Quick Update

And when my friend and I were done
We went to rest upon the sun
Cause life takes from us the things we love
And it robs us of the special ones
And it puts them high where we can't climb
And we only miss them all the time.

--"Life is Shit" Dead Milkmen

I haven't blogged in a while because I don't see the point in sharing misery if I can't find the funny in it. Things haven't been easy emotionally--I've still been trying to get used to my new prescription of Wellbutrin. My shrink added that to the Celexa I've been on, just to give my brain a little bit more juice. You need to get the little guy up there going. I think it's working, a bunch of possibilities and hopes that I never thought I had started to pop up. I've stopped taking midday naps, but I still have the crushing urge just to lie in bed. Of course, when the hope starts cutting through the numbness, I've had to deal with the opposite--grappling with the reality that I am not happy where I am in life. That has been kicking my ass. Before and after work, I've started to have panic episodes. I guess when the pills peeled away the numbness, there's a deep well of fear. I'm terrified and I don't know where it's coming from.

I remember when I was working on my senior thesis at Bard and one of my advisors told me that "We need to know which level of reality you're working on." Days later, he told me, and I forget the context, "You are going to go crazy, and it would be a real loss if you do". After college, I got addicted to Philip K. Dick. In an interview, he said that he thought he was too sensitive to authority, that he folds automatically out of fear, and that he doesn't feel equipped with the tools to fight it. I think that's why I fell in love with his books--I feel the same way, buddy. Thinking about PKD's books, I wonder if my years of depression and anxiety, which I now know goes way back past my adult life and into my teenage years, warped my reality. I simply don't see things the way people in my life see them, including my family. It's like a weird parallel self-centered reality. Life is going on somewhere else at a different pace. Up in my head, it's going on at a snail's pace and life is some villain that's fucking me over. Economically, I'm in the best place I can possibly be, well-off parents, living at home, a lot of money saved up. I can't get it to translate emotionally. I think my emotional intelligence is about five or six years behind where it should be. Over the past few weeks, I've been in countless arguments with them about my mental health. I don't blame them, I guess, if you have a kid with messed up wiring, it must be insulting to know you programmed it wrong. But sometimes wiring gets jostled or soldering falls away, or the cord gets frayed, and for the life of me, I can't get them to see that.

So that brings me to more recent news. Without going into morbid detail, I lost a friend and nearly lost another. The death was ruled a suicide. I'm still trying to process it, but that Dead Milkmen song above is where I stand on it now.

Taking Inventory: February '14

So, I haven't been active blogging for the past few weeks because work, and the possibility of not having work in the near future, have been occupying my time and head-space. My head-space, I realize is not a big room. Or perhaps it's stuffed with a lot of bullshit that I've hoarded over the years. This is what it's all about I guess. Maybe when I shovel all the garbage out I'll find out how big of a room it is. That worries me. If my head-space is a small room I'll be disappointed. If it's too big, then I'll wonder why I shoveled out all the shit. Maybe it was perfectly fine where it was.

That said, following the criteria of good days and great days ("good"being where I spend my workday not wanting to be compulsively drinking, eating, smoking, sleeping, or suicidal ideating, ideationalizing or whatever the verb is. "great" being I'm excited with the day enough to not want to pass out in bed), I would rate one day as being good and no days being great. The good day was my birthday--I had a very pleasant day getting drunk with my parents and eating a fancy burger.

However, there was one day that was absolutely horrendous. On the 12th, we got a winter advisory warning so I moved my counselor appointment to an earlier time and left work early. After talking with my counselor, she tells me that I really need to consider a psych evaluation because the Celexa I'm taking isn't working enough. To this, I disagreed since I felt much better than I did before I started taking the drug. However, apparently, three months into the medication, I should be happy or whatever-the-fuck. So I leave the place in about two inches of snow and in what should be a fifteen-minute drive from the shrink's office to the highway was a two-hour long ordeal. At the end of these two hours, I saw a three-car spin-out that looked pretty bad, but not bad enough to justify the wait. Two inches of snow. This shit wouldn't fly anywhere north of Richmond, VA. Then when I hit the bottleneck from the highway to the road leading up to my parent's neighborhood, with no exits and flashing police lights up ahead the traffic was at a halt. For four more hours. I was standing outside my car, chain-smoking, looking at the woods, saying to myself "I can walk through these woods and be home in thirty minutes." At the end of this horror, I learned that the reason for it was a semi-truck jack-knifed in the intersection. Nobody was dead. Nobody was hurt. And I was furious.

What I learned that being stuck in traffic because the cops and firemen couldn't deal with a semi-truck jack-knifed in an intersection is that there's nothing to learn. Being stuck in traffic is a purely nihilistic experience. When you are alone in your car for four hours without moving, you go through all the stages of grief except for acceptance. You might bargain, but that's usually ruined when you see the cops allow the opposite lane to proceed every thirty minutes and you end up yelling "Fuck you, you hillbilly cunts" and flicking off each one as they drive by. Then you see their faces, like they wonder why they were the ones chosen to go home, like a low-stakes version of survival guilt and you feel bad for telling them to fuck off. But what are you gonna do? You can't leave and you can't abandon your car, because you're forced into this system. You have to trust the person ahead of you and the person behind you has to trust you, but for what end? So you can all go home to your miserable lives? What are you gonna do when you get home anyway? Watch TV? Play video games? Go to bed angry?

So that day basically undid whatever good days I might have in the coming month. It was a day that could be valued as negative good days. I don't know how much damage was actually done but I guess we'll see...

Coping Strategy: The Big Mozz

I know I am not a decent person because I eat meat. Imagine if you will, the life of a cow on an industrial cattle ranch. Cows as a species have been bred to the point of stupidity. Cattle ranchers have to reach into the mother's womb (the breeding sow), wrap a chain around the newborn's legs, then pull the little guy or gal out with some kind of tractor or a truck. Whatever they have on the farm. After that initial trauma, the calf is then shoved into a cage where it is subjected to hormone and steroid injections every single day for years. A man in a lab coat walks past each cage (there are hundreds), prodding the animal inside with a stick (with a little too much interest). When he finds a prime candidate, a voice that he no longer recognizes as his own  but his wife and children know all too well says, "It's time". The cow is pulled out of the cage and led to a group of other candidates, all huddled together, terrified but with no comprehension as to what terror actually is. Their collective filth, years in the making is hosed off with disinfectant. Single file, the cows march towards a death chute. One after the other, they fall in and down a chute face-first, and their necks crack on the hard ground. SPLAT. The ones who survive are beaten to death by hammers wielded by lunatic men.

I suspect this is what happens because it is actually considered terrorism to enter one of these facilities and film or photograph the meat-making process. That last bit isn't a joke.

So today, I thought about all of this and felt sad. So I bought and ate a burger.

Taking Inventory: Jan 2014

Yesterday, I listened to the interview that Maron did with Todd Hansen, a longtime writer and editor of The Onion. In the second half of the interview, Hansen details his failed suicide attempt and how he began to rebuild his life after that. Something that resonated to me was that in the two years following his suicide attempt in 2009, he took inventory of the relatively good days in the year. After all, if I'm going to get self-help advice from somebody, I might as well get it from somebody who has been on the other side.

YouTuber TF Grillah uploaded the interview (begins at 11:29, heavy shit begins at 1:00:00):

My Depressive Adult Life

I should have included a trigger warning in my previous post, so I apologize for that.  I want to give a trigger warning to anybody dealing with sexual assault/harassment and/or suicide for this post.

This is a quick and dirty guide to my brain. I'll preface it with this: I'm not a particularly great person but thankfully I only live inside my head, so I'm not that much of a threat to anything outside of it.

Relax! It's Just Ideation!

Monday, I caved. I drove to Sheetz, bought a pack of cigarettes, then drove to the hotel parking lot across the street. I took off my jacket and sweater (because in my mind I wasn't relapsing because I couldn't smell smoke on ALL of my clothes), tossed them in the back of the car where I still have my graduation cap and gown, and fired up--staring across the road to a small field where somebody's horses were grazing. Their butts were towards me and their tails swatted at flies. Throughout this whole sequence of events, I was consumed by my favorite fantasy: That I was going to turn my radio to the Top 40 pop channel, grab the steering wheel with both hands, and veer my car into oncoming traffic.