Triggered Again...
tonight...trigger was getting an email from my building manager that i had a three-day eviction notice - I called the landlord and he told me he hadn't received rent. I lied and said I'd sent it, but the truth was that I hadn't been able to find my checks to write the rent check with, and since I've been on this (more or less successful) kick to not flip my shit over lost things, I decided not to flip and just forgot about it - but didn't write the check.
Tonight, I decided that the right thing to do was to drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to go to my apartment, get the checks, write one, hand it into the building manager with an apology, and come back to Santa Fe for my Sunday and Monday meetings. I remembered seeing my checks (because after all, who uses them anymore?) right after I got home from Mexico on a counter in the kitchen - and I also remembered putting them aside "somewhere" so I would remember them later.
I came home, couldn't find the checks, and went completely ballistic - a part of my ballistic side is a BIG healthy chunk of paranoia, which is always more or less in the background with most people, I'd imagine, but which rises front and center with me. The theme of this on was, "I can never do the right thing because really stupid obstacles are always in my way," and that dovetails nicely with all of the strange incidences of betrayal I've experienced in the past few years (predominantly with women.)
the interesting thing about that triggered time is this: while it's often *very* agitated and uncomfortable (literally feeling like the head is going to explode if the mouth cannot, for which telelphone is best for concentrated ranting) There is a surge of ...liquid electricity is the best description I can offer, which creates the ability to connect all these loose strands together into a cohesive totality. Because I'm fairly articulate, when it's going down, I come up with these pretty lucid stories, essay subjects, ideas, etc - for years, I would bet even money that most of my really good ideas to write about came during these moments.
Incidentally - I really feel like, in the past few years, as I've really tried (not my best, but better than before) to control my shit, my writing has suffered - of course, the stuff I do produce is often of superior quality - it's just not as inspired or self-righteous or crazy, (which, as anyone whose ever spent time on a listserv with me, can be quite entertaining.)
How I Feel Today:
Special Podcast Enclosed!
My Other Life is NearThis morning I woke up for the second day in a row feeling suicidal. It always seems so ludicrous to say that, but when it's real, it's real, and I had been doing so well up until now, it's seems like it's easily been a year since this happened. As I explained to one person, "Okay, I'm not really suicidal, because that means you want to kill youself. But I definitely don't want to live anymore."
It never lasts. It always goes away. My shrink tells me that. My best friends, Erik & Gentry, always remind me that it'll go away. Feeling suicidal, though, isn't like a black mood - it's like an actual sickness in and of itself, where you feel unfocused and pointless and unhappy and it just seems like staying alive is going to be so painful that you might as well off yourself, and if you can't pull that off, then just SLEEP somewhere. I've slept a bunch in the past two days because I can't imagine dealing with anything. And generally speaking, this crap hits when I have a LOT to do.
This morning, when I woke up and didn't want to live anymore, I was settling into that thought when I thought of my friend Gentry, who two years ago
tomorrow lost one of his best friend's to suicide. I met that guy, DJ, once or twice, and saw him play a mean sax with Gentry's band The Night Watchmen. But I knew him more through Gentry's letters and phone calls about this fantastic collaborative relationship he had making music with him, and the suicide ripped him to shit. And I begrudgingly realized that as long as I had friends (so many friends) who care about me and like having me around even when I'm miserably sad, I couldn't off myself even if I thought it might make me feel better.
The last song DJ ever wrote is called "My Other Life" and was recorded by Gentry for his solo album "Home." After the funeral, the bereaved wife freaked and sued Gentry and he had to take it off the album. I had an early release and it's one of my favorite Gentry Bronson cuts. You can download it
here - I've been listening to it all day.
suicide,
suicidal,
sadness,
depression,
sleeping
Back from Mexico & 2 Crises Await
I spent my last twenty-four hours in Mexico leaving the country, first boarding a bus in Puerto Escondido at around 8 in the evening, accompanied by my Mexican community - Daniel from Montana (also bipolar, who provided me with lithium when I was out, briefly) and Gregory & Antonio from Canada, (neither mentally ill but fine folks to drink wine and eat fish with.)
People had told me to prepare for Mexican busses - that they were all sweltering hot and filled with farm animals and such. This is out of date information - these days, Mexican busses are so overloaded with air-conditioning that you could hang a side of beef in the bus I was on, so I had layered up with sweat-shirts, sweaters, long underwear, bluejeans - and I was still freakin' cold.
Bus to Mexico City took all night. Taxi to airport took a half an hour and cost almost half as much as the bus ride. I checked in, ditched my big bags and spent hours in the bar and food court area, drinking beer with stranded passangers from Scotland who'd missed a connecting flight. No worries. We took turns watching each other's bags to go pee and check out the McDonald's menu in Spanish.
My flight for Dallas left at 2pm. I arrived around 5pm, and somehow cleared customs, though not before some jarhead shit-for-brains told me my passport was "too dirty" for travel. Whatever the fuck. Here's the big kick in the pants on customs - you arrive in America, get your bags from a special baggage claim area, then go through a security checkpoint and re-check your bags. Fucking unreal. They unload the bags, we carry them through a minimal checkpoint, then we put them back in the check-in. Stupid stupid stupid. No wonder all the airlines are going bankrupt.
Another flight to Albuquerque and I'm home. One of my bags was damn near ripped apart in the zeal of Homeland Security to inspect it - it contained an ancient laptop and my leather jacket, but they just Had to Know what was inside. Sigh...I was greeted at the airport by my friend Courtney and we went home and I gave her a gift and we drank a little beer and that was that. I was home at last.
The next day I tried to normalize things - went to the golf course for a bucket of balls - I hit several over 225 yards, I'll have you know - and just puttered around my house. Day after that, it occurred to me that I actually couldn't remember the last time I'd taken my meds - and so I began to look through the debris for them. And I couldn't find the lithium. And I started to panic in a bad way.
Before I left for Mexico, I had filled a prescription for Lexapro at my local Walgreen's pharmacy, a script that was supposed to contain 15 units of 20mg Lexapro that I could split into 10s for 30-days worth of 10mg/day dosages. Instead, Walgreen's, in it's infinite wisdom had decided that I only needed 15 *10mg* tablets - a stupid mistake that's easily rectified when one is in-country, a deadly decision when the patient flies to Mexico without reading the label and checking the number of pills, which of course, I did not.
