There once was an old lady who swallowed a fly. She swallowed a spider to catch the fly. She swallowed a bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled inside her. Yes. That old song from younger days took on new meaning for me this year. I awoke New Year's Day with the realization that the fly that I taken-to years ago to eradicate from my body the shit of depression, had multiplied. And that's not all. Somewhere along the road from my troubled Saturn Return (if only I could destroy planets with my mind, I'd blow that fucker right outa the sky!), the flies had become those nasty horseflies and their sting required treatment. Some doctor prescribed spiders to eat the flies. I dutifully swallowed spider after Klonipin-spider. When the spiders began to bite, well, the good doctors had something for that, too. Birds. If you're following this progression, you'll have guessed that our birds became, in time, a veritable flock of seagulls.
Now, I'd been drinking socially since age 16, sometimes to excess. We'll call booze the cat. Unlike all the other creatures, the "cat count" in my blood remained, interestingly enough, static and even decreased at times. But to untrained observers versed in the symptoms of only most obvious social drug, the cat took all the blame. Bad kitty! In my growing remorse for all my pets, I hiked my ankles into oblivion on a few thousand miles of American soil, rowed the Mississippi River until I shredded my untrained shoulder muscles, and sailed the San Francisco Bay so hungry for the life that had long ago been denied me by chronic depression that, in my desperation, I hurled myself from the deck of my sailboat four feet down to the cabin companionway T-boning my lower back so bad that I've spent the entire winter as a hunchback. Woo-hoo, as my friend Frank would say. Woo-fuckin-hoo!
So, on the first day of this glorious upchuck-colored year of our Lord, 2008, I quit everything. I mean EVERYTHING! Booze, Prozac, Valium, Codeine, and just to rub salt in the wound, coffee, too. And by shear force of will, I succeeded. Don't tell my mother, but my vigilance nearly cost me my life a few times. NEVER cold turkey Klonipin! It is death in a bottle. Were I of a litigious mind, I would launch a lawsuit so noxious it would poison the very fabric of our pharmacopious society. But I'm not. So I won't. Anyway, I quit. And four months later, to the day (that's TODAY), I popped out of a nightmare I have been walking around in for dark endless weeks and poof! I realized that if I didn't go back on meds, I was going to die. It was that simple. And that clear.
Friends can attest to my out-of-character teetotaler abstinence from alcohol (not a drop for four months). I exercised regularly, put myself out there to be with friends and be social. I went without all the pharmaceuticals, without beer, without caffeine of any kind for FOUR MONTHS. Oh, clarity was grand, let me tell you! I was the most uptight insane nefarious creepy unstable bug-eyed childish scared and stupid human being you'd ever not wanna know for the duration. Especially in recent weeks. Then today, utterly at wits end after countless bad-sleep nights and morning terrors and queasy uneasy daydream days, I packed a day bag, let a close friend know where I was headed, and set out on foot for the local ER, where I knew I would then be transported to the county psych ward and who-knows-where from there. I was gonzo in the worst definition of the word. Worse, I had that eerie instinctual sense that if I didn't surrender to the medicos I would soon be dead. I walked a couple of miles to the hospital, paced outside the ER, and, being a smart cookie, fast-forwarded in my mind through the whole awful demeaning 5150 process I would be put through, the whole mental instability meat grinder. When I popped out the other side and returned to the present, I turned on my heel and walked away. I couldn't do it. I can't do it. If I lose it, they're gonna have to talk me off the railing of the Golden Gate or peel me off the front of an Amtrak train, because I just can't self-admit any more. I returned home to my sailboat and knew what I must do. I took my medicine. And though one med takes two weeks to kick in, the other is practically instantaneous. I felt better in a matter of minutes. And for the first time in four months, I sat down at my computer NOT to fumble incoherently with email and infinitely confounding web, but TO WRITE! And to post to my website for the first time in who knows how long.
Now I know it wasn't the booze or the drugs, though certainly a return to careful moderation is in order. It was me. It was my body chemistry, my lifestyle perhaps, my DNA. It was me. And it was how my fragile eggshell mind interacts with the reality of our bomb-crazy, human-torturing, war-money-loving, daughter in the basement raping and imprisoning, pregnant marine killing and body-burning, multi-trillion dollar debt crashing country and world and human race. And there's no judgment left in me for me. I just am. And in the meds or death ultimatum, I'll take meds and life. And that's ranting for you. - RSM
