Small Miracles

Well, halle-fuckin’-jullah!!!

Or, you know, however you spell that…

Why the exclamation of sheer, unadulterated glee? You KNOW you’re wondering that, ain’t you? “What could POSSIBLY have happened to have made my grumpy old cynical prick of a buddy Steve Thompson so exuberantly happy (well, for Steve Thompson anyway)? Did he win grand prize in some contest where the winner gets to sodomize Megan Fox while she wears a little French maid outfit? That’s GOT to be it…”

The answer, unfortunately, is NO…Megan’s career hasn’t slid NEARLY far enough into Hell where she needs to hold such contests--YET (now, if her next movie or two tanks as bad as the last few have, then maybe…just MAYBE…). And no, I didn’t win the fucking lottery or get my teeth fixed or find out that my seizures will never come back, nor did they invent lightsabers yet…all of those WOULD be pretty cool, though.

No, it’s much simpler than that—I’m finally, finally, FUCKING FINALLY getting my transmission rebuilt. $1,800…I’ve got half right now, and will have to pay back the other half (which, when you’re already in debt as deep as me, could quite accurately be described as “a piss in the ocean”), but it’s WORTH EVERY SWEAT-AND-BLOOD-SOAKED PENNY. Fuck me, I’ll be able to GO PLACES for a goddamned change…I mean, I WENT places before obviously, but nowhere particularly far away. My buddy’s place in Three Rivers (a whole 26 miles away) was about as far as I could COMFORTABLY drive the car before, and even just the slight elevation there was hard on the fucking car—it was always slipping into neutral driving up 198 to get there. But now I can finally go ANYWHERE…well, anywhere that people without two cents to rub together nor a pot to piss in CAN go, anyway. Like taking a trip to Yosemite again. Or making it down to San Francisco to go salmon fishing. Or…well, like I said, fucking WHEREVER. Hell, if I had money just POURING out of my asshole I could even finally get back to SIN CITY…shit, I haven’t been there in damned near twenty years.

But, as much as anything, it will be nice just to be able to drive down the street again without the fucking car slipping into neutral and revving up to 50,000 RPM every time I have to put my foot on the accelerator…that shit gets kind of embarrassing after a while, you know?

It's still kinda hard to believe that it's actually gonna happen. It's been FIVE GODDAMNED YEARS since I got that car, and I've been wanting to get it done basically since the day I bought it. I was starting to think that they'd finally be finished building the fucking Freedom Tower before I got around to this shit. Imagine you knocked up your wife back in 2007, and the lazy little juvenile-delinquent-to-be only just FINALLY got around to crawling out of your old lady's vagina TODAY, in 2012...that's almost (I emphasize the "almost" here) what it feels like.

Things are actually LOOKING UP...

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood at The Cellar Door

Well, seeing the Chris Robinson Brotherhood at The Cellar Door in Visalia was an absolutely KILLER good time, ESPECIALLY for a mere $15. It could have been BETTER in some ways, but come on…fifteen fucking dollars, y’know? Just to start with the “bad” shit, to get it out of the way and make everybody shit their pants in joy—nobody reads my blogs for any GOOD, UPBEAT, JOYOUS, SUNSHINE-UP-YOUR-ASS BULLSHIT anyway, now do they?—the three MAIN bummers were:

(A) I couldn’t browbeat ONE STUPID FUCKING FRIEND into going along.
(B) I couldn’t get hammered as hell drinking Heineken and other good beer.
(C)The band didn’t play NEARLY the setlist I would’ve liked.

Obviously, reason (B) is just immature, crybaby horseshit to begin with, and it’s not as though I’m NOT accustomed by now to going places—concerts, casinos, fishing trips—where I would MUCH RATHER be shotgunning brewskis and gulping tequila with buddies instead of settling for fucking Sparkletts bottled water. So fuck reason (B) anyway. Reason (A) is just natural, isn’t it? Concerts are ALWAYS better with friends along, for reasons too many to list— to help remember things you DON’T remember until it’s brought up to you (“Hey, remember that badass riff in “Hard To Handle”? That shit was COOL!”), to help remember where you parked the goddamned car, as wingman while you’re trying to talk the chick in the tight leather pants into wrapping her tits around your cock (well, give you a phone number at least), as backup when the aforementioned chick’s plastered boyfriend finds out that you’re trying to give his girlfriend a gynecological exam 2 feet away from him, etc. But reason (C) was the biggest problem by far, and IT didn’t even bother me too much.

Although I’m obviously pretty fond of the band, you can’t really classify me as the world’s BIGGEST Black Crowes fan. There’s a whole string of their albums that I’ve never even HEARD or only heard once or twice long ago (LIONS, BY YOUR SIDE, THREE SNAKES AND ONE CHARM, AMORICA) and don’t even REMEMBER hearing. And I knew ZERO of Chris Robinson’s solo work. I just happen to like Robinson’s voice and style of music and was rather excited to get to experience it in an intimate bar setting, which I hoped would sound better than an arena concert sounds to me generally. And it did, thankfully—otherwise I would’ve been REALLY disappointed. I was really amazed when I only recognized ONE song (“Appaloosa” from BEFORE THE FROST…) in the entire 2-hour-plus set but the great sound made all the shit that I didn’t recognize just as enjoyable as what I did. Some were supposed to be new Chris Robinson Brotherhood originals but many of the other patrons seemed to know most of the words to most of the tunes so they must have been older Chris Robinson solo tunes (his first solo album, NEW EARTH MUD, was available for $10 at the door so I grabbed it—it made a better souvenir than the ass-ugly $25 fucking T-shirts did).

I had decided to try my iPod Touch’s video recording ability for the first time here, and I was quite pleasantly surprised AND quite pissed off, too—surprised because, as it turned out, it worked FAR better than I thought it would, mainly in the audio recording department, and pissed because I didn’t try to get more of the show. Due to a number of reasons (such as getting a tired arm from holding the son of a bitch in the air all night, my expectation of a muffled-sounding, unwatchable video, my fear that the battery charge would run out quickly while recording, and the fact that I kept waiting for them to play SOMETHING I fucking recognized) I only recorded fragments of like 3 songs, but when I checked them out on the computer after I got home they sounded MORE than acceptable in terms of audio quality and it didn’t burn up much of the battery’s charge either. Live’n’learn, I guess…next fucking concert I’ll know better.

Of course, the next concert I see probably won’t be in such a cool place. I really liked The Cellar Door when I volunteered to help with my Alpha Gamma Sigma clubmate Donna’s charity concert against child abuse there a few years back (I ended up working the door for 8 fucking hours), and it hasn’t changed any. The room immediately to your right when you first walk in was used as the band’s dressing room or backstage area or whatever the fuck you want to call it—it was where they served up the food during the charity concert. I figured it was probably where the band was hanging out at, especially after I smelled all the burning incense floating out of there every time somebody ran in or out of the room, which was often (another clue that the band was in there). I was standing just outside the room, leaning against a cooler full of wine and beer with my back to the door when the band came out to take the stage—all of a sudden the dude with the Jesus Christ hair who’d just walked past me turns around to say something and it’s Chris: he wasn’t talking to ME, he was talking to his guitar player who was still back in the room. I could’ve shook the dude’s hand or asked for a picture but I decided not to bother him seeing as how I’m not a 16-year-old groupie or some shit.

The crowd was small, relatively well-behaved, and mostly OLD. The average age of an audience member was probably somewhere in between “not old enough for the Guinness Book of World Records but too old to fuck without throwing their back out.” There were a couple of people there that were younger than me, quite a few people that appeared to be about my age, and TONS of AARP members boogeying away. This probably contributed to the crowd’s good behavior—after all, it’s kind of hard to rock out hardcore when you’re worried about breaking your hip or losing your dentures.But I definitely enjoyed the laid-back vibe.

Well, I’ll be looking out for a debut album from the Chris Robinson Brotherhood—from what I heard played that night it will definitely be worth checking out.

Exeter town pride!(?)

I was cruising thru our little dump of a neighborhood strip mall today—well, okay, “dump” may be a bit strong, let’s just say “shoddy, run-down-looking joint”—when it occurred to me that this single block of pus-colored buildings is all that my family (yours truly excluded, of course) ever sees of Exeter. The old, half-assed grocery store (SaveMart) is there, the equally old-and-half-assed auto parts store (AutoZone) and pharmacy (RiteAid) are too, along with the bank they use and all the fast-food joints/restaurants that we frequent. To be entirely accurate, a couple of those fast-food joints/restaurants are across the street at another little strip mall that, while newer, still somehow manages to look like a little red-headed stepbrother to the BIGGER strip mall across the road. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the only part of this city that my family ever sees is the last two blocks on the western edge of town. I always have to tell them when something new happens uptown, like a new business opens or an old one closes or they paint the water tower or build a nice, new granite sign at the cemetery. This is not quite as true of my mom as it is of my dad, because every once in a blue moon she’ll have to go to the post office to mail something or swing by the Exeter School District office to drop off an insurance payment, although generally speaking she just makes ME do it. But that’s basically it.

The only reason it occurred to me was because I was afraid that some people might begin to assume I fucking LIVED there, seeing as how I’m up there several times a day—in fact I can, with utter and complete confidence, predict that I will go up there for milk, some fucking prescription, and some shitty lunch item from Taco Bell (or possibly Mickey D’s), at least, before I even finish this blog. But after that, other things began to strike me, too: things like the very strong belief that some people have about “buying locally” and supporting the community and/or the small businessman instead of supporting the behemoth WalMart or the big-box titans like Home Depot or Costco over in Visalia, and thereby keeping those tax dollars in Exeter (or something like that—I never took economics, and can assure you I would’ve flunked for ditching class even if I HAD taken it). We actually USED to do that…run up to Coast-to-Coast for a paintbrush or the Mercantile for some shells for the .22 so we could go all fucking Iwo Jima on all the vermin squirrels running around here. Or we’d hit V.I.P. Pizza, or Video Zone to rent a flick, all that shit that you’d see in a Rockwell painting, if Rockwell were deranged and took acid. But almost everything in this house comes from Visalia nowadays, and has ever since WalMart opened up 15 or 20 years ago. This is mainly because of my mom: I firmly believe my mom would shop at a store called “WeFlogOurEnslavedChildLaborersAndSupportIslamicTerroristsMart” if she thought she could save five fucking cents on toilet paper there. My mother—the whole family really, including ME, but ESPECIALLY my mother—is basically the small businessman’s nightmare. In fact, some of the local business owners probably have pictures of her with a Hitler mustache drawn on them hanging on their office dartboard (at least I HOPE it’s drawn on, otherwise my mom has a secret life as a male and a Nazi that I know NOTHING about).

Some greasy spoon called Huckleberry’s (breakfast and lunch ONLY—what fucking sense does it make to be CLOSED FOR DINNER? I would’ve thought that restaurants made their biggest profits THEN) opened up at the smaller strip mall: after several months my family went and ate there once and loved it. They then proceeded to bitch up a storm when it closed up shop a few months later. You can’t really seem to explain to them that they have no right to bitch about a place closing down when they only bought like one fucking meal a year there; NO establishment can stay in business if all it’s customers only shopped there once a fucking year. You’ve gotta be more supportive than THAT shit, you know? Some other restaurant, called Yukon Jack’s (no relation to the whiskey that I know of), has already come and gone in the same place, and we NEVER ate there—not even ONCE. Now there’s a Perko’s in there, been there for a couple of months or so, and we haven’t eaten there yet either. It probably speaks volumes that the most successful business in that place is the fucking dialysis clinic that opened up several months ago.

It just seems weird, because my folks used to really spout off about how good a town Exeter was and how glad they were that they lived here. Of course, considering all the surrounding communities (Farmersville, Woodlake, Lindsay, Ivanhoe, etc.), it ain’t like it’s got a lot of competition—the fucking death camp at Buchenwald probably looks like Cape Cod or the Riviera compared with Goshen or Yettem. They’ve also never been a victim of crime that I can recall, although other houses on our street have been, as have I: a $90 pair of shades was stolen out of my truck during the night like 18 years ago or something. But now, every time I start the car in the morning to warm up for 5 fucking minutes while I take a leak, I have to listen to, “Stephen, one of these days that car just ain’t gonna be there anymore when you go back out to leave. You laugh at us and think we’re paranoid now, but it happened to Bobby Sue’s second cousin’s mailman’s ex-wife’s kid just a couple of weeks ago on the other side of town. Things have changed around here.” They act like they’d like to have a home security setup sort of like Will Smith’s in I AM LEGEND, but of course they’re too cheap for THAT shit—a solitary motion light is the tireless guardian of our house. Well, that and enough guns to defeat Moammar Qadhafi stashed in the old man’s closet. Personally, I’d rather LIKE it if somebody tried to break in myself—I’m most curious what it feels like to remove a person’s head with a 12-gauge, and that seems like the only way you could ever find out without going to jail for it…

It’s also rather weird that they never bother to see the town anymore because people ACTUALLY COME HERE JUST TO LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED TOWN nowadays. There’s, like, 15 or 20 murals around town, some depicting the town’s history (which ain’t much…it’s not like there was a Civil War battle here or something) and others depicting…well, whatever, y’know? I mean, there’s a pretty rad WWII one at the Ford place, with a big B-17 or B-25 or something…but most are just boring scenes of everyday life: immigrants picking oranges, Exeter’s first motorcycle pig (sorry, make that “police officer”) on his patrol, etc. But they’re still rather colorful and pleasant to look at, and so there are tours that go thru here and all kinds of shit. And they (my family) ignore all of it, never see any of it.

Christ, I hope I’m not that bored—and BORING—when I get old…okay, older (blow me)…I guess only time will tell.

The mortality blog

You know, death always hits me weird…

I would admit that nobody really close to me has ever died. Oh, sure…the grandparents, maybe an assorted aunt or uncle, blah blah blah. But a parent? A sibling? An ex-girlfriend that could suck like a Hoover and was actually pretty cool to be around to boot? Never happened. Never lost any particularly close friends, either. So I guess you could say that I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about (which seems to be a pretty commonly held sentiment about yours truly anyway). But I just don’t think it affects me the same way that it does most people.

I got the chance again today to find out. I was awakened this morning by a phone call informing me that one of my old friends had died—last night actually, in a motorcycle accident (I’ve known at least two people that have died on those fucking things, as well as one guy who died on a three-wheeler and another guy who died on a quad). My relationship with him, actually, would probably fall somewhere in between acquaintance and friend, though much more towards the friend side of the equation. Though I’d known him for 25 or 30 years, I hadn’t seen him in 3 or 4 years—we just traded the occasional comment on each other’s Facebook page. But obviously, it still sucks…and I will miss him. Big time. And he was much, much closer to a couple of my best friends than he was to me.

The first thing that hits me is guilt, in a way. I suppose some of it could be a form of so-called “survivor’s guilt”—you know, “why do I get to live on and he doesn’t?” Though this is supposed to mainly (if not exclusively) strike people who have been through intense shit together—like, say, hostage situations or military service in times of war or even just automobile accidents—where one survives and one doesn’t, I think it happens a lot more often than that. Put it this way: if a computer, or maybe Mr. Spock (the actual Leonard Nimoy might do in a pinch), sat down and read a summary of our lives—just how together our lives were, what we’d accomplished thus far, number of lives affected, possible future existence, all that shit—and had to pick one of us to go, most definitely it’d be me. This is not some bullshit “it should have been ME!” statement, nor do I wish to change places with him…it just makes you ponder shit, get all existentialist and whatnot. Was it “his time” in God’s eyes, or was the whole thing just a freak accident?

There’s another kind of guilt that comes with it, too. I’m not a “weeper”—never have been. This has always made me feel terrible, like maybe I lack a soul or something. I can always tell how difficult it is for the person passing the news along, how they try in vain to sugarcoat it or something in the fear that I won’t be able to handle it and will snap like a bungee cord made in China, immediately requiring a straitjacket and a sedative to contain my grief. I feel like an absolute asshole when they finally break the news and I simply go “huh!” in a detached, “Imagine that!” sort of way. The same sort of reaction that most people have when you tell them that the average sea turtle swims 500 miles a year or some other boring factoid. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been at a funeral and nearly blew a blood vessel or shit my Fruit of the Looms just trying to force a few goddamned tears out of my ducts. But it almost never happens. Instead, I just stand there looking like I’m about halfway between bored and pissed, like some poor dude in the mall who can’t get his wife to move her ass and finish shopping so he can get home and watch the big game or something.

But it does hit me…it becomes this ever-present black cloud, this thing that nags at the back of your mind at all times. Kinda like the feeling you get when you’re afraid you’re going to get some bad test results back from the doctor. And it’s always there. Oh, it goes away eventually, of course…but it takes several days. Tomorrow morning may well be the worst of it…that would be my guess. That first morning when you really have to remind yourself that you really have awakened already and it’s not all just weird shit from last night’s dream. But for the next few days at least, I’m continually going to find myself snapping out of some trance where I realize that I’ve been staring into space for 10 fucking minutes and just…pondering. And remembering.

The final little bout with guilt that I have to endure comes from my own cynical, hardheaded assholishness (fuck you, it’s a word because I SAID so)…whenever I hear a news report like the one they did on my buddy, I just instantly write the victim off as a probable piece of shit, anyway. I analyze the situation, think “Hmmm…eleven’o’clock at night, motorcycle, speeding…well, you play with matches, you get burned, don’t you? 'Bye-bye, dumbshit. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way into whatever afterlife you’ve earned.” But every once in a while, a little reminder—occasionally a very harsh reminder at that—comes my way to let me know that I have no fucking right at all to be such a judgmental prick, and also to remind me that many other lives are affected and not just the stiff in the morgue’s.

I have no idea what’s up with a funeral just yet. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, seeing as how the whole affair just happened 24 hours ago. I simply mean, I don’t know if he’s to be buried in the city he’s living in now, or if he wanted to come back to this place, or if he’s to be cremated, or what. If he’s to be buried there, then I’ll most likely miss the funeral. But if it’s to happen HERE, then I’ll most definitely go.

Rich, it was real, brother. RIP…

The Joys of Tegretol Withdrawal (Continued)

Exactly two weeks ago yesterday—Monday, August 23rd to be exact—I woke up (or perhaps I should say came to) at 6:30 in the morning to discover my room was filled with strangers, my bed was soaked, and my tongue hurt like hell.

The strangers were paramedics, my bed was soaked because I had pissed in it, and my tongue hurt like hell because I had chewed it all to fuck.

In short, I had my first seizure in 8 goddamn years.

It took one month and two days off the Tegretol for me to have a fucking seizure, drop me into a pit of depression and near insanity, and make me wish I could snap the doctor’s neck like a toothpick.

And all of it was for nothing.

I’ll admit, I had wanted off the fucking meds…before I knew what it would do to me mentally. All those little side effects I had wished would go away—the difficulty in concentrating, the ability (occasionally even the tendency) to fall asleep suddenly and unexpectedly, the fact that Tegretol (also called carbamazepine—it’s also used for treating bi-polar disorder, which I suppose is why I took such a steep downward plunge after they took me off it even though I suffer from depression and NOT bi-polar disorder) supposedly somehow makes you even more prone to sunburn even though I already burn like a marshmallow on a fat kid’s stick over a campfire after about 30 seconds in the sun—I would gladly suffer for the rest of my life if I could just go back in time 3 months or so. And of course, the cruel fact of the matter is that I WILL suffer those things for the rest of my life, whether I get to use them as a bargaining chip with fate or not. I’m on the shit for the rest of my life; there’s nothing I can do about that.

But I had expected to be on the shit for the rest of my life anyway before Dr. fucking Ho Chi Minh had dangled hope in front of my face a couple of years back, telling me if I simply had a clean EEG that I would probably be able to get off the shit. I had never bought into that idea with the same certainty and enthusiasm that he had shown. None of it really added up to me. But he had seemed so certain, so sure of himself…and it’s not like I really had any say in the matter. If a doctor wants to take you off of something, hey…all he’s gotta do is stop writing the fucking prescriptions. It’s not like I’m in any kind of financial shape to seek a second opinion. The neurologist that I used to see, some now-retired nutcase I never particularly warmed to named Chahil (my uncle saw him once or twice about his Parkinson’s—he didn’t like him either) agreed that it was possible, and so did another neurologist (supposedly) that Dr. Ho Chi Minh (all right, his real name is Nguyen—like that’s any better) consulted before taking me off of it, so I suppose I can’t lay ALL the blame on him. But this fucking clown was so sure of himself that he didn’t even suggest that I stop driving for a few months, even though I fucking ASKED him about that, while I came off the drugs—it was sheer luck, for lack of a better word, that I was home and not behind the wheel when I had the seizure. And, of course, now I CAN’T drive for several months—even though I haven’t heard a thing from the fucking DMV yet, the hospital told me that they would be reporting it. If I want to leave this house, I can either (A) walk—as though there was anything within walking distance in this shitty little town of 10,000, or (B) take a bus—anybody that knows me knows THAT will never happen, or (C) beg a ride off of my mom.

So NOW what? I saw some other doctor the Saturday before I had the seizure (he apparently only works Saturdays, which is why I’d never seen him before, but I prefer HIM to Nguyen already) that put me on 40 mg of Prozac, 1 mg of Xanax, and 50 mg of Trazodone to help with the depression and to help me sleep, but I can’t stay on all that shit. Xanax and Prozac I take in the morning, but supposedly one (the Xanax) can reduce the effectiveness of Tegretol while the other can raise the levels of Tegretol in your blood to dangerous levels. And the other shit, the Trazodone (which was to help me sleep, as well as being an antidepressant), could make me just “forget” to breathe during the night, to use the doctor’s words—remember, I wasn’t taking the Tegretol when he originally prescribed all that shit, but now that I’m taking it again too he says I can’t continue taking all that shit, it’s too many drugs working on the brain all at once. So I quit taking the Xanax (haven’t had one since Saturday) and didn’t take a Trazodone Sunday night, although I broke down and took one last night because I didn’t sleep worth a shit the night before (he said I could take one if I absolutely felt it was necessary, but that I should try to get off of them and the Xanax) and went for some blood work this morning to test the Tegretol level in my blood, to see what the Prozac was doing to it. I may have to stop taking it, too. And considering the Tegretol worked fine by itself for eight years, that may not be such a bad thing. And there are other anti-depressants that they can try.
But considering what happened the last fucking time they tried taking me off of something, you can’t blame me for being a bit nervous of what may happen if they try taking me off of something else. Even now there are times when the depression comes back pretty strong, and times when I feel absolutely like shit both spiritually and physically. I don’t know if I can handle being that depressed for any period of time again.

But I see the therapist-dude one more time this Thursday, and finally see a real doctor next Friday over at the Mental Health department—one that can write prescriptions and (supposedly) knows all about this shit. So maybe he’ll know what he’s doing.

Fingers crossed.

The Joys of Tegretol Withdrawal

This is NOT my typical style of blog—which is to say, it’s NOT really written to “entertain.” In fact, I’m not entirely certain why I’m even writing it, but one possibility stands out: that maybe I should just share a little recently gained insight. Maybe it will help other people understand a subject that most people probably don’t—depression.

I was diagnosed with depression years ago. This came as a surprise to no one—it seems to run in my old man’s side of the family. HE certainly had it, anyway—he even underwent electroshock therapy in his forties, a time of life that I myself have recently entered into, and at one point he even got rid of all of his guns just in case the depression simply became too strong to fight—and I strongly suspect that many of the other members of his family had it too, such as his little brother (whom I barely knew and he never got along with) who died from a heroin overdose when I was 20 or so. Today (as for many years now obviously) my dad is on Prozac (which he has said to me before, and again a couple of days ago, was maybe the best thing to ever happen to him) and some other drug that I can’t remember right at this minute. I myself was on Prozac for a few years, but of course when I lost my job, and thus my insurance, I lost that too—and I REALLY don’t remember it making much of a difference to my mood anyway, either when I STARTED taking it or when I STOPPED taking it. But of course, I was drinking like a fish—an ALCOHOLIC fucking fish at that—and indulging in various other “party favors” at the time, so maybe that helped to hide the changes.

I took my last Tegretol last Tuesday (the 20th). In the space of two months I went from 800 mg a day, which some (like the doctor in the emergency room) would consider a large dose although I HAVE heard of even larger ones, to zero by dropping one 200 mg tablet a day every two weeks—in other words, I started at one pill in the morning, one pill at noon, and two pills at night but dropped it to one pill at morning, noon and night, down to one at morning and one at night, down to one in the morning until...well, you get the picture. My only concern at the time was that I may have some seizures and have to go back on the shit—however, so far so good on the seizure front. HOWEVER, Tegretol has another benefit to it that was unbeknownst to me—in addition to stopping seizures it is also occasionally used as a mood stabilizer and depression aid. And my CURRENT doctor didn’t know about my depression—it was another doctor in another clinic, back when I had insurance, that made the diagnosis and prescribed the Prozac. I just kind of assumed that he (my current doctor) had all my medical records and was aware of it. So as of that moment, for the first time since I started partying at 15, I was completely free of not only any mood stabilizer-type meds but also of any alcohol or pot or speed or anything else that affects mood or releases endorphins, the chemicals that make people feel pleasure or happiness.

After I had gotten down to taking 1 pill a day for a few days I began to feel pretty lousy: I had no energy nor desire to do anything but lay around, plus my stomach was always hurting, or at least I ASSUMED it was my stomach—it also felt reminiscent of when I would get hepatitis during my drinking days, just a deep, throbbing, unending pain in the center-right side of my abdominal area (which is where the liver, as well as the gall bladder, is located). However, I didn’t really think it was liver-related, since the doctor has run zillions of liver panels on me (to check the Tegretol level and a couple of other things) in the years since I quit drinking and they never showed any problems. Also, I would get hungry and eating would make my stomach feel somewhat better, although I had no appetite—even though I KNEW I was hungry and COULD force myself to eat I had no desire to. Nothing seemed to taste right, including the shit I generally loved to eat or even drink like iced tea and Sierra Mist, and anything I put into my mouth I just wanted to spit right back out. However, like I said I could still make myself eat—when I had the hepatitis I couldn’t really even FORCE myself to eat, other than a few small Ritz crackers here and there throughout the day; I would simply have to wait a few days for my liver to stop throbbing and the swelling to go down before I could really eat normally again. I almost saw the doctor at that point, but I began to feel a little bit better and already had an appointment to see him on this coming Monday (Aug. 2) so I figured maybe I was being a little premature about things.

However, by last Friday or so things had gotten MUCH worse. The pain was not only getting worse again, but I was completely depressed in ways that I had NEVER really known. Some people are better than others at moving on, I suppose—better at realizing that they’ve fucked up in the past, may have thrown away YEARS of their lives or blown chances that may NEVER come again but also at realizing that each new day brings new chances and new opportunities, if you know where to look or who to ask for help and are willing to put in the work because you also have to realize that almost NOTHING GOOD EVER COMES EASY. I myself have never been one of those people, particularly. I have always wondered why I couldn’t have buckled down in school, at least enough to have graduated at 18 rather than 32. I have always wondered why I can’t seem to figure out my “place” in the world, why SOME people at 18 have a laser-like focus on getting a business degree or becoming a doctor or architect or engineer or something as though they KNOW that is what they were born to be while I flounder about just trying to figure out WHAT will make me NOT miserable while providing at least enough of a salary to not have to worry about rent and eating and having a proper and reliable car that doesn’t break down at every other fucking stop sign and all those other things that so many people take for granted. These are thoughts that occur to me almost EVERY DAY at some point—basically, both my past AND my future haunt me. However, I was always able to balance it out somewhat by simply realizing that, no matter HOW bad things may seem to be in my life, there ARE people in this world who have been through far worse and survived, and some of them have even gone on to flourish. There are people who are FAR, FAR bigger idiots and assholes than I am who have pulled it off—maybe I can too. And there are people in this world—family, friends, instructors at COS—who care about me, who never miss the opportunity to tell me how smart I am and that I WILL, one day, figure all this shit out if I keep trying.

Suicide has always held a kind of cold fascination to me. I have known people who’ve killed themselves. I have known others that, while they didn’t directly kill themselves, I do believe they more or less intentionally took the slower way, just like Ozzy’s song “Suicide Solution” says—“Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker/Suicide is slow with liquor.” I sometimes wonder if it didn’t play a role in my uncle’s OD all those years ago. Mainly I have wondered what made people like Kurt Cobain—a guy with money, a secure legacy as a musical icon/genius, a wife and young daughter and millions of fans—feel so badly that he could blast his skull to dust with a shotgun (assuming it wasn’t murder like the conspiracy theorist-types allege). Or a guy like Owen Wilson—maybe not the best-looking guy but who doesn’t love Owen Wilson? With his money and personality who cares if he’s got a nose that’s slightly fucked up, he could still get any woman he wanted in all likelihood, you feel like he’d be a really great buddy and all-around fun guy to hang out with, he doesn’t have to worry about his future…what makes a guy like that even dream of attempting suicide?

But I don’t know if I can say I’d ever TRULY considered it before. In a detached, feel-sorry-for-yourself kind of way, maybe—I suspect that MOST people have. But considered it to the point where it just scares the living fuck out of you, I’m not so sure. There ARE considerations that have always, to ME at least, made suicide far too radical an act to actually commit…such as God. Assuming he exists, the Christian belief obviously is that God doesn’t accept suicides—that if you “reject his gift of life” you’re denied entry into the “Kingdom of Heaven” and instead spend eternity BBQ’ing your nuts in Hades. And how does one do that to their loved ones? If you cared about them AT ALL how could you possibly put your spouse/children/parents/best friends or whatever through the sheer life-shattering horror of walking into a room to discover brains and blood blown all over the walls and your lifeless corpse lying on the bed or swinging from a curtain rod, or make them have to go down to the morgue to identify the splattered remains you left behind when you leapt out of a tenth-story window? That seems rather selfish, doesn’t it? Does ANYONE deserve that? These thoughts, in my normal state, make suicide absolutely unthinkable to me, no matter HOW badly I may think my life sucks from time to time.

By last weekend, however, none of those things helped. I hated seeing the morning come, assuming I was even lucky enough to have gotten to sleep at all, because it meant I was going to be hounded by those thoughts all day long. I didn’t enjoy listening to music, playing video games, running around town…nothing. Quite basically, I was becoming suicidal myself. The thought was simply omnipresent in the back of my mind, and nothing could chase it away for long. My debts, my inability to figure out just who I am in this life or what I should pursue for a living, the thought that NOBODY can find work these days on top of the thought that nobody would want to take a chance hiring my ass anyway because of the decade-plus gap since my LAST job, and all the other failures of my life to date…all those things were just swarming through my mind constantly. And all those things I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that I used to think about, to re-assure myself that I was just being a big drama queen who just needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, no longer chased those black thoughts away, at least not for more than a few seconds, before they were back at full force. I simply felt sheer, black-as-night terror and dread all day long. NOTHING scared me more than being alone, I needed to be around people at all times because…well, who knew? The sheer, cold, logical answer to everything seemed more and more like—just get it over with. While I can’t say that I “heard voices” I could understand how SOME people in a similar situation could interpret it that way, because the idea just HOUNDS YOU—“Come on, you KNOW nothing’s ever gonna get any better, do you REALLY want to feel like this anymore? There’s an easy way out, y’know…and it doesn’t even have to HURT.” By Monday night I had simply had it; I asked my mom to drive me to the emergency room to find out if there was anything wrong with my stomach or liver or any of my other internals, and also told them about the depression. I simply felt like I had to try SOMETHING, because without a doubt I felt like I was truly losing it and that if I DIDN’T try something I wasn’t going to make it much longer.

So I spent the next 7 hours sitting in the hospital. They pumped me full of Dilaudid and Ativan, a painkiller and a tranquilizer, while they ran a shitload of tests and called a social worker (something they have to do when someone suicidal comes in). Fortunately, I can say that I’m in perfect physical health aside from the 4 or 5 spare tires I wear around my waist: my liver is completely normal (after 8 alcohol-free fucking years you’d certainly hope so), no gall bladder problems or gall stones, EKG was normal, etc. They (the doctors and the social worker) told me that, in all likelihood, my physical pain was simply linked to the depression and that both were almost 100% due to coming off the Tegretol. They also told me to come into the Department of Mental Health the next morning and get signed up for benefits. At 1:30 Tuesday morning (we got there at 6:30 pm) they finally released me.

So I signed up at 8 am Tuesday morning just like they told me: I see a doctor at 10 am next Thursday. However, I also moved up my other appointment with my regular doctor—I saw him Wednesday morning. He was rather upset that he had never known about my depression, and also apologetic. He instantly wrote a prescription for Prozac, as well as a week’s worth of alprazolam (which everyone knows as Xanax) to help out until the Prozac kicks in. He started me out with a very low dose—20 mg a day (I believe I was taking 50 back when I was originally on it)—but I understand that they ALWAYS start you out that way. I’m happy to say that, physically speaking, I’m basically back to normal, or at least 99%. I’m not ENTIRELY back to my old self yet psychologically speaking—after all, like I said I’ve only been taking a very low dose of Prozac for 4 days now (plus .5 mg of Xanax twice a day, which will run out Tuesday) and those 3 or 4 days before I went into the hospital were incredibly unsettling. However, I will make sure the doctor increases my dosage. The guy I see Thursday will probably (hopefully) do it. And I AM probably 50-75% back to my old self. I think that, as much as anything, I’m rather frightened and a bit haunted by how low I NOW KNOW I can sink without any antidepressants in my system. And it’s VERY unsettling to realize that all it takes is one bean-counter asshole, or maybe even just a paperwork mistake, at some insurance company or government agency to cut me off and put me right back into the hell, the utter despair and hopelessness, that I felt last weekend.

But like I said, for now things are lookin’ up.

And to be clear, I DON’T want anybody to be worried about me or anything else. This is NOT a “sympathy blog.” However, if you know anybody who suffers from depression—be it a family member, a friend, a cashier at the local SaveMart that you’re friendly with or someone else you care about—then be there for those people if you think they’re struggling, because I can assure you—NOBODY deserves to feel that kind of torment.

And now I have to go and think up something light-hearted and filthy and funny to write about, to put everybody’s minds back at ease…see ya!

The Blog That Does Not Exist

Sorry, but to spare certain people's feelings this blog is no more...if you ever want to read it, however, just e-mail me your address and I'll send it to you. See ya!