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On Being Manic

The beauty of it is that you're in a groove where you mind moves lightning fast - the bad part, for me generally, is that I have ideas that I can't execute, and not just writing ones, but simple things like...hanging a picture. Having an idea in your head (like for a mad theme camp, for example) isn't the same as executing that idea. The other day I tried to hang a picture and truth be told, my spatial understanding falls off dramatically when I'm manic...it was either too high or too low, and I made gouges in the wall with my nails, and hit my finger with the hammer, and tossed the picture to the floor just to hear the sound of tinkling glass - sharp, sudden, dramatic, like banging a tuning fork and feeling all the sound molecules in a room just line up at the ready...

Later on, I was trying to organize/re-organize my books and stuff....I always have piles of papers that are more or less unaccounted for but I can't throw away - YEARS worth of medical records, social services receipts, business cards of doctors I haven't seen in years (they should all be in a big box or folder marked "Crazy in America,") but more of them come every month and I have no good systems.

I was in the process of building one the other day and the music stopped. My big desktop wasn't churning out Pandora and so I checked it. Nothing. Nada. Going nowhere. Tried to reboot. Lost wireless signal. Turned on my laptop. Tried to open Pandora. Nothing. Turned on WinAmp. No sound. Nothing. Turned on Itunes - but I had recently re-organized all my MP3s and it couldn't find any files. I was getting desperate and angry. I turned off the desktop roughly - it now fails to work, has a crazy blue screen I can't decipher. My mind was racing at a million miles an hour and I wanted to get back to what I was thinking about, but the silence without the music was like an incessant itch, an irritant that had to be dealt with. I tried harder to get music out of the fucking laptop and then I just went berserk and pounded the keyboard of the laptop as hard as I could with my fist, more or less knocking out the hard-drive and sending the screen blank.

THAT'S mania, or manic dysphoria, when the mind moves so quickly that it can comprehend itself and it wants to ride that ride and so do you, but there's something else going on that makes you So FUCKING angry that you just lose your fucking mind.

Someone came over last night. They fixed the laptop - I'd been drunk all day so I was next to useless and they told me I needed an extra hard-drive to get the data. I drove to Wal-Mart and bought a 160GB drive. Got it back and it was only a 20GB, but the best part was that it was FULL of someone else's data - they'd swapped out an old 20GB for the 160GB and returned it to Wal-Mart. Funny shit, really. But today I tried putting the laptop back together and it all just froze and I was suddenly back in the anger and desperation of it all and I just went into the kitchen and started breaking plates...

Meanwhile, I've got a lot to do - assignments feel like they're piling up and of course, I work all the fucking time and I'm really broke and I feel like I'm going nowhere - every minor glitch feels like a catastrophe, like the day a couple weeks ago when I got stopped for speeding. Speed trap. A disingenous mechanism to earn revenue for the police-miltary complex. A total fucking sham. 48 in a 30 that was clearly marked 45. Another fine PIG move on the part of the police, whose authority erodes daily as America makes a criminal out of everyone for no seat belts and excessive smoking. I wanted to KILL THAT SMUG MOTHERFUCKER, but of course, I kept quiet, and today I signed in at court and artfully Got the Fuck Out because my country has been so fucking good at making a criminal out of me that I now know that waiting to see the judge to plead Not Guilty is for squares - I requested a Waiver of Appearance, filled it out, and WALKED ON DOWN THE HALL and out the fucking door.

That's the system - NEVER say you're guilty, NEVER say you have money in the bank, NEVER say you're getting better. It doesn't pay.

Meantime - I have a room full of broken computer simply because I was trying to follow the mind's directive...it was sweet and pure in there, in that space of a million ideas. I long to be there and then some totally minor thing will just send me over the fucking edge. You'd think I'd Just Say No and never want to go there...but it is *so* tempting in this crazy life to just have a few minutes when you feel like You Know Everything - even if you can't do a fucking thing about it.

posted by by gregoryp(tm) aka Gregory Pleshaw @ 10:43 AM