The Indigestible

It was Friday night; now it’s Saturday morn­ing. 0400.

It’s still work­ing, but it’s lost some of its effi­cacy (obvi­ously, or I’d be asleep now). The manic uptick is a bit harder than it was, say, five days ago.

I hope this is just a bit of tol­er­ance. I’ll be up to 50 mg next week, and maybe that’ll offer a bet­ter reg­u­la­tor. For now, where I am isn’t unwork­able, just … dif­fi­cult. Like my reg­u­lar cyclothymic phases. Not quite manic, not quite BP I, but still not what I con­sider opti­mal. Not at all where I was, say, last Sunday. That was a good, bal­anced mellow.

I’m a weird mix now between jazzed and tired. That’s part of the up-​​cycle. You find rea­sons, excuses, to be wired, excited, intense. But the base fact is sim­ply that you are wired, excited, intense. There’s just no rea­son for it. It sim­ply is.

Worst part is that the upswings are also dis­in­hibit­ing. Like being a bit drunk, but with­out the alco­hol. You’re just a lit­tle too will­ing to do things that, ordi­nar­ily, you would never do. Or at least not usually.

Like be awake at 4 AM on a Saturday, writ­ing about your own per­sonal mad­ness in a pub­lic forum. Sigh.

Yup, 25 mg isn’t quite enough, I think. But it beats the liv­ing shit out of where I was two weeks ago.

Dx. came back more or less how I sus­pected it would: Bipolar I. I think it’s mostly fugue; the rest of the time I think I’m cyclothymic rather than fully BP. Rapid cycling too, just to make it a lit­tle more fun.

Cyclothymia is still one of those things that’s being stud­ied and under­stood fur­ther; the trans­la­tion, prac­ti­cally, is, we don’t know what else to call it just yet, but we’ve got a new edi­tion of DSM to take to press, so, well…

When I went in to talk to the psy­chi­a­trist last Wednesday, I was in the mid­dle of a full-​​on bipo­lar fugue. I was bounc­ing between the oh what the hell who cares depths, and the I can do it all king-​​of-​​the-​​world on the bow of the Titanic upswings, and even as the doc­tor was ask­ing me if I had sui­ci­dal or homi­ci­dal ideation and I was say­ing no, no way, well, yes, I was.

In fair­ness, not actu­ally plan­ning any­thing. To me there is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between think­ing I’d like to just die ver­sus actu­ally plan­ning ways to make it hap­pen. To my mind the lat­ter is sui­ci­dal ideation. But, for the sake of per­spec­tive, I’ve been prone to such thoughts since I was fif­teen. So I guess a bet­ter ques­tion would have been if I was rel­a­tively more prone to sui­ci­dal ideation of late. And still the answer would have been, well, sort of, maybe, I don’t know.

Rapid cycling means you don’t shift moods over months; it hap­pens over weeks instead. Mm-​​hmm. There’s even ultra-​​rapid cycling, which is min­utes or even sec­onds in dura­tion. Mm–hmm.
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He did this in the 90s. Just a bit of Bowie to coun­ter­bal­ance the Elfman.

====

Baby Grace is the vic­tim; she was four­teen years of age.
And the wheels are turn­ing, turn­ing, for the fin­ger points at me.

But I have not been to Oxford Town.
No I have not been to Oxford Town.

Toll the bell; pay the pri­vate eye. All’s well.
Twentieth Century dies.

And the prison priests are decent. My attor­ney seems sin­cere.
I fear my days are num­bered.
Lord, get me out of here.

This is your shadow on my wall. This is my flesh and blood. This is what I could’ve been.

And the wheels are turn­ing and turn­ing as this Twentieth Century dies.

If I had not ripped the fab­ric
If time had not stood still
If I had not met Ramona
If I’d only paid my bill

This is my bunk with two sheets. This is my food, though foul. This is what I could have been?

…I have no, I don’t have to…

Calendar comes up clear for the day. Today. Starting 5 hours from now, and me with no sleep, and know­ing I won’t get any sack time before then.*

Good, so I can coast behind the mon­i­tors. Just shift, paste, com­pose. Wave hi, howyadoin.

Fuck, fuck me, I am so tired.

Not phys­i­cally.

====

* Why didn’t I go to bed? Good ques­tion. It’s insane to not go to bed when you know you need to, isn’t it?

Earlier tonight, lucid. Now … yes, that fast. Less than five hours.

You clock in and go to work, clock out for lunch. Somewhere in that time, in that half-​​day stretch, appar­ently, I go mad.

That is your lunch. This is my life.

And this is not drama. It’s quar­ter to four in the morn­ing right now as I write this. This is a jour­nal, kids. That’s why I cre­ated the “Sickness” tag.

So you can see, and won­der why, and … if you’re like me, know. It’s not just you.

“Insanity”, by Oingo Boingo.

==

I’m so sorry. Please for­give me.
Who do I pray to to straighten out this prob­lem?
Straighten out this prob­lem, straighten out my mind,
straighten out this crooked tongue?

My mind has wan­dered from the strait and nar­row;
my mind has wan­dered from the flock, you see.
My mind has wan­dered; the man just said so.
My mind has wan­dered; I heard it on TV.

And the flock has wan­dered away from me.

All around the world now like a big bright cherry cloud
trav­el­ing from home to home, TV sets and tele­phones,
here it comes just like a storm; bathe in it and be reborn.
Time to let the world know.
Welcome mad­ness, say hello.

Like a wave we can­not see wash­ing over you and me,
hid­ing here and hid­ing there, mad­ness hid­ing every­where.
Such a curios­ity; here it comes to set us free.
Plenty left for you and me.
Say hello, insanity.

I am the virus; are you the cure?
I am morally, I’m morally impure.
I am a dis­ease and I am unclean; I am not part of God’s lit­tle oiled machine.
Christian nation, assim­i­late me. Take me in your arms and set me free.
I am part of a degen­er­ate élite, drag­ging our soci­ety into the street,
into the abyss and to the sewer, don’t you see?
The man just told me, he told me on TV.

Do you think you’re bet­ter than me?
Do you want to kill me or befriend me?

And the alco­holic bas­tard waved his fin­ger at me, and his voice was filled with evan­gel­i­cal glee.
Sipping down his gin and ton­ics while preach­ing about the evils of nar­cotics,
and the evils of sex, and the wages of sin while he men­tally fon­dles his next of kin.

My mind has wan­dered from the flock, you see.
And the flock has wan­dered away from me.

And he waved his hyp­no­tiz­ing fin­ger at me.

Let’s imi­tate real­ity.
Let’s strive for medi­oc­rity.
Let’s make believe we’re all the same.
Let’s san­i­tize our lit­tle brains.

I’d love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed.
I’d love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head.
I’d love to hear you laugh tonight; I’d love to hear you weep,
I’d love to lis­ten to you while you’re scream­ing in your sleep.

Christian sons, Christian daugh­ters, lead me along like a lamb to the slaugh­ter.
Purify my brain and hose down my soul; white per­fec­tion. Perfection is my goal.

Do you think you’re bet­ter than me?
Do you want to kill me, or befriend me?

Christian nation, make us all right.
Put us through the fil­ter and make us pure and white.

My mind has wan­dered from the flock, you see,
and the flock has wan­dered away from me.

Let’s talk of fam­ily val­ues while we sit and watch the slaugh­ter.
Hypothetical abor­tions on imag­i­nary daugh­ters.
The white folks think they’re at the top; ask any proud white male.
A mil­lion years of evo­lu­tion. We get Danny Quayle.

All around the world now like a big bright cherry cloud
trav­el­ing from home to home, TV sets and tele­phones;
here it comes just like a storm. Bathe in it and be reborn.
Time to let the world know.
Welcome mad­ness, say hello.

Let’s imi­tate real­ity. Let’s strive for medi­oc­rity. Let’s make believe we’re all the same. Let’s san­i­tize our lit­tle brains.

I’d love to take you home with me. I’d love to tuck you in.
I wish I could pro­tect you from the wages of our sin.
I’d love to hear you scream tonight, I’d love to hear you cry,
pro­tect you from the mad­ness that is rain­ing from the sky.

*

Let’s imi­tate real­ity. Let’s strive for medi­oc­rity. Let’s make believe we’re all the same. Let’s san­i­tize our lit­tle brains.

I’d love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed.
I’d love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head.
I wish that I could keep you in a pre­cious Chinese box; on Sundays I would pray for you so it would never stop.

I’d love to hear you laugh tonight, I’d love to hear you weep.
I’d love to lis­ten to you while you’re scream­ing in your sleep.
I’d love to soothe you with my voice and take your hand in mine.
I’d love to take you past the stars and out of reach of time.

I’d love to see inside your mind and tear it all apart, to cut you open with a knife and find your sacred heart.
I’d love to take your satin dolls and tear them all to shreds.

I’d love to mess your pretty hair.

I’d love to see you dead.

I think I’m in pretty seri­ous trouble.

Used to be that I knew the depths of the sad­ness, the depression.

But lately, it’s been coun­tered by up phases. I don’t know how to describe that. Best anal­ogy is when you’ve had too much caf­feine, I guess.

They swing back and forth. In a stan­dard cal­en­dar month I feel about right for maybe five days. The rest…

When I’m down I know it and can deal with it. Just my phases, my sad­ness. It’s the up times that I can’t…

They’re hap­pen­ing at the same time.

This is way beyond my con­trol. How can I be both recessed, dropped into the dark­ness — and, at the same time, feel like I can take on the world?

Something is seri­ously wrong here.
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