over.

In the twilight state that follows all this a new kind of dream will emerge. I call it the "voiceover" dream, because it is exclusively auditory. It always takes place in an ambiguous cylinder where the upper half of my body is lying at the bottom, listening. Above me is the Omnicient Narrator.

Of Prayer

My old friend The Anchoress is the only blog contact I have retained. She has followed my ups and downs, some unfortunately, on her own blog when my emotions got out of control, and has always kept an eye on me through e-mail. Earlier this month she put a request in her blog for prayers for me.

She has just renewed this along with requests for others. No one ever feels as morally good as they actually are, and Elizabeth Scalia, to give her real name, is just as weighed down with the guilt of her life's transgressions as any one of us. But she is morally good. She is a Catholic, a lay Benedictine, and works hard both to pray and to be ready to accept the Sacrament regularly and with Faith.

The Lunatic

Today is the day of a spectacular lunar eclipse visible on the other side of the globe from me. The perfect day to start a blog about madness.

Just so you know, from 2004-2006 I wrote a political blog called A Straight Shot Of Politics. I had to stop because the stress of constant anger over what was being done to our country, eventually left me too symptomatic. I can't do anything more with that blog. I had to abandon my old e-mail address for one reason or another and I could no longer convince Google that I owned it.

Maybe I don't. Maybe I have finally changed enough that I no longer have the ethical right to post there. Such things happen in my life. In any event, I am not likely to write about politics here. I did not enter that fray willingly, though I try to vote regularly. I did all I could to help elect a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate majority.

Now it's up to them.