12.09.2005

there is a frenzy in the air. people are rushing about, consumptively preparing for the holidays like they were storing nuts for winter. it is catching and it is adding to my already crazed and nervous state. i can feel the tension in my muscles. i am filled to overflowing with semi-conscious anxiety. i am twitching and i am fiddling. i am terrified of the improbable. my faith in my immunity to random bad things happening to me has been greatly diminished by the random bad things that have happened to me. i do not feel safe. i feel vulnerable, made so by the circumstances in the weather, by the political climate in this country, by the fact that bad shit happens to people more innocent than i every day all over the world. the hole that is new orleans makes me see the post-industrial wasteland that is this town where i live as potential fodder for some unintended apocalyptic consequences of a government overrun with greed. the near-empty streets in the early morning hours, snow falling in the darkness, are like visions of horror movies where dark men creep unexpectedly and zombies emerge silently from shadows. these are the irrational ramblings of someone half-crazy, and i am struggling against the impossibilities of my brain, those synapses have been so altered and the chemicals are mixing in weird ways. i feel not-myself, as though some thing has put a blockade inside my mind, making things twist and turn, making me foggy and confused. and yet there are new insights which feel like sudden lightbulbs sprung up, lightning flashed and abruptly illuminating the previously unseen, causing it to feel airy with obviousness. i am in constant confusion and my emotions are short-circuited so that rage erupts from nothingness and i go from calmly doing the mundane task before me to gnashing my teeth and snarling wildly in an instant. i am intoxicated by my hormones as they are all coming out in stupid, uneven amounts like the chemist who resides in my brain were clumsily spilling things all over, sloshing progesterone this way and that, noradrenaline careening over the edges of glass beakers, melatonin splashed on the floor and walls... i cannot put thoughts together in coherent sentences and then in an instant, i can. i feel muddled and groggy, yet on edge, flinching and itching, like there is something out to get me, some instant karma lurking just around the corner, ready to grab me and drain my life of all the good in it. but if i am sitting here, anxious and wondering of what is next, of what is yet to come, how can there be any good at all in my life? how can i let the happiness at all inoculate me against my madness when i cannot even sense the light pressing in on my darkness or when i am in constant expectation for it all to close off? how do i find me again amongst all this clutter of brain-damaged mumblings, the imagined corpses of my future selves sprawled out before me?

12.06.2005

i am trying to be okay. i am attempting, in my own way, to overcome the challenges of my current hormonal makeup. in the anxiety of my thoughts, stillness does not arrive, but must be talked out, worked out, pulled out. i am trying to find a way through all this to that, from the question to be crazy to the answer to maintain. i don't know if i can do it. my body has dwindled to a sliver of what it should be and completely unintentionally at that. i am just moving through my life, every day a question on my lips, in my mind. i try to plan it, try to complete the mundane tasks of my domestic existence, try to do the dumb things i gotta do. and in all that i am not certain that there are answers for my son and his behavior or for me and mine. perhaps they are a mirror of each other, though i've sensed that before and denied it then too. maybe it just is what it is and we will live through this as we've lived through everything else - the surgeries and the accident and the continual upheaval dealt us by our destination. when we've finished transitioning from one thing to the next we may find ourselves built for transition though, and all the struggle will be but what we know and how we understand our life. maybe i will yet be able to do all the things i want to do and maybe yet i will not hate myself while trying. maybe we can accept this and be who we aspire to be even while everything is churned about, my chemicals raging, his urges immutable and somehow all this insanity will be the symphony of our days and will make sense and will not feel like such palpable craziness. maybe it will really be all right. maybe i am worrying about how i am the cause of all destruction around me for nothing, because maybe i'm not.