November Ennui

 I cry for the dead, the missing, the lost, and those with illnesses so unbearable I wonder how the person does not end up screaming in horror at walls or in a car with the windows rolled up.  How do we do it, this getting through life?  There has been so much loss these later years, I have witnessed two close friends be eaten alive by bits, and now another and now another.  They fall like pins in a terminal game, mowed down not by time but through erosion of flesh and sense.

Have you lived to old age?  There is no formula or mercy of the divine that allows life as we would like it to be; a slicing shadow cast by some astral gnomon, following a 360° circle of the sundial in a garden of fruit and flowering excess.  It is one day at a time and there is no dispensation; you get the suffering and tragedy with the tiniest bits of happy.  Are you happy all the time, for half a day, for two hours, for five minutes solid?  I would like to meet you.  

So sour, so focused on the negative, but lord god it is overwhelmingly common when compared to what joy rarely pops in.  I can tell you the dates when I was happy in the past year.  There was a period of three weeks that I don’t understand which occurred in the spring.  I was unscared, capable, and energetic.  I was happy on October 9, the day I started taking a beta blocker for high blood pressure: it was unreal to me, the calm, the warmth, the embraceable universe that lasted through to the next day before dissipating as my system regulated itself back into panic attack mode.  Another chemical breakthrough happened the day I first took a half dose of Budeprion, an offshoot of the antidepressant Wellbutrin; it was different than the beta blocker, not so warm fuzzy happy but humorous, playful, involved, speedy, you’re my new friend happy.  That disappeared and is gone, even as the dose was put at what is considered full.  I’m told it doesn’t do anything for panic, and to increase the beta blocker creates risks and very real nightmares, the ones where you are frightened to fall asleep because of the vivid, bloody scenes of walking over slippery mashed faces in mud furrows during war.  That was Paxil.  Yes, I am becoming a medicine cabinet.

Antidepressants are still not mentioned in company, polite or coarse, as if it is more a battleground of will than a chemical imbalance.  Cheer up, get over yourself.  People are more comfortable if you are a drunk.  Would you condemn a diabetic for not producing enough insulin?  Really, this is no different, we depressives drive, go through grocery lines and can button up our shirts neatly if not wistfully.  I had weaned myself off of Prozac two years ago, partially because it wasn’t doing anything but putting weight on me, plus the inner shame of needing a crutch even if it was a prescribed medicine that wasn’t a bottle of whiskey.  I imagine it was why so many family members became alcoholics.

I don’t need an antidepressant for a few months to get me through a period of blah, I need one everyday for the rest of my life, unless knocked unconscious by a passing two by four, and I am ashamed of it.  But in my view, disclosure is strength and you would be stunned to know who takes one in secret morning ritual anyway.   But what if my job finds out?  An angry individual seeking methods of sabotage?  Or the people who sort of like me but may be uneasy to know that I take a tablet that fine tunes dopamine, making me able to stand and breathe and walk out the door?  Gossip has no intent but self-promotion, and there are a few who would love to have this information to pull a Did You Know card out of their pocket.   Get over it, I tell myself, there will always be people who prefer plums to peaches, and more than a few insecure jerks abound.  I don’t mean you.  Smiley face emoticon inserted here.

You see, this goes back to the beginning of this page, the loss of friends and loved ones that I could trust with my life.  I’ve never had that many friends with periods of none to one; making friends has always been fraught with flashes of what do I say next, oh jesus I shouldn’t have said that, good lord panic freeze get me out of here lockjaw.  I write better than I speak, it comes way easier.

But I have been crying, too much.  The news delivered regarding my brother’s health issues two weeks ago broke something inside of me, and so now I have been spilling tears overmuch concerning aging, loved cats; my fricking crown that came off, the fact that I read the Sunday paper in fifteen minutes and it’s over, (I look forward to Prince Valiant in the funny papers), and that I haven’t made any art in months, years, waiting waiting for some inner permission and look, I’m almost sixty.  I could have been a somebody if only if only I wasn’t such a jerk myself.  Life. Is. Hell.

I am the Assistant, if you need help, I am there and will stay to the end.  I will bathe you, lift you to change tubes and pads, administer meds, and wipe you up.  Can I not assist me?  I am good at keeping going, putting one foot in front of the other even if it is robotic or unsure; but it accomplishes nothing great, no deeds, no insights, nothing but a love of the possibility of life, of the hope that there is happiness ahead, that I will someday have another October 9th.

Tears are falling now, for the music playing through the laptop is poignant, a piano rendition of Never Neverland by a gifted Vince Guaraldi who composed the scores for the Charlie Brown cartoons.  He’s dead, a heart attack in his forties, gone.  I have a place where dreams are born and time is never planned.  Cripes.  Wah.

Now this piece has been totally self-indulgent and I realize that, but this is My Journal and didn’t you know you were part of my self-therapy of working things out?  I have to stop crying at dust motes and cake crumbs (no, there isn’t any cake but I wish), and so writing gets it out there for reflection and honesty.  I have hand written journals from twenty, thirty years ago that I revisit for verification of blurry memory or just to read.  No letters of merit, but there sometimes is wonder at the amazing beauty of this world, physical, emotional, or innocent.

Early dark, Kai is at the open window breathing in night air of the cool, damp grass and fallen leaves.   A Sunday, there is a pot of soup on the stove made with We Have to Get Rid of Them Today Mushrooms from the grocery and chicken, enough for a week of meals.   Sleep will come to cleanse with tides and fathoms, waves and currents.  Restore, recharge, replenish.  Good night.